GovTrack.us: Your Easiest Tool for Keeping Tabs on Congress

GovTrack.us is a free, non-partisan federal legislation tracking system similar to services offered by commercial database providers like Westlaw and Lexis. In our opinion, GovTrack.us may be even better and more useful than many of the subscription-based services for online advocates and conservative counter-revolutionaries.

The easiest way to explain the utility of GovTrack.us is to illustrate how we use it. We’re currently considering writing a column on HR 875, proposed legislation commonly known as the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009. We think HR 875 may mean the end of small family farming and ranching operations and will disadvantage smaller farms and ranches by imposing hefty compliance costs, but we haven’t read it and there hasn’t been too much discussion of the bill, yet, so we need to find out more.

We can begin our research by going to GovTrack.us and typing “H.R. 875″ in the search form in the upper left corner of the GovTrack.us home page. This will provide us with an HR 875 page, which will show the full text of the bill with convenient internal linking and formatting for easy reading, the Congressional Research Service summary, sponsors and cosponsors, recent activity, committee assignments, and related legislation. The system allows you to see what other legislation people are tracking in addition to H.R. 875. The GovTrack.us bill page layout is very user-friendly and the information is just as well-organized as it is comprehensive.

But, the beauty and utility of GovTrack.us is found in its easy tracking features. We can merely click a button and receive updates on activity concerning HR 875 daily, weekly or monthly basis. The site also allows you to track the activities of members of congress, committees, and a host of other variables. If we wanted to, GovTrack.us makes it easy to add a widget to our site which automatically updates the status of the bill for our site viewers or provides other information like congressional district maps of the bill sponsor.

Note that because the U.S. Congress typically posts update information on Thomas.gov a day late, the information on GovTrack.us lags about 24 hours behind the occurrence of the event.