The best free tools to track Congress
Seven free ways to follow bills, votes, and your own representatives — compared by what each is actually good at.
Everything Congress does is public. The challenge has never been access — it's that each tool shows you a different slice, and none of them is built for a normal person's attention span. Here's what each one is actually good for.
1. Congress.gov — the source of truth
The Library of Congress's official record: every bill, full text, status, sponsors, amendments, and committee actions. Best for: looking up a specific bill you heard about. Weakness: firehose volume and legal language — it tells you everything except what matters.
2. GovTrack.us — the power-user tracker
The veteran independent tracker. Subscribe to alerts on a bill, an issue area, or a member of Congress; see prognosis scores estimating a bill's odds of passage. Best for: following a specific issue over months. Weakness: you have to know what to follow.
3. The official vote pages — who voted how
Every recorded vote is published by name: the House Clerk (clerk.house.gov/Votes) and the Senate's roll-call vote pages. Best for: checking how your representative actually voted on a bill — the receipts. Weakness: raw tables, no context on what the bill did.
4. The floor schedules — what's coming this week
The House Majority Leader posts the week's expected bills at docs.house.gov/floor; the Senate publishes its daily schedule. Best for: answering "what is Congress voting on this week" from the primary source. Weakness: bill numbers and procedural jargon, no explanation.
5. CBO.gov — what it costs
The Congressional Budget Office publishes its cost estimate for nearly every bill that clears committee. Best for: the honest price tag on a bill before the spin arrives. Weakness: dense PDFs.
6. C-SPAN — watch it live
Unfiltered video of floor proceedings and hearings, plus an excellent archive. Best for: seeing a debate or hearing with your own eyes. Weakness: hours of your life per bill.
7. Pass or Trash — the ten-second habit
Our entry, and the reason this site exists: all of the above distilled to one bill a day in plain English — chosen from what's actually moving, costed with the CBO's official number, posted to @passortrash as a Pass-or-Trash poll. Best for: building a daily civic habit without homework. Weakness: it's a distillation — when a bill grabs you, the six tools above are how you go deeper.
The honest recommendation
Pair a push tool with a pull tool. Let one thing come to you daily (the feed), and when something matters to you, pull the receipts yourself (Congress.gov for the text, the Clerk for the votes, CBO for the cost). That combination — effortless awareness plus occasional deep dives — is more civic engagement than the vast majority of the country manages, in about a minute a day.