How to track Congress yourself
The free, official tools for following bills, roll-call votes, and what your own representatives are doing — plus the easiest daily habit of all.
You don't need a subscription or an insider to follow what Congress is doing. Everything is public — the trick is knowing where to look. Here are the tools that matter, from the deepest to the easiest.
1. Congress.gov — the official record
Congress.gov is the primary source: every bill, its full text, its status, its sponsors, and its action history. Search by keyword or bill number (like H.R. 5446), and you can see exactly where a bill sits in the process. It's also where the data behind every Pass or Trash post comes from.
2. Find — and follow — your own representatives
Use house.gov/representatives to find your House member by ZIP code, and senate.gov for your two senators. Each has an official page listing the bills they've sponsored and how they've voted. Contacting them is free and, on a quiet issue, surprisingly effective.
3. Roll-call votes — see how each member voted
When a chamber votes, the result is recorded by name. The House Clerk and the Senate publish these "roll-call" votes. This is how you check whether your representative actually voted the way they said they would.
4. Cost and budget — the CBO
The Congressional Budget Office publishes the cost estimates for bills that have been scored. If you want to know a bill's effect on the deficit, this is the source. (We explain how to read those in what a CBO cost estimate means.)
5. The easiest habit: one bill a day
The tools above are powerful but demanding — they reward people who go looking. Most of us won't check Congress.gov every morning. That's the gap Pass or Trash fills: instead of you hunting for what's moving, one scored, plain-English bill comes to you each day, with a vote attached.
Follow @passortrash and the habit builds itself — ten seconds a day, and over a few weeks you'll have a far clearer picture of what Washington is actually up to than the headlines give you.
The information has always been public. What's been missing is a reason to look at it every day. That's the job we're trying to do.