Since 1789, records of the operations and activities of Congress have evolved dramatically. The Legislative Branch of the United States Government is responsible for making and passing laws. There are three factors to keep in mind when researching congressional publications:
1. Time period or Congress of interest
2. Types of publications that will meet your research needs
3. Format of the material you will be using.
Please note, we have a separate guide for the Executive Branch and there are 15 departments the President oversees. For Federal Agencyies, a full list can be found at USA.gov of all 438 agencies.
Since 1914 CRS has been the public policy research arm at the Library of Congress. Any member of Congress can release CRS reports (unless they contain classified information) but CRS would not do so of its own volition. New legislation passed in 2018 directed the CRS to make CRS Reports available to the public. Several organizations and universities collect CRS reports that have been placed in the public domain.
Each of these websites listed below has different searching features that will appeal to different researchers.
HeinOnline has a helpful Research Guide of their own about Congressional documents in their database
All lobbying is advocacy, but with a specific opinion on a piece of legislation.
Lobbyists.info: A resource for information on lobbying and government relations across the nation. Browse and search for information by legislation, organization, lobbying firm and more.
Search HathiTrust to identify and access a growing body of digitized federal government documents.
