Sunset of Pocket Congress

After July 10th, 2024, Pocket Congress will no longer display new information about the status of congressional legislation or the votes of representatives. The app will continue to exist, frozen in time.

The Campaign Finance feature of the app will continue to update normally because finance data is provided separately by the Federal Elections Commission.

Thank you for using Pocket Congress. As perhaps the only way to easily understand the actions of our own representatives, this app has been a joy to create and maintain. As my largest, most popular, and most recognized project, one I started as a high school student, it’s clear it has reached its natural end.

Pocket Congress retrieves congressional data from a service called the “ProPublica Congress API”, which is run by a nonprofit newsroom. ProPublica has announced that they are closing this resouce, effective July 10th.

It would be difficult for me to rebuild the app with another source of information because I am attending college in the fall. There are other services that developers can use for congressional data: in the time since I have created Pocket Congress, the Library of Congress has released an official Application Programming Interface, for example. However, the code of Pocket Congress is tightly integrated with ProPublica’s service.

Please email me if you have any questions. It’s been an honor to create Pocket Congress and share it with the world.

Sincerely,

Siddharth M. Bhatia