CapitolLens: Tracking Congress Without the Noise

Congress introduced 16,601 bills in the 118th session (2023-2024). The median American can name their two senators and maybe their House representative. Almost nobody can tell you what legislation those representatives are actually voting on.

This isn’t an apathy problem. It’s an access problem. Legislative data is public, but it’s buried in congress.gov’s desktop-first interface, mixed with procedural noise, and formatted for staffers — not citizens.

CapitolLens is our 11th Android app. It pulls real-time data from the Congress.gov API and puts it in your pocket.

What CapitolLens Does

Bill Tracking

Search bills by keyword, filter by chamber (House/Senate) or status, and follow the ones you care about. Each bill shows a status timeline — introduced, referred to committee, passed one chamber, passed both, signed into law. Most bills die in committee. CapitolLens makes that visible.

Followed bills appear in your personalized feed so you don’t have to search repeatedly.

Member Profiles

Every sitting member of Congress has a profile: name, state, party, chamber, and a link to their official page. Follow members to see when they sponsor new bills or cast notable votes.

My Representatives

Select your state and congressional district to instantly see your two senators and House representative. This is the “who represents me?” question that most people can’t answer without googling — answered in one tap.

Roll Call Votes

House roll call votes display with full party breakdowns — how many Democrats voted yea, how many Republicans voted nay, and which way your followed members voted. This is the data that matters for accountability: not what politicians say, but how they vote.

Offline Caching

Followed bills, members, and recent vote data are cached locally. Browse your saved items without a network connection — useful for reading up before a town hall or during a commute.

The Data Source

CapitolLens pulls exclusively from the Congress.gov API, operated by the Library of Congress. This is the same data that powers congress.gov itself. It’s free, public, non-partisan, and authoritative.

The app sends only search queries and pagination parameters — no personal data, no device identifiers, no location. API requests go directly from your phone to a US government server.

No third-party analytics, advertising, or data collection SDKs are included. The privacy policy explicitly documents the single network connection to api.congress.gov and nothing else.

Why This App Matters

Civic tech is an underserved category on the Play Store. The existing options are:

1. News apps — CNN, Fox, AP. They cover legislation through a political lens, cherry-picking bills that generate engagement. You see the controversial votes, not the infrastructure bills that affect your daily life.
2. Advocacy apps — Countable, Resistbot. They’re built to drive action (call your rep, sign petitions). Useful, but they editorialize — telling you which side to support rather than just showing you the data.
3. Government apps — Congress.gov itself. Comprehensive but designed for researchers, not casual citizens. The mobile experience is poor.

CapitolLens occupies the space between: raw legislative data in a clean mobile interface. No editorializing, no engagement optimization, no push notifications about outrage. Just bills, members, and votes.

Technical Implementation

CapitolLens is the most network-dependent app in our portfolio — it needs internet to fetch legislative data. But the architecture still prioritizes user privacy:

• API calls go directly to congress.gov (no proxy, no middleware)
• Cached data persists in AsyncStorage for offline browsing
• No accounts, no sign-up, no user tracking
• Built with Expo 54, React Native, TypeScript (35 source files)

The Congress.gov API has rate limits, so the app implements intelligent caching with configurable refresh intervals. Once you’ve loaded today’s data, subsequent opens are instant from cache.

The Civic Data Gap

Only 33% of Americans can name all three branches of government. Voter turnout in midterm elections hovers around 40%. These numbers aren’t because people don’t care — polls consistently show that 70%+ of Americans want to be more informed about what Congress does.

The barrier is friction. Congress.gov exists but it’s not designed for mobile-first citizens. News apps exist but they filter through editorial judgment. CapitolLens removes that friction by putting the raw data in a format designed for quick consumption.

At $4.99 with no ongoing costs, it’s accessible to anyone with an Android phone and a desire to know what their government is doing.

The Portfolio at 11

CapitolLens rounds out our portfolio at 11 apps spanning utilities, finance, health, food, pets, vehicles, and now civic engagement. Every app follows the same principles: local-first where possible, no ads, no tracking, no accounts.

The civic tech category is smaller than health or finance, but the audience is motivated and underserved. People who want to track legislation are exactly the kind of engaged users who pay for well-built tools.