fec-mcp

An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server for Federal Election Commission rules, regulations, and data covering PACs, party committees, and candidates.

It provides two complementary tool families:

1. Rulebook search -- full-text search over the FEC's own official PDF guides (campaign guides for candidates, party committees, and PACs, plus the contribution-limits chart). This is the authoritative source for compliance questions and dollar limits: results are quoted directly from the PDFs with filename + page citations, not hardcoded or model-recalled figures.
2. Live OpenFEC data -- real-time lookups against the public OpenFEC API for candidates, committees, filings, financial totals, elections, and the reporting calendar.

Setup

1. Install

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .

2. Add the FEC rulebook PDFs

Place the official FEC PDF guides in data/rulebooks/, for example:

• The FEC's Campaign Guide for Congressional Candidates and Committees
• The FEC's Campaign Guide for Political Party Committees
• The FEC's Campaign Guide for Nonconnected Committees (PACs)
• The current Contribution Limits chart

These are published on fec.gov under its Campaign Guides / Contribution Limits resources; grab the current versions from there (this repo does not bundle download links since they change over time -- verify you have the current cycle's documents).

Any PDF you drop in data/rulebooks/ is picked up automatically -- the server builds a search index (cached in data/rulebooks/.index/) the first time it starts and rebuilds it whenever files are added, removed, or changed.

3. Get an OpenFEC API key (optional but recommended)

Live OpenFEC lookups work out of the box with the shared DEMO_KEY, which is heavily rate-limited. For real use, get a free key at https://api.data.gov/signup/ and set it:

export FEC_API_KEY=your_key_here

4. Configure your MCP client

For Claude Code / Claude Desktop, add to your MCP config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fec": {
      "command": "/absolute/path/to/FEC_MCP/.venv/bin/fec-mcp",
      "env": {
        "FEC_API_KEY": "your_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Or run directly for local testing:

fec-mcp

Tools

Rulebook search (grounded in the PDFs you add):

Tool	Purpose
list_rulebook_sources	List loaded PDFs and page counts
search_rulebooks	Full-text search across all loaded PDFs
get_rulebook_page	Read the full text of one page

Live OpenFEC data:

Tool	Purpose
search_candidates / get_candidate / get_candidate_totals	Candidate lookup and financials
search_committees / get_committee / get_committee_filings / get_committee_totals	PAC/party/campaign committee lookup, filings, financials
search_filings	Cross-committee filing search
search_elections	Election search by state/office/cycle
get_reporting_calendar	FEC reporting and election deadline dates

Notes on scope

• No hardcoded contribution limits or rule text. OpenFEC's live API has no endpoint for contribution limits or regulation text, and those figures change (limits are inflation-adjusted every two-year cycle) -- baking them into code risks going stale silently. Instead, this server searches the FEC's own PDFs you provide, so answers are always sourced to a specific document and page.
• Not legal advice. Tool output should be treated as a research aid and cited back to its source (PDF page or OpenFEC record), not relied on as a substitute for consulting the FEC or legal counsel.

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest