Bulk Data

Much of the data behind Influence Explorer and its APIs is available in bulk. Listed below are the various datasets, with links to downloads and schema documentation.

License

Data returned by this service is subject to the use restrictions set by the Federal Election Commission. By accessing this data, you understand that you are using the data subject to all applicable local, state and federal law, including FEC restrictions.

All data licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. By downloading data and accessing the API you are agreeing to the terms of the license.

Federal campaign contribution and lobbying records must be attributed to OpenSecrets.org.

State campaign contribution records must be attributed to FollowTheMoney.org.

Available Datasets

Campaign Contributions

Full state and federal data set 3.27 GB

Federal

Federal records provided by OpenSecrets.org.
Please see OpenSecrets' data README prior to use.

All federal campaign contribution records 1.57 GB | Schema documentation

By Contribution Year

State

State records provided by FollowTheMoney.org.

All state campaign contribution records 1.7 GB | Schema documentation

By Contribution Year

Federal Lobbying

Federal lobbying data provided by OpenSecrets.org.

Full data set 228 MB | Schema documentation

Earmarks

Earmarks data provided by Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Full data set 2.7 MB | Schema documentation

Federal Grants & Contracts

Federal grant and contract data can be downloaded from USASpending.gov.

Schema documentation

EPA ECHO

EPA data from EPA ECHO.

All EPA ECHO records 6 MB | Schema documentation

Note: the download contains two files, one with the action records and the other with case ID's and defendant names (defennm) as they are found in the EPA data, alongside the verified, corresponding organization name and parent organization name in Influence Explorer.

Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA)

Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) data provided by U.S. General Services Administration.

All FACA records 16.5 MB

Federal Regulations

Federal regulatory comments extracted from Regulations.gov.

This dataset consists of all of the text extracted from federal rulemaking dockets on Regulations.gov. It encompasses approximately 13,000 regulatory dockets comprised of over 3,000,000 documents. The entire dataset is approximately 14 gigabytes. For each docket, there is one zip file containing a directory for each document, which, in turn, contains a text file for each attachment. Both dockets and documents also include additional, JSON-encoded metadata (date, title, etc.). The docket zip files are organized into directories by agency.

We offer several mechanisms for downloading this dataset, depending on whether you're interested in a single docket, an agency's worth of dockets, or the entire dataset. To find a particular docket you will need the docket ID from Regulations.gov.

Web access

We have made the dataset available for browsing via the web below. Individual dockets can be downloaded from this site.

Browse the dataset online

BitTorrent

We are also seeding a torrent of all of the regulatory data. This is the recommended mechanism for downloading the entire dataset. You can use this torrent to either download data for all agencies, or, if your BitTorrent client supports it, a subset of either agencies or dockets. For more information on how to use BitTorrent, see this LifeHacker post.

Download the dataset via BitTorrent

Rsync

The dataset is also available via Rsync, either in full or part. The link below is the Rsync URL for the entire dataset. To download only an agency's worth of data via Rsync, use the browser interface, locate the agency you wish to download, then copy the rsync URL from the rightmost column. Note: our rsync capacity is limited as rsync is a memory-intensive process. BitTorrent is the preferred means of downloading full agencies or the entire dataset, so please only use the Rsync service if you can't use the torrent.

Download via Rsync