buriedsignals/anomaly/openfec-campaign-finance

Query OpenFEC candidates, committees and receipts

meta.yaml is the executable contract. Use only released operations.

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Current catalogue release status

meta.yaml is authoritative. Execute only operations listed as Released below; other sections in this playbook may document provider or unreleased adapter scope.

Released

• us/fec/campaign-finance:search-candidates — Search candidate registrations by name and optional office, geography, party, cycle, status, activity, and pagination filters.
• us/fec/campaign-finance:search-committees — Search committee registrations by name and optional type, designation, geography, party, cycle, filing frequency, treasurer, and pagination filters.
• us/fec/campaign-finance:donations — One row per itemized receipt for the named committees or contributors, in receipt-date order, read by keyset pagination.
• us/fec/campaign-finance:recipients — One row per committee with its first Statement of Organization date, by committee id or first-filing date range.

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Search entities, then resolve identifiers

catalogue query us/fec/campaign-finance --operation search-candidates \
  --input '{"q":"Warren","office":"S","state":"MA","per_page":10}'
 
catalogue query us/fec/campaign-finance --operation search-committees \
  --input '{"q":"ACTBLUE","per_page":10}'

Candidate IDs are office-specific: the same person can have different IDs for different offices. Committee names are not unique and can change; preserve committee_id, filing dates, cycle, type, and designation.

The two search operations return registration/entity data only. Receipts come from the donations operation below; disbursements, independent expenditures, cash, debt, and financial totals are not released.

Fetch campaign_finance contract rows

donations reads GET /v1/schedules/schedule_a/ and recipients reads GET /v1/committees/. Every row already carries the contract column names of domains/campaign_finance.yaml, so write the records to JSONL and pass them to anomaly.oneshot without a column map:

catalogue query us/fec/campaign-finance --operation donations \
  --input '{"committee_id":"C00718866","two_year_transaction_period":2026,"min_amount":3000,"pages":5}'
catalogue query us/fec/campaign-finance --operation recipients \
  --input '{"min_first_f1_date":"2026-05-01","committee_type":"O"}'
python -m anomaly.oneshot --tables donations=donations.jsonl \
  --tables recipients=recipients.jsonl --request request.json --approved

Schedule A pages by keyset: the adapter passes pagination.last_indexes back as the next request's parameters, as the OpenFEC docs require, and stops after pages (at most 20 pages of 100). It refuses more than 10 committee_id values per request. is_individual defaults to true, which keeps non-earmarked individual contributions only and avoids counting a conduit (ActBlue, WinRed) memo entry twice; set it to false to see contributions from companies and organisations, for example when checking who funds a new super PAC. Contributions from one person to a candidate's primary and general elections are separate limits, so read election_type before calling repeated gifts excessive.

The bulk "contributions by individuals" file uses different names for the same fields: SUB_ID, CMTE_ID, NAME, EMPLOYER, ZIP_CODE, TRANSACTION_AMT, TRANSACTION_DT (MMDDYYYY) and ENTITY_TP (https://www.fec.gov/campaign-finance-data/contributions-individuals-file-description/); map them with a columns object in the request and convert the date first.

Apply FEC usage restrictions

OpenFEC identifies itself as the source and says data are updated nightly. Its current Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy govern reuse. The current policy includes a broad commercial-use restriction; federal law separately restricts sale or use of individual-contributor information for solicitation or commercial purposes. Users must assess their intended use against the current official terms. The donations operation returns contributor names, employers and ZIP codes: never use them to solicit contributions or for commercial purposes.

Read the API reference for endpoint parameters, codes, pagination, and official policies. Read the query guide for candidate and committee resolution.

Bundled resources

• references/api-reference.md — Firecrawl-preserved FEC docs, OpenAPI, and policies (Schedule A and recipients: this SKILL.md).
• references/query-guide.md — identity resolution, filter, and reporting workflow.
• scripts/verify.py and assets/verification-cases.json — live candidate and committee checks.
• evals/evals.json — identifier, financial-scope, cycle, and reuse cases.

python3 scripts/verify.py --list
python3 scripts/verify.py