December 2025 Release Notes

The GovInfo team worked diligently over the last few months to develop a variety of improvements and updates for the system. This included 82 individually tracked changes for the latest public release. Highlighted features were: integrating Congressional Committee Prints submitted through the bulk submission process into the main prints’ collection browse and search structures; migrating the United States Reports and Congressional Record Index Content Details pages to the new framework, along with migrating several collection browse pages migrated; a new “jump to” link on the Document in Context tab; XML support for the Monthly Catalog (MoCat) publications; an API “courtCode” search field and an API endpoint for Docket ID; development for the public preview of a Model Context Protocol (MCP); as well as security patches and component upgrades, design improvements, collection and system enhancements, bug fixes; and more.

New Content and Features: Approximately 50,000 content packages (roughly equivalent to one bound printed document) were made available from October 1 to December 31. Notable submissions included the publications below, and so much more:

• Volume 39, Nos. 15-16 and Volume 40, Nos. 3-4 of the FCC Record: A comprehensive compilation of decisions, reports, public notices and other documents of the Federal Communications Commission of the United States
• Historical U.S. Statutes at Large volumes in USLM XML format for digitized volumes 29-35, 37-39, 44, 80-93
• Additional titles of the United States Code, including Titles 23, 24, and 25 of the 2024 Edition
• 29 reports submitted by Federal agencies into the Congressionally Mandated Reports collection (bringing the total to over 840)
• 733 born-digital documents that were acquired through GPO’s Cataloging and Indexing Program
• 8,908 digitized U.S. Congressional Serial Set reports, documents, and journals
• Interim packages for the Privacy Act Issuances collection
• Railroad Retirement Board publications
• Indiana State Library partnership publications, including Volume 26 of the Decisions of the Department of the Interior and the General Land Office in Cases Relating to the Public Lands

The image below features covers from some of the publications submitted to GovInfo this quarter.

Integrated Additional Prints into the Congressional Committee Prints Collection Browse and Search Results: During this release, the team integrated committee prints that are submitted to GovInfo through the bulk content submission process into the “day-forward” Congressional Committee Prints collection browse page and search results. This important update enables workflow flexibility that accompanies bringing in harvested, or “one-off", prints into GovInfo, and supports the logical discoverability of content that belongs together but is processed differently. Ultimately, the result is easier access to these prints for end users. This is being done systematically for all content that is processed in different ways but is the same publication type.

This image displays an example of a harvested “GOVPUB” committee print nested within the Congressional Committee Print browse page alongside a day-forward “CPRT” committee print.

Monthly Catalog of U.S. Government Publications in XML for Select Years: To ensure users can access content in the formats they need, this release included making XML formats available for what is commonly referred to as the “Monthly Catalog,” or “MoCat.” This publication lists all of the publications produced by the U.S. Government Printing Office (now “Publishing”) from 1895 to 2004. If available, you will see an XML format button next to a MoCat title. Not all titles or years will have XML. The MoCat is available to browse or search in GovInfo.

This image shows an example of the XML for a MoCat search result.

API Enhancements: Two major enhancements were made to the GovInfo public API for this release. The first was the addition of the “courtCode” search field. This means that a search service request for collection:uscourts, courtCode:caed, for example, will return results from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, similar to how API users can use the courtCode query parameters in the collections and published endpoints. For the second enhancement, API users can now utilize the related endpoint to query Federal Register documents that share the same “docketID” metadata.

Content Details Page Modernization, Document in Context “Jump to”, and Web Application Framework Migration: Significant progress was made with migrating the web application to the new framework. Content Details pages updates for this release included the United States Reports (USREPORTS) and the Congressional Record Index (CRI) collections. As part of the migration, a targeted design improvement was applied to the Document in Context functionality tab for the migrated documents’ details pages. When a user clicks on the new “Go to current document” hyperlink located at the top of the listing of documents, the page immediately jumps to the location of that document’s section within the whole volume or “book”.

This image shows the Content Details’ Document in Context tab and the new “Jump to” link, which directs users to the document’s section within the volume.

The browse pages migration progress included the Economic Report of the President (ERP), Economic Indicators (ECONI), Coastal Zone Information Center (CZIC), Public Papers of the President (PPP), U.S. Congressional Serial Set (SERIALSET), Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), and the Additional Government Publications (GPO) collections. It also included the CFR Parts Affected from the Federal Register utility.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) Public Preview: (Coming Soon) During this release, the team developed an initial implementation of a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that will enhance access to GovInfo content for large language models (LLM), specifically artificial intelligence (AI). MCP is an emerging industry standard that enables systems to create specific tools that LLMs can interact with, without requiring those systems to train their own custom models. Training LLM models is time-consuming and expensive, and MCP allows LLMs to access more up-to-date information than the information on which they were originally trained.

Is GovInfo implementing AI and what does this mean for users?

GovInfo is providing tools that will allow LLM agents to take user prompts and then access up-to-date GovInfo content and metadata. The GovInfo MCP will provide the same response back to any LLM making the same request, acting as a universal API for AI agents to access live information and perform actions. Depending on the LLM and the user request, the LLM may take additional steps that will require user review.

The GovInfo team remains steadfastly committed to serving as a trustworthy platform providing free permanent public access to official Federal publications. In addition to the existing GovInfo website and API, the GovInfo MCP will serve a new set of “users”.

With MCP, there will be three primary interfaces that access the same underlying data:

• Web User Interface (UI): humans
• API: programmatic and machine access
• MCP: LLM and AI access

What does the public preview look like?

The initial release will provide basic search and retrieval capabilities, allowing the developer community to provide feedback. More information will be available in GPO's API GitHub repository.

When will this be available?

The initial launch is planned for early 2026. The launch will be announced in a GovInfo Feature Article and on GitHub.

Additional Release Enhancements:

• Enhanced the visual display of page number ranges on the Federal Register browse page.
• Improved U.S. Code and Code of Federal Regulations collection standard references parsing within collections.
• Added courtCode as a search field for the U.S. Courts collection.
• Upgraded the public-facing content management system (CMS).
• Modernized application and system infrastructure.
• Implemented processing changes for the application of digital signatures on large PDF files.
• Performed parser refactoring for the List of Sections Affected, Senate Manual, House Rules and Manual, Public Papers of the Presidents, Education Reports from ERIC, Coastal Zone Information Center, and E-CFR collections.
• Implemented daily Congressional Record collection parsing enhancements and bug fixes.
• Updated the public API for Congressional Calendars collection to only display a single PDF link in the granule summary.
• Updated the Congressional Calendars collection to detect edition information correctly.
• Improved the GovInfo API documentation to highlight the availability of the search service and add a deprecation warning for the offset parameter to make offsetMark more prominent.
• Updated the Public Papers of the Presidents collection so that the first browse line is not truncated.
• Improved detection of “Issue Number” in the 1995 daily Congressional Record collection packages.
• Fixed a parsing issue for Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents collection {PCS/weekEndingDate}.
• Updated the Miscellaneous Government Publications collection to support a change to full-text indexing logic.
• Updated processing for all unique Daily Digest granules in multi-book Congressional Record collection packages.
• Performed a major upgrade to the internal content management system.
• Upgraded the internal components that power the GovInfo publication linking functionality.
• Began infrastructure-related technology migration activities.
• Made various updates to the internal XML metadata editor and content management system.
• Performed updates related to web application content delivery and other web services.
• Performed various software and security upgrades on multiple internal and external components.



About Release Notes -- Changes to GovInfo components are made through code deployments on a quarterly release cycle. Release Notes are published after deployments to highlight some of the key changes, summarize other noteworthy activities, and recap new content, feature articles, and top searches since the previous release. Read previous editions of Release Notes.