Chronological actions (newest first) for a specific bill from Congress.gov. Identify via billId or congress+type+number.
AI agents call get_bill_actions to retrieve information from Us Legal without modifying anything — typically the context-gathering step in research, monitoring, and reporting workflows, before the agent takes action elsewhere.
This tool retrieves and displays legislative action history—a read-only operation that queries existing public data. No modifications, deletions, code execution, or financial operations are possible. The severity is low because misuse would only result in unwanted information retrieval without operational impact.
From the tool's definition Tool retrieves 'chronological actions' for a specific bill. Functionally a query/fetch operation that returns historical legislative action records from Congress.gov with no side effects.
Documented attack patterns abuse exactly the kind of access get_bill_actions gives an agent:
PolicyLayer is an MCP gateway — it sits between your AI agents and Us Legal, and nothing reaches the server without passing your rules. This is the rule we recommend for get_bill_actions:
{
"version": "1",
"default": "deny",
"tools": {
"get_bill_actions": {}
}
}get_bill_actions is read-only, so it stays allowed — but everything else on the server is denied unless you say otherwise.
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Chronological actions (newest first) for a specific bill from Congress.gov. Identify via billId or congress+type+number. It is categorised as a Read tool in the Us Legal MCP Server, which means it retrieves data without modifying state.
Register the Us Legal MCP server in PolicyLayer and add a rule for get_bill_actions: allow, deny, rate-limit, or require approval. Point your MCP client at the PolicyLayer proxy URL and the rule is enforced on every call, before it reaches Us Legal. Nothing to install.
get_bill_actions is a Read tool with low risk. Read-only tools are generally safe to allow by default.
Yes. Add a rate_limit block to the get_bill_actions rule in your PolicyLayer policy. For example, setting max: 10 and window: 60 limits the tool to 10 calls per minute. Rate limits are tracked per agent session and reset automatically.
Set action: deny in the PolicyLayer policy for get_bill_actions. The AI agent will receive a policy violation error and cannot call the tool. You can also include a reason field to explain why the tool is blocked.
get_bill_actions is provided by the Us Legal MCP server (jamesanz/us-legal-mcp). PolicyLayer sits as a proxy in front of this server to enforce policies before tool calls reach the server.
Start from Us Legal, add the rest of your stack, and see everything your agents can call. Then put policy on all of it.
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18 Us Legal tools catalogued and risk-classified — across an index of 43,000+ MCP servers.