federal-register-doc-fetch

name

federal-register-doc-fetch

description

Fetch Federal Register document search results with explicit term, publication-window, agency, document-type, topic, docket, and RIN filters, then return structured official-policy records with retries, throttling, pagination, and validation. Use when tasks need authoritative U.S. Federal Register notices, proposed rules, final rules, or presidential documents for policy verification and regulatory context.

Federal Register Doc Fetch

Core Goal

• Search the Federal Register documents API with one bounded request plan.
• Retrieve official notices, proposed rules, final rules, or presidential documents relevant to one mission topic.
• Return machine-readable JSON records with publication dates, agencies, URLs, excerpts, docket IDs, and RIN metadata.
• Keep execution deterministic with retries, throttling, pagination caps, and payload validation.

Repository Policy

• This is the only Federal Register source skill in this repository.
• Do not create or invoke parallel Federal Register wrappers for the same documents endpoint.
• When eco-council or OpenClaw assigns a raw artifact path, write this skill's full JSON payload to that exact path with --output.

Required Environment

• Configure runtime by environment variables in references/env.md.
• Start from assets/config.example.env.
• Load env values before running commands:

set -a
source assets/config.example.env
set +a

Workflow

1. Validate effective configuration.

python3 scripts/federal_register_doc_fetch.py check-config --pretty

2. Dry-run the search plan before making remote calls.

python3 scripts/federal_register_doc_fetch.py fetch \
  --term "wildfire smoke EPA" \
  --start-date 2023-06-01 \
  --end-date 2023-06-10 \
  --agency environmental-protection-agency \
  --document-type NOTICE \
  --max-pages 2 \
  --max-records 20 \
  --dry-run \
  --pretty

3. Fetch one bounded search window and write the payload.

python3 scripts/federal_register_doc_fetch.py fetch \
  --term "wildfire smoke EPA" \
  --start-date 2023-06-01 \
  --end-date 2023-06-10 \
  --agency environmental-protection-agency \
  --document-type NOTICE \
  --output ./data/federal-register-docs.json \
  --pretty

4. Use task-specific structured filters when the mission already knows them.

python3 scripts/federal_register_doc_fetch.py fetch \
  --term "greenhouse gas" \
  --start-date 2024-03-01 \
  --end-date 2024-03-31 \
  --regulation-id-number 3235-AM87 \
  --document-type RULE \
  --document-type PRORULE \
  --max-records 50 \
  --pretty

Output Record Shape

Each item in records is one Federal Register document record, typically including:

• document_number, title, type
• publication_date, effective_on
• agencies, topics
• abstract, excerpts
• html_url, pdf_url, raw_text_url, comment_url
• docket_ids, regulation_id_numbers
• source_query_url, source_page_number

The full raw payload also keeps request metadata, page summaries, and validation output for downstream auditing.

Scope Boundaries

• This skill targets the Federal Register documents search endpoint only.
• This skill does not crawl linked HTML, PDF, or raw-text bodies.
• This skill does not infer legal meaning or summarize regulations.
• This skill does not need an API key.
• This skill is the canonical Federal Register fetch interface for this repository.

References

• references/env.md
• references/federal-register-api-notes.md
• references/federal-register-limitations.md
• references/openclaw-chaining-templates.md

Script

• scripts/federal_register_doc_fetch.py