US Gov Open Data

Register for a FRED API key at the St. Louis Fed and a Data.gov API key. Both are free and available instantly. Most other APIs in the collection require no key at all.

# FRED API key: https://fredaccount.stlouisfed.org/login/secure/
# Data.gov API key: https://api.data.gov/signup/

Add the server to your claude_desktop_config.json with your API keys in the env block. The -y flag ensures npx always pulls the latest version.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "us-gov-open-data": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "us-gov-open-data-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "FRED_API_KEY": "your_fred_api_key_here",
        "DATA_GOV_API_KEY": "your_data_gov_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

For VS Code users, add the server to .vscode/mcp.json in your workspace or user settings.

{
  "servers": {
    "us-gov-open-data": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "us-gov-open-data-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "FRED_API_KEY": "your_fred_api_key_here",
        "DATA_GOV_API_KEY": "your_data_gov_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop or VS Code after updating the configuration. The server loads 300+ tools across economic, health, legislative, energy, and financial domains. Tool loading may take a few seconds on first startup.

Ask Claude to retrieve economic data or track legislation. The server caches responses to disk for performance and uses WASM sandboxing for safe cross-agency data processing.