MCP servers for government data

Several MCP servers expose government data to AI agents. Some are remote services you connect to by URL, such as Olympus (Census demographics, Streamlined Sales Tax rates and SEC financials, with provenance) and USAFacts; others you run locally, such as the U.S. Census Bureau's own Data API server and community servers for SEC EDGAR, FRED, CKAN portals like data.gov, Congress.gov and Companies House. To connect Olympus, add https://mcp.olympus.new-odyssey.com/mcp to your MCP client and either send your API key in the X-API-Key header or sign in with OAuth.

By New Odyssey · Published 2026-10-21 · Markdown

Servers we could verify

This list includes only servers whose repository or official page we opened on 2026-10-21. "Official" means published by the agency or organisation that owns the data; everything else is a community project. Check each project's own documentation for current tools, terms and limits.

We did not find an official MCP server from the SEC, data.gov (GSA) or the UK Office for National Statistics. The MCP Registry lists many more community servers; search it for the dataset you need.

What to look for

• Who maintains it. An official server reflects the publisher's own reading of its data; a community server may lag behind source changes.
• Provenance. Can the agent cite where each number came from (source URL, release, date)? Without it, answers are hard to check.
• Coverage statements. Does the server say what it doesn't cover (states, years, estimates vs counts) so the agent doesn't fill gaps with guesses?
• Auth and limits. Remote servers need credentials and have quotas; local servers call the upstream API with your own key and its rate limits (for example, the SEC asks automated clients to declare a User-Agent and stay at or below 10 requests per second).

Connect the Olympus server

The server speaks Streamable HTTP at https://mcp.olympus.new-odyssey.com/mcp. Every tool call makes the REST requests listed in its description with your credentials, so the same plan, quotas and metering apply as for the REST API. Catalogue tools (list_olympus_products, get_product_coverage, get_product_pricing) need no key.

With an API key

Create a key (the Free plan includes every live API), keep it in $OLYMPUS_API_KEY, and add the server to your client. Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http olympus https://mcp.olympus.new-odyssey.com/mcp \
  --header "X-API-Key: $OLYMPUS_API_KEY"

Clients that take a JSON configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "olympus": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://mcp.olympus.new-odyssey.com/mcp",
      "headers": { "X-API-Key": "${OLYMPUS_API_KEY}" }
    }
  }
}

With OAuth

Add the server URL without a key. Clients that support MCP authorization discover the Olympus authorization server, register themselves and open the consent screen, where you choose the organization and the APIs the client may use (PKCE, per-API scopes such as sec:read). Access tokens last 15 minutes and work only through the MCP server; the client refreshes them itself. You can revoke a client under Connected apps.

claude mcp add --transport http olympus https://mcp.olympus.new-odyssey.com/mcp

Tools

Example prompts

• "What is the median household income in ZCTA 02139, and what is its margin of error? Say which ACS period it describes."
• "Compare Apple's and Microsoft's revenue for their last five fiscal years. Cite the 10-K for each figure and note that their fiscal years end in different months."
• "What sales tax rates apply at 1445 K St, Lincoln, NE 68508 today? List each jurisdiction and its effective date."
• "Which states does the Olympus sales tax API cover right now?"
• "How much of my Olympus quota is left this month?"

Results come back as structured content with the REST response's data, provenance, coverage limits and request_id. Text from source records, such as company names, is marked as untrusted data, and the tools never add instructions to their output. A sales tax result is a published rate, not a tax calculation, and ACS values are survey estimates, not current counts; the tools say so in their output.

Sources

• Model Context Protocol: MCP Registry
• USAFacts: USAFacts Data MCP
• U.S. Census Bureau: us-census-bureau-data-api-mcp
• U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission: Accessing EDGAR Data

Related docs

• Olympus for AI agents
• Agent quickstart
• Get SEC financial statements as JSON
• How sales tax rates by address work