# Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS)

> ACUS is an independent federal agency in the executive branch whose statutory mission is to improve the procedures by which federal agencies administer regulatory, benefit, and other government programs. It issues roughly a dozen formal recommendations a year to agencies, Congress, the President, and the Judicial Conference. ACUS is not a software vendor and runs no developer program, but it does operate one publicly callable API and two public databases.

Generated by API Evangelist on 2026-08-30 from live probes of acus.gov hosts. ACUS publishes no llms.txt of its own (probed /llms.txt on www.acus.gov, eaja.acus.gov and sourcebook.acus.gov — all HTTP 404).

## IMPORTANT — read before making any request

Every acus.gov host returns **HTTP 403 to non-browser User-Agents**. Measured 2026-08-30 against
https://sourcebook.acus.gov/rest.php/v1/page/Main_Page: `curl/8.7.1` → 403, `python-requests/2.31.0` → 403,
`GPTBot/1.0` → 403, desktop Chrome UA → 200. The same holds for www.acus.gov. The API is public and
unauthenticated; the barrier is the edge, not authorization. Set a browser-like User-Agent.

There are no API keys, no accounts, no plans, no pricing and no quotas anywhere in this agency.

## The callable API — Federal Administrative Procedure Sourcebook

A MediaWiki 1.43.0 instance holding 21 content articles covering the core statutes of US federal
administrative procedure. Both MediaWiki interfaces are live and anonymous.

- MediaWiki Action API: https://sourcebook.acus.gov/api.php (54 actions; formats json, jsonfm, php, xml, rawfm, none)
- MediaWiki REST API v1: https://sourcebook.acus.gov/rest.php/v1
- Auto-generated API reference: https://sourcebook.acus.gov/api.php
- Discovery document (RSD 1.0): https://sourcebook.acus.gov/api.php?action=rsd
- Human entry point: https://sourcebook.acus.gov/wiki/Federal_Administrative_Procedure_Sourcebook

Verified endpoints (all HTTP 200 anonymously on 2026-08-30):

- GET /rest.php/v1/page/{title} — entry with wikitext source
- GET /rest.php/v1/page/{title}/bare — metadata only
- GET /rest.php/v1/page/{title}/html — rendered Parsoid HTML
- GET /rest.php/v1/revision/{id}/bare — one revision
- GET /rest.php/v1/search/page?q=&limit= — full-text search
- GET /rest.php/v1/search/title?q=&limit= — title prefix search
- GET /api.php?action=query&list=allpages&aplimit= — enumerate every entry (continuation via `continue`)
- GET /api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&siprop=general|statistics — platform and corpus metadata

Statutes and doctrines covered: Administrative Procedure Act, Freedom of Information Act, Privacy Act,
Government in the Sunshine Act, Federal Advisory Committee Act, Negotiated Rulemaking Act, Regulatory
Flexibility Act, Paperwork Reduction Act, Congressional Review of Agency Rulemaking, Equal Access to
Justice Act, Contract Disputes Act, Administrative Dispute Resolution Act, E-Government Act of 2002,
National Environmental Policy Act, Information Quality Act, Government Performance and Results Act,
Federal Register Act, Agency Practice Act, Tucker Act, Judicial Review of Agency Action, and Rulemaking
Requirements from the Executive Office of the President.

Error handling: the REST API returns `{errorKey, messageTranslations, httpCode, httpReason}` — structured
JSON, but NOT RFC 9457 problem+json. The Action API returns HTTP 200 for most application errors and puts
the failure in the body; parse the body, not the status code.

## Public databases with no API

- Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA) Awards Database — https://eaja.acus.gov
  Statutorily required by the Dingell Act (2019). A Symfony/EasyAdmin HTML application listing every EAJA
  fee award against the federal government by agency, case name, award date, amount, awardees, claims
  description and finding basis. Filter-and-browse UI with spreadsheet downloads. No JSON endpoint —
  /api, /jsonapi, /graphql and /openapi.json all return 404.
  Background: https://www.acus.gov/eaja

- Federal Administrative Adjudication Database — https://acus.law.stanford.edu/
  A joint ACUS / Stanford Law School project on federal agency adjudication processes. Hosted by Stanford,
  not by ACUS. No API.

## Agency content (HTML, plus one RSS feed)

- Home: https://www.acus.gov/
- Recommendations: https://www.acus.gov/recommendations
- Reports: https://www.acus.gov/reports
- Data / Evidence Act page: https://www.acus.gov/data
- Adjudication topic hub: https://www.acus.gov/page/adjudication
- Updates in Federal Agency Adjudication (monthly): https://www.acus.gov/updates-federal-agency-adjudication
- News releases: https://www.acus.gov/news-releases
- Blog: https://www.acus.gov/blog
- RSS feed (the only machine-readable change feed): https://www.acus.gov/rss.xml
- Resources: https://www.acus.gov/page/resources
- About / contact: https://www.acus.gov/about-acus — info@acus.gov

## Policy

- Vulnerability Disclosure Policy: https://www.acus.gov/vulnerability-disclosure-policy — security@acus.gov, scope *.acus.gov, safe harbor for good-faith research, CISA BOD 20-01
- Privacy Policy: https://www.acus.gov/document/privacy-policy
- All agency policies: https://www.acus.gov/page/policies
- FOIA: https://www.acus.gov/freedom-information-act-foia

## What ACUS does not publish

No OpenAPI, GraphQL, AsyncAPI, gRPC or WSDL contract. No MCP server. No A2A agent card. No SDK, CLI or
package in any registry. No GitHub organization. No status page, SLA, changelog, deprecation policy,
sandbox, webhooks, OAuth, or /.well-known/ document of any kind — including no security.txt, despite the
Vulnerability Disclosure Policy existing as an HTML page.