Oversight Project Empowers Citizen Investigators with DocDepot AI Toolkit
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 21, 2026
Washington, D.C.–The Oversight Project announced a major expansion of DocDepot, its public transparency archive, adding an AI research assistant and a publicly available Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. This is the first time these tools have been applied to a public transparency dataset at this scale and made accessible to the average citizen. With these tools citizen investigators can search, read, and chat with nearly 200,000 government documents – that’s four million pages of FOIA productions, congressional releases, watchdog reports, and historical texts. The archive grows by hundreds of documents every week and is free to use at docdepot.itsyourgov.org.
With DocDepot’s new AI features users can quickly get answers buried in the 100th page of a dense report or investigate research questions that span many primary sources. The builtin AI agent’s responses link to DocDepot documents as sources, and the agent draws diagrams and timelines to illustrate its findings. Asking it to "Create a timeline of autopen pardons," for example, produces a timeline of pardons signed by autopen during the Biden White House. Documents are tagged by subject and source, so users can browse curated sets of records. DocDepot’s public MCP server lets users connect their own Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, and other AI agents directly to the archive. This gives users’ AI the tools of DocDepot’s built-in assistant to use as part of a larger open-source research toolbelt. The Oversight Project is committed to giving oversight power back to the people. With DocDepot’s new functions, it does just that. We do it because it’s your government.
Oversight Project President Mike Howell gave this statement:
“We use the tagline ‘It's Your Government’ for a reason. We've spent years fighting tooth and nail to pull records out of the government, many of which have propelled some of the biggest stories in America. But what good are all these documents if a busy, everyday American doesn't have the time to make sense of them all or read an entire congressional report or the like? This tool solves that problem. I'm incredibly impressed by our team dedicating years to gathering this universe of information, painstakingly logging and organizing it, and then building an advanced and innovative system to make it all user-friendly and accessible. This is what the future of oversight looks like.
Our Republic works only when there is an informed and virtuous citizenry. America needs a civic revival to usher in a return to self-government. Today we take a big step to help make that happen.
I'd like to particularly thank The Heritage Foundation for their longstanding support and incubation of the Oversight Project. None of this would have been possible without their support and believing in our mission.”
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Watch the DocDepot launch video here:
Read the exclusive story from the Daily Signal here: https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/10/22/watchdog-using-ai-to-help-americans-dig-through-millions-of-pages-of-government-records/