USAspending — Federal Government Contracts and Grants

1. Summary

USAspending.gov is the official source of federal spending data. Coverage: contracts, grants, loans, direct payments, sub-awards. Required by the DATA Act of 2014 — all federal agencies must report to a single schema.

2. Access Methods

API v2: https://api.usaspending.gov/api/v2/ (no auth, no key)
Bulk: https://files.usaspending.gov/ (CSV / Parquet by award type)
Auth: None
Rate limit: Not strictly enforced, but be polite — keep to <10 req/s

3. Data Schema

Key fields emitted by fetch_usaspending.py (prime awards):

Column	Type	Description
`award_id`	str	Federal award ID (PIID for contracts, FAIN for grants)
`recipient_name`	str	Awardee legal name
`recipient_uei`	str	Unique Entity Identifier (replaced DUNS in 2022)
`recipient_duns`	str	Legacy DUNS number (historical only)
`recipient_parent_name`	str	Ultimate parent organization
`recipient_state`	str	Recipient state
`awarding_agency`	str	Department / agency name
`awarding_sub_agency`	str	Sub-tier (e.g. DoD → Army)
`award_type`	str	Contract / Grant / Loan / Direct Payment
`award_amount`	float	Current total obligation in USD
`award_date`	str	Action / signed date YYYY-MM-DD
`period_of_performance_start`	str	YYYY-MM-DD
`period_of_performance_end`	str	YYYY-MM-DD
`naics_code`	str	Industry classification
`psc_code`	str	Product / Service Code
`competition_extent`	str	Full / limited / sole-source
`description`	str	Award description (free-text)

4. Coverage

US federal awards only (state/local not included)
FY 2008 → present (full coverage from FY 2017)
Updated bi-weekly from agency reporting
~100M+ transaction records cumulative

5. Cross-Reference Potential

SEC EDGAR ↔ recipient_name (public companies as contractors)
Senate LD ↔ recipient_name (lobbying clients winning contracts)
OFAC SDN ↔ recipient_name (sanctions screening of contractors — must be filtered out by SAM.gov but verify)
ICIJ Offshore ↔ recipient_name (offshore-linked contractors)

Join key: normalized recipient name. UEI is canonical when present.

6. Data Quality

DUNS → UEI transition (April 2022) — old records have DUNS, new records have UEI
Some sub-awards aren't reported (FFATA threshold is $30k)
Award amount changes over time (mod actions) — fetch script reports current total
competition_extent field is free-text in older records — fetch_usaspending.py normalizes to canonical values
Recipient name variations are extensive — "ACME LLC", "Acme L.L.C.", "ACME, INC" all appear. Use entity_resolution.py.

7. Acquisition Script

Path: scripts/fetch_usaspending.py

bash

# By recipient name
python3 SKILL_DIR/scripts/fetch_usaspending.py --recipient "EXAMPLE CORP" \
    --fy 2024 --out data/contracts.csv

# By awarding agency
python3 SKILL_DIR/scripts/fetch_usaspending.py --agency "Department of Defense" \
    --fy 2024 --out data/contracts.csv

# Filter to sole-source only
python3 SKILL_DIR/scripts/fetch_usaspending.py --recipient "EXAMPLE CORP" \
    --fy 2024 --sole-source-only --out data/contracts.csv

8. Legal & Licensing

Public record under the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA, 2006) and DATA Act (2014)
No commercial use restrictions on the data
Personal information of award recipients (e.g. small business owners' addresses in some grants) should be handled per the source agency's privacy notice

9. References

API docs: https://api.usaspending.gov/
Data dictionary: https://www.usaspending.gov/data-dictionary
Award schema: https://files.usaspending.gov/docs/Data_Dictionary_Crosswalk.xlsx