USASpending.gov

How It Works

USASpending.gov was first mandated by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA) of 2006 (Public Law 109-282, cosponsored by Senators Tom Coburn and Barack Obama) and substantially expanded by the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act) of 2014, which required Treasury and OMB to standardize federal spending data elements and publish them machine-readably. The site, operated by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service at Treasury, is the most comprehensive public record of federal spending and covers over $7 trillion in annual obligations across contracts (FPDS-NG feed), grants (FAADS PLUS feed), direct payments, loans, insurance, and employee compensation. Data is refreshed daily from agency financial and procurement systems, with a typical lag of 30-45 days for new transactions. Users can filter by agency, recipient, NAICS code, PSC code, place of performance, award type, or any combination, and the site exposes a public REST API (api.usaspending.gov) with rate limits generous enough for full bulk download. TaxDollarData ingests the USASpending API to build contractor, agency, and state profiles that make the underlying data faster and easier to browse than the official site. Known limitations include reporting lags of 60-90 days for some grant and loan programs, inconsistent data quality in recipient name normalization (the same firm may appear under multiple legal entity variants, which TaxDollarData handles through a normalized parent-recipient mapping), and incomplete visibility into intelligence community and classified spending, which appears only as aggregated totals without contractor or program detail. Subawards (grants to subrecipients and subcontracts to lower-tier contractors) have lower reporting compliance than prime awards under FFATA Subaward Reporting System (FSRS) requirements, typically capturing 40-60% of actual subaward value.

Related Terms

• Obligation, A legally binding commitment by the government to spend money, the point at which funds are formally committed to a contract, grant, or other agreement.
• Government Accountability Office (GAO), The independent, nonpartisan agency that audits federal spending, investigates how taxpayer dollars are used, and reports findings to Congress.
• SAM.gov (System for Award Management), The federal government's central registration database for entities doing business with the government, required for receiving contracts, grants, or other awards.
• DATA Act (Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014), A 2014 federal law that required Treasury and OMB to standardize federal spending data elements and publish them as open, machine-readable data on USASpending.gov.