Mission:  USAspending.gov shows the American public what the federal government spends every year and how it spends the money.

Background: USAspending.gov is a U.S. government source for data on federal grants, contracts, loans, and other financial assistance (e.g., Medicare benefits, food stamps, and unemployment benefits) that enables users to search federal awards from FY2008 to the present by state, congressional district, county, city, and zip code. Created under P.L. 109-282, the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, the site is designed to empower every American to hold the government accountable for each spending decision through funds tracked — from Congressional appropriations to federal agencies and down to local communities and businesses. Data is uploaded directly from more than a hundred federal agencies’ financial systems, with more than four hundred data points collected.

Outstanding Web Features: Federal agencies submit contract, grant, loan, direct payment, and other award data at least twice a month to be published on USAspending.gov. Users can research this data using the site’s Spending Explorer, enabling “big picture” browsing of federal spending obligations and offering interactive data visualization by budget function, agency, and object class. The Advanced Award Search lets users search prime and subaward data back to FY2008 and filter them by award type, awarding agency, recipient, country, state, zip, county, city, CD, and other criteria. The Profiles tab provides searchable subtabs that include Agencies, which features data on each agency’s total budgetary resources; Federal Accounts, which features a list of nearly two thousand federal accounts through which users can track spending obligations; States, which provides tables, interactive maps, and graphs showing a breakdown of a total awarded amount to each state back to FY2008; Recipients, which contains profiles of entities that have received federal awards in the form of contracts, grants, loans, or other financial assistance back to FY2008; and a new COVID-19 Spending portal that provides a snapshot in time of the overall federal funding response to the pandemic. The site also features a Download Center that allows for bulk exporting of large, pre-generated award data sets by agency, award type, and fiscal year through the Award Data Archive, in addition to pages that feature Custom Award Data and Custom Account Data (which covers all spending data, including non-award spending). Users can also download large data sets and metadata and utilize further resources to access the site’s glossary, data dictionary, data model, agency submission statistics, and an API tutorial for more information.