Who the government pays.
Award by award, in its own figures.

The source

USAspending.gov is the federal government’s official public record of its spending, run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service at the Department of the Treasury under the DATA Act of 2014. Contracts reach it from the Federal Procurement Data System; grants, loans and other assistance from the agencies’ own submissions. This page reads its public API, version 2, at api.usaspending.gov, straight from your browser — no key, no account and no server of labs.llc’s in between. Six endpoints do all of it:

• search/spending_by_award/ — the rows of the search
• search/spending_by_award_count/ — the count on each kind
• search/spending_by_category/ — the three boards (awarding agency, recipient, state or territory of performance)
• search/spending_over_time/ — the strip of years
• references/toptier_agencies/ — the agency menu
• awards/last_updated/ — USAspending’s own date for its data

Works of the United States government are not under copyright (17 U.S.C. § 105), and USAspending publishes this data for anyone to use. The six kinds of award and the codes in each are USAspending’s own grouping, from its references/award_types/ list; a search can only ask about one kind at a time, which is why the kinds are a switch. Each row links to that award’s page on usaspending.gov, which is the authority on it. For the money itself — the debt, the cash balance, what came in and went out today — see this site’s Treasury desk.

What an amount means

Every amount here is an obligation — a binding promise to pay — not an outlay, the money actually paid out, which usually comes later and can be less. In the search table the amount is USAspending’s “Award Amount”: the award’s total obligation over its whole life, so a ten-year contract shows ten years. On the boards and the strip the amount is what was obligated inside the fiscal year, added up over that year’s transactions. The two answer different questions and are never mixed.

Loans are the exception USAspending itself makes: a loan’s obligation is its subsidy cost, the government’s estimate of what the loan will cost it, not its face value. The table prints both; the boards add up the subsidy cost. A negative amount is a de-obligation, and it is printed as it came.

What is worked out here

Only arithmetic that cannot be wrong in an interesting way: the dates of a fiscal year (1 October to 30 September, named for the year it ends in, by your clock); the number of pages (a count over twenty-five); a board row’s share of its year (its amount over the strip’s figure for that year, both USAspending’s, printed only when that figure is above zero and at least what each board’s rows add up to — the year is net of de-obligations, and for loans it can fall below zero, when a share would mean nothing and the boards say so instead); and the rounding of board and strip amounts to millions and billions, with the exact figure on the element’s title. Nothing is interpolated, and a year USAspending returns no figure for is drawn as a gap, not as a zero.

The limits

The search reaches back to fiscal year 2008, which is USAspending’s own limit for it; older awards are in its download tools. It hands out the first 50,000 results of any one search, so a larger answer is narrowed or reversed rather than paged through. A keyword needs three letters or more. These are prime awards only; the subawards made under them are not included.

The current fiscal year is not closed, and reporting lags: the Department of Defense publishes its contract data ninety days after the fact, and agencies correct their submissions for months, so recent figures move. For that reason the page opens on the year just closed from 1 October to 31 December, while the new year holds only weeks of reporting, and on the year under way from 1 January; either year can be chosen at any time, and a search sent to somebody carries its year. Recipients are grouped as USAspending groups them, so a parent company and its subsidiaries can appear separately, and “MULTIPLE RECIPIENTS” and “REDACTED DUE TO PII” are its labels for payments to individuals, added together.

What you type

What you type goes from your browser to api.usaspending.gov, inside the request, and nowhere else; the requests carry no cookies. The search is also written into this page’s address after the #, so it can be sent to somebody — browsers never send that part of an address with a request — and kept in this tab’s session storage, so switching edition does not lose it. labs.llc stores none of it; its analytics count that the page was used, never what was searched. If USAspending does not answer, the panel says so and offers to ask again; nothing is shown in its place. Questions and corrections: labs@labs.llc.