USAspending — Federal Contract & Grant Awards

The U.S. Treasury's USAspending.gov data on federal awards: contracts, grants, loans, and direct payments. Every dollar the federal government has awarded since 2008 (with patchier coverage going back to 2001), broken down by recipient, agency, sub-agency, NAICS code, and place of performance. Free, no auth.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1476+ live data sources.

Why this matters for AI agents

Where SAM.gov is opportunities (what the government is buying), USAspending is awards (what was actually contracted). For competitive intelligence, lobbying-spend ROI analysis, federal vendor research, or following the money on policy areas, this is the source of truth.

Common flows:

• "How much has X received in federal contracts?" → get_federal_spending({recipient: "X"}) → award totals by year, agency.

• "Who are the top contractors for the DoD?" → spend search filtered by agency.

• "Federal investment in AI / cybersecurity / clean energy?" → keyword + NAICS / PSC code search.

Used by the govcon_contractor_profile and lobbying_activity recipes.

Related MCP server: USAspending MCP Server

Auth

None. USAspending is fully public, free.

Award classes

For company-level analysis, contracts are usually what matters. Grants matter for universities and nonprofits.

Common pitfalls

• Recipient name normalization. "Lockheed Martin Corporation," "LOCKHEED MARTIN CORP," "Lockheed Martin" all appear in the data. Aggregate case-insensitively after stripping legal suffixes for clean totals.

• Parent vs subsidiary. A large company has many subsidiaries, each with separate UEIs. USAspending includes parent-recipient hierarchy fields — use them for true company-level totals.

• Obligated vs outlayed dollars. "Obligated" is what the government committed; "outlayed" is what's actually been paid. The gap can be years for multi-year contracts.

• NAICS codes for "we sell IT services." A single contractor can have dozens of NAICS designations. Filtering by NAICS gets you only the awards classified that way; cross-NAICS analysis needs careful aggregation.

• Lag. Most awards appear within 30 days of obligation. The very-most-recent quarter is incomplete and revises upward.

• Unique award IDs. Awards have stable IDs (PIIDs for contracts, FAINs for grants). Use these for citation; recipient-level totals are the rolled-up view.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "usaspending": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/usaspending/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/usaspending/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1476+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Usaspending data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides

• pipeworx.io

License

MIT