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 1684+ 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.

Recompete calendar — usa_expiring_awards / usa_incumbent_profile

"Which VA IT contracts over $10M expire in the next 12 months, and who holds them" is the core govcon business-development question, and these two tools answer it directly — no key, no upstream throttle.

usa_expiring_awards({agency: "Department of Veterans Affairs", naics: "5415",
                     min_amount: 10000000, months_ahead: 12})
usa_incumbent_profile({recipient: "Booz Allen"})

usa_expiring_awards returns the incumbent, period of performance, obligated dollars, agency/sub-agency, NAICS/PSC and a usaspending.gov link per award. usa_incumbent_profile returns one contractor's portfolio: active awards, total obligated, ceiling, expirations at 6/12/18 months, top agencies and NAICS.

These read usaspending_awards_current, a materialized view of one row per award (626,306 awards from 1,510,983 transactions). Rebuild it after every pipeline load with select usaspending_refresh_awards_current(); — it also restamps the mirror_as_of that every response carries.

What will bite you

• Grain. The base table is one row per transaction. Every modification repeats the award's PIID, so querying usaspending_contracts directly counts one contract many times and sums its money just as often. Use the view.

• Two different end dates. period_of_performance_current_end_date is the recompete decision point. period_of_performance_potential_end_date is when all options would be exhausted. An award ending in 6 months whose options run 3 more years will be extended, not recompeted — listing it as a lead is a false positive that looks exactly like a real one. options_status reports options_remain / no_options_remain / unknown, and it is unknown for everything loaded before 2026-08-28: the potential end date was dropped at ingest and only starts populating on the next pipeline run.

• The end date is the latest transaction's, not the maximum. 5,299 awards (0.88%) disagree between the two, because a later modification can shorten the period. Checked against api.usaspending.gov, latest-transaction matched upstream 5 times out of 6 and max matched once. Don't "fix" it to max().

• The date can still be stale. A modification filed after mirror_as_of may have extended an award listed here as expiring — one $1.4B VA award read 14 months early for that reason. The usaspending_url is the live check.

• IDVs are excluded. They are ordering vehicles with no period of performance, so they have no expiry. 443,315 transactions carry no end date, but only 22,221 of 626,306 awards lack one, because the date is taken from the latest transaction that actually has one.

• min_amount filters obligated dollars, not the ceiling. A lightly-used vehicle with a $40M ceiling and $40k of real work does not pass a $10M floor.

• mirror_as_of comes from the data, not the snapshot filename. Those have disagreed: the pinned snapshot URL read contracts-all-20260506.zip while the table held action dates through 2026-08-04.

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 1684+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/usa_spending_by_agency \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"fiscal_year":"2024"}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/usa_spending_by_agency. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "usaspending": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-usaspending"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-usaspending

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

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