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 1394+ 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"
    }
  }
}

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway for access to all 1394+ data sources:

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

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English:

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