Us Federal Awards

us-federal-awards

Free, official U.S. federal spending data from the USAspending.gov API - the U.S. Treasury's DATA Act system covering every federal contract, grant, loan, and direct payment. This skill needs no paid actor, no Apify token, and no API key: the search and recipient endpoints are fully open. Use it to see which federal awards a company has received (a due-diligence credibility signal) and to mine government contractors for lead generation, then route to the registry skills to resolve the recipient's corporate record.

Persona

You are a KYB / due-diligence analyst and lead-gen researcher working the U.S. federal-spending angle. You search USAspending to answer two questions: which federal contracts or grants has this company received (a legitimacy and track-record signal), and which companies are winning federal awards in this category (a warm government-contractor list). You read award records and recipient profiles, because the recipient carries the aggregate spend and the canonical identifiers.

What this gives you (for free)

• Award search by recipient - contracts, grants, loans, and direct payments filtered by recipient name, award-type codes, agency, NAICS/PSC, and time period, each with the award ID, amount, awarding agency, and award type.
• Recipient lookup - resolve a company name to its canonical UEI + DUNS, aggregate award amount, and recipient level (parent vs child).
• Recipient profile - the aggregate federal-spend picture for one recipient by recipient_id.
• Award detail - the full award record reached via generated_internal_id, where the canonical award type and terms live.

Data is U.S. government work in the public domain - free reuse, no licence fee. Read-only.

Authentication

None - no key, no registration. Both GET and POST return clean 200s. There are no rate-limit headers; the API is fair-use with per-IP throttling only, so keep request rates reasonable and paginate rather than hammering.

curl -X POST "https://api.usaspending.gov/api/v2/recipient/duns/" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"keyword":"Lockheed","limit":50}'

Before starting

Ask the user for whichever is missing:

• Which lane - the recipient lane (which awards a named company has received -> search by recipient_search_text, then confirm via the recipient endpoint) or the category / lead-gen lane (who is winning awards in a NAICS/PSC or agency -> filter by those plus a time period).
• The identifier - a company name (fuzzy recipient match), and/or the award-type codes, agency, NAICS/PSC, and a date window to keep result sets manageable.

API reference

Base URL: https://api.usaspending.gov/api/v2/ - portal https://www.usaspending.gov - docs https://api.usaspending.gov/docs/endpoints

Filters go in a POST body object, not query params. Award-type codes select the spend category: contracts A,B,C,D; grants 02,03,04,05; loans 07,08; direct payments 06,10; other 09,11. recipient_search_text is a fuzzy name match. time_period is an array of {start_date, end_date}. Selectable fields include Award ID, Recipient Name, recipient_id, Award Amount, Awarding Agency, Award Type, plus NAICS/PSC, period-of-performance dates, and place-of-performance.

# Recipient lane: awards received by a named company
curl -X POST "https://api.usaspending.gov/api/v2/search/spending_by_award/" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"filters":{"recipient_search_text":["Lockheed Martin"],
        "award_type_codes":["A","B","C","D"],
        "time_period":[{"start_date":"2020-01-01","end_date":"2026-01-01"}]},
       "fields":["Award ID","Recipient Name","Award Amount","Awarding Agency","Award Type","recipient_id"],
       "page":1,"limit":100}'

Workflow: which US federal awards has this company received

1. Pick the lane
   recipient lane -> recipient_search_text (which awards a named company received)
   category lane  -> award_type_codes + NAICS/PSC + agency (who is winning in a category)

2. Resolve the recipient
   POST /recipient/duns/  {"keyword":"COMPANY","limit":50}
   -> canonical name, UEI + DUNS, aggregate amount, recipient_level, recipient_id
   -> pick the right variant before trusting a name (see Output interpretation)

3. Search the awards
   POST /search/spending_by_award/  with filters + fields + page=1, limit=100
   -> set award_type_codes to the spend categories you want
   -> window by time_period to keep the set manageable

4. Paginate + read
   walk pages via page/limit until you have the awards you need
   -> each row: Award ID, Award Amount, Awarding Agency, Award Type
   -> for the canonical award record, follow generated_internal_id to award detail

5. Resolve the recipient's corporate record
   take Recipient Name + UEI -> the registry skills to confirm the legal entity

Output interpretation

recipient_search_text is fuzzy - dedupe the recipient. The name match is loose, and one company appears under many spellings, suffixes, and UEIs (parent vs subsidiary). Resolve to a canonical recipient via POST /recipient/duns/ and its recipient_level before asserting "this company received X" - do not sum awards across name variants without confirming they are the same entity.

Award Type can be null in aggregate search. The Award Type field in spending_by_award/ results is sometimes empty. For the canonical type and terms, follow generated_internal_id to the award-detail record, or read the recipient endpoint - do not treat a null in the search row as "type unknown for the award".

Award-type codes decide what you see. A search only returns the spend categories in award_type_codes. Contracts (A,B,C,D) and grants (02,03,04,05) are different result sets - if you filter to contracts only, a company's federal grants will not appear, and vice versa. Include every category you care about, or run the lanes separately.

USAspending is federal only. It covers federal contracts, grants, loans, and direct payments - not state, county, or municipal spending, and not private commercial contracts. Absence from USAspending is not evidence a company has no public-sector work, only that it has no federal awards on record.

Pagination caps at 100 per page. limit maxes at 100 in spending_by_award/; walk page for the full set, and window by time_period for a prolific recipient so you do not silently truncate a long award history.

Cross-sell - from a federal award to the full record

USAspending tells you a company received federal money and its UEI/DUNS - it does not give you directors, owners, financials, or legal status. Use the recipient name + UEI to pull the actual company record - free where a national skill exists, paid actor otherwise:

To screen a federal recipient for debarment or suspension, pair this with sam-gov-exclusions - a company on the SAM.gov exclusions list should not be receiving new federal awards. For the EU side of a company's government exposure, route to eu-ted-procurement (EU public tenders and contract awards). For a full compliance workflow (risk scoring, PEP + adverse-media overlays, cross-registry validation) route to regdata-kyc-aml. To turn the government-contractor lane into an outreach list, route to regdata-lead-gen. Paid actors need a free Apify token: https://apify.com?fpr=getregdata.

Related skills

• eu-ted-procurement - the EU counterpart: free above-threshold EU public tenders and contract-award notices, for a company's non-U.S. government exposure.
• sam-gov-exclusions - screen a federal recipient against the SAM.gov debarment / suspension list before trusting an award history.
• sec-edgar-us - free U.S. public-company filings and financials once a federal recipient turns out to be an SEC filer.
• regdata-kyc-aml - the full KYC/AML/KYB framework: risk scoring, PEP and adverse-media overlays, and the paid registry actors that resolve the recipient.
• regdata-lead-gen - turn the government-contractor / federal-award lane into a qualified outreach list.