Usaspending MCP server

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 1679+ 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?" → getfederalspending({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 govconcontractorprofile and lobbying_activity recipes.

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 — usaexpiringawards / usaincumbentprofile

"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"})

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

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

What will bite you

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.