usefulweb.site Public Spending Explorer

Public technical data explorers

Public Spending Explorer

Search government contracts and grants: who pays whom, totals per agency and vendor.

Full-text keyword (award description / notice text).

Optional. USAspending: recipient_search_text; TED: winner-name contains.

Default: 365 days before today.

Default: today.

Response of USAspending POST /api/v2/search/spending_by_award/ or TED POST /v3/notices/search.

Try an example: Pasted USAspending response: largest "wildfire" grants FY2026

How it works

Searches US federal awards on USAspending.gov (contracts, IDVs, grants, other assistance) or EU contract award notices on TED, then totals the results per agency/buyer and per recipient and draws the agency → recipient relationship graph. Paste a saved API response to analyse it offline.

  • USAspending: POST https://api.usaspending.gov/api/v2/search/spending_by_award/ with filters {keywords, recipient_search_text, award_type_codes (one group), time_period}, sorted by "Award Amount" descending. "Award Amount" is the award's total obligated value, not only the money obligated inside the period.
  • For live USAspending searches the tool also calls spending_by_category/awarding_agency and /recipient (obligations of all matching transactions inside the period) and spending_by_award_count (counts per award group), so the totals are not limited to the listed page.
  • TED: POST https://api.ted.europa.eu/v3/notices/search (anonymous, no key) with an expert query restricted to contract award notices (can-standard, can-social, can-desg, can-tran) and the publication-date range. Multilingual names prefer English. Notice values are not split between several winners and are summed per currency — currencies are never converted.
  • Per-buyer and per-recipient totals sum only the awards listed (top N by amount for USAspending, newest N for TED). The graph links each buyer/agency to its recipients (edge = summed listed value), keeping the largest relationships up to 60 nodes.

Award data is reported by agencies and may be revised; amounts are nominal and unconverted.

Sources

For scripts and AI agents

  • JSON API: POST https://publicspendingexplorer.usefulweb.site/api/v1/calculate (same calculation as this page)
  • Interface description: OpenAPI 3.1 · AI guide: llms.txt
  • MCP server (Streamable HTTP): https://publicspendingexplorer.usefulweb.site/mcp · tool name public_spending_explorer
Example request
curl -s -X POST https://publicspendingexplorer.usefulweb.site/api/v1/calculate \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{…see OpenAPI examples…}'

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