# Public Spending Explorer

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

Part of usefulweb.site (https://usefulweb.site/). Results are deterministic calculations from the inputs and the listed assumptions; the API returns exactly what the web page shows.

## Use it
- Human interface: https://publicspendingexplorer.usefulweb.site/ (interactive tool at https://publicspendingexplorer.usefulweb.site/tool)
- JSON API: POST https://publicspendingexplorer.usefulweb.site/api/v1/calculate with a JSON object of inputs (schema: https://publicspendingexplorer.usefulweb.site/api/v1/tool)
- OpenAPI: https://publicspendingexplorer.usefulweb.site/openapi.json
- MCP (Streamable HTTP): https://publicspendingexplorer.usefulweb.site/mcp - tool `public_spending_explorer`

## Inputs
- source (select): Data source
- keyword (text): Keyword - Full-text keyword (award description / notice text).
- recipient (text): Recipient / vendor name - Optional. USAspending: recipient_search_text; TED: winner-name contains.
- awardType (select): Award type (USAspending)
- startDate (date): From - Default: 365 days before today.
- endDate (date): To - Default: today.
- buyerCountry (text): Buyer country (TED, ISO 3166 alpha-3)
- limit (integer): Max results
- pastedJson (textarea): Pasted JSON response - Response of USAspending POST /api/v2/search/spending_by_award/ or TED POST /v3/notices/search.

## Method
- 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.

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