US Federal Spending & Contracts Search

Search US federal awards, contracts, and grants from USAspending by recipient, agency, or keyword. Get amounts, recipients, and agencies as clean structured data.

This Actor queries the USAspending.gov award search API and returns normalized federal award records, sorted by award amount.

Features

• Search by one or more keywords matched against award descriptions and recipient names.
• Filter to contracts, grants, or both.
• Narrow to a specific recipient (company, university, state agency, and so on).
• Results sorted by award amount, largest first.
• Run summary with total awards returned, total dollar amount, and the top recipient by combined award value.

Example input

Largest AI-related federal contracts:

{ "keywords": ["artificial intelligence"], "awardType": "contracts", "maxItems": 40 }

Grants to a specific university:

{ "keywords": ["climate research"], "awardType": "grants", "recipient": "University of Texas", "maxItems": 25 }

Input

Field	Type	Description
keywords	array of strings	Search terms matched against award descriptions and recipient names. Required.
awardType	string	contracts, grants, or all. Default contracts.
recipient	string	Only keep awards where the recipient name matches this text. Leave empty for any recipient.
maxItems	integer	How many awards to return, largest amount first. Default 40, max 1000.

Output

Each dataset item is one federal award:

{
  "awardId": "W911QX20C0023",
  "recipient": "ECS FEDERAL, LLC",
  "amount": 120575059.35,
  "awardingAgency": "Department of Defense",
  "awardingSubAgency": "Department of the Army",
  "awardType": "contract",
  "startDate": "2020-04-23",
  "endDate": "2027-03-11",
  "description": "RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT EFFORT TO DESIGN AND DEVELOP PROTOTYPES TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE/MACHINE LEARNING ALGORITHMS.",
  "url": "https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_W911QX20C0023_9700_-NONE-_-NONE-"
}

Run summary (OUTPUT)

The run's default key-value store record OUTPUT holds an aggregate for the whole result set:

{
  "query": { "keywords": ["artificial intelligence"], "awardType": "contracts", "recipient": null },
  "itemsReturned": 40,
  "requestedMaxItems": 40,
  "totalAmount": 1834221904.12,
  "topRecipient": { "name": "ECS FEDERAL, LLC", "totalAmount": 188453416.55 },
  "generatedFrom": "https://api.usaspending.gov/api/v2/search/spending_by_award/"
}

How it works

The Actor calls the public USAspending spending_by_award search API with your keywords, award type, recipient, and a wide time window covering all indexed awards. Contracts and grants use different award type codes that cannot be mixed in one request, so when awardType is all the Actor queries both groups and merges the results by amount. Pages are fetched until maxItems is reached or there are no more matches. No API key is required.

Use cases

• Find the largest federal contracts or grants in a given field or technology.
• Track how much money a specific company or institution receives from the government.
• Research an agency's spending on a topic before pitching a related product or service.
• Feed federal award data into lead generation or market research pipelines.

MIT licensed.