USAspending Scraper: Federal Contract & Grant Award Alerts

Money Trail: Federal Contract & Grant Award Alerts (USAspending.gov)

Money Trail follows federal money as it moves. It pulls contracts, contract vehicles (IDVs), grants, loans and direct payments from the official USAspending.gov API and, unlike a plain scraper, it can alert you only when something new happens: a new award, an award whose value went up or down, or a modification.

Built for government-contracting BD and capture teams, competitors tracking rivals' wins, grant writers and nonprofits, investors watching federal revenue, journalists and watchdogs, economic-development offices.

• Filter by keyword, awarding agency, recipient (name or UEI), NAICS, place of performance state, minimum amount and look-back window.
• Change mode (changesSinceLastRun): schedule daily and get only new / changed awards with changeType and amountChange.
• Recipient add-on (off by default): parent company, UEI, business types (small business, etc.), HQ city/state, last-12-month federal totals.
• Campaign money add-on (off by default): candidate PACs whose names match the recipient's name in official FEC records (name matches, not verified relationships), with latest-cycle receipts, disbursements and contributions to federal candidates.
• One flat row per award with agency, sub-agency, dates, NAICS/PSC or assistance listing, place of performance and the official award link.

No login, no API key, no proxies: one documented public government API, called politely with an identifying User-Agent.

Why this one

	Money Trail	Typical USAspending scraper
Change alerts	New awards, value changes, modifications, per watchlist	Full dump every run
Award types	Contracts, IDVs, grants, loans, direct payments, other	Often contracts only
Who's behind the recipient	Parent company + business types add-on	Rarely
Catches modifications	Yes (last-modified window by default)	Usually start-date only
Bad input	Clear message, no charge	Fails or bills an empty run

Pricing (pay per event)

Event	Price	When
Award row	$0.002 ($2 per 1,000)	Each award returned
Award alert	$0.004	Change mode only (after the first baseline run), for a new or changed award; replaces the row charge
Recipient profile add-on	+$0.002 per row	Only if addRecipientProfile is on
Campaign money add-on	+$0.002 per row	Only if addCampaignMoney is on and at least one matching FEC committee is found
Actor start	$0.00005	Apify's standard start event

How that compares: USAspending and SAM.gov Actors on the Store run about $2–$5 per 1,000 rows. Our base row is at the low end; alerts cost a little more because they do the diffing for you, and unchanged awards in change mode cost nothing. Set Max charge per run to cap spend.

Billing examples (change mode, 100 matching awards): baseline run = 100 award rows = $0.20; next run with no new or changed awards = start event only; a run with 5 new or changed awards = 5 alerts = $0.02 (add-ons extra per row only when on).

Input examples

Big cybersecurity contracts in the last 30 days, with parent companies:

{ "keywords": ["cybersecurity"], "awardTypes": ["contracts"], "minAmount": 1000000, "addRecipientProfile": true, "maxItems": 100 }

Daily competitor watch (schedule this):

{ "recipients": ["Booz Allen Hamilton", "Leidos"], "awardTypes": ["contracts", "idvs"], "mode": "changesSinceLastRun", "stateKey": "competitors", "lookbackDays": 7 }

NSF and NIH grants performed in Texas:

{ "awardTypes": ["grants"], "agencies": ["National Science Foundation", "Department of Health and Human Services"], "states": ["TX"], "maxItems": 200 }

Output (one row)

rowType (award or award-alert), changeType (new-award, amount-increased, amount-decreased, modified), amountChange, previousAmount, awardId, awardKey, awardCategory, awardType, recipientName, recipientId, amount, totalOutlays, awardingAgency, awardingSubAgency, fundingAgency, startDate, endDate, lastModified, description, naics, psc, assistanceListing, placeOfPerformanceState, placeOfPerformanceZip, url, plus recipientProfile{} with the add-on.

Tips

• The first change-mode run for a watchlist is a baseline (normal rows). Alerts start on the next run. Change mode scans up to 5,000 awards per type in your window so history is complete.
• Results are sorted largest first. Agency names must match USAspending's top-tier names.
• USAspending data lags agency systems by days to weeks; amounts are federal obligations, not payments.

Campaign money add-on: how the FEC key works

The FEC API uses free api.data.gov keys, which are issued per user. Paste your own key into fecApiKey (a secret field: Apify stores it encrypted, and this Actor never logs or outputs it). Get one free at api.data.gov/signup. If you leave it empty, the Actor uses FEC's public DEMO_KEY, which is shared and limited to a few requests per hour, so lookups are capped at 10 per run by default. If FEC rate-limits a run, it finishes successfully: rows already enriched keep their data, the rest are returned without it and aren't charged for the add-on, and the SUMMARY explains what happened.

Matching is by name: we strip legal suffixes (Inc, LLC, Corp...) from the recipient name and keep PAC and super-PAC committees whose names contain it as whole words. Every match is labelled campaignMoney.matchStatus: "name-match-candidate" with relationshipVerified: false. A match means "a committee with a matching name exists", not proof that the recipient controls, funds or is connected to it. Check the connected organization on the linked FEC page.

Data source and legal notes

• USAspending.gov API v2 (U.S. Department of the Treasury): public, documented, no key; no robots restrictions on the API host. Requests are spaced about 0.6 s apart with backoff.
• FEC API (api.open.fec.gov), add-on only: official public campaign-finance records, called with your own key (or DEMO_KEY), about 1 request every 1.2 seconds, with an identifying User-Agent. Only committee-level totals are returned, never individual contributor names. (Federal law, 52 U.S.C. 30111(a)(4), bars using individual contributor information from FEC reports to solicit contributions or for commercial purposes.)
• Federal spending data is public domain. Individual recipients are aggregated/redacted by USAspending itself; this Actor adds no personal data. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the U.S. Treasury or any agency.

Disclaimer

Data is provided as is from USAspending.gov and can be incomplete, delayed or later corrected by agencies. It isn't legal, procurement, investment or financial advice, and it's not an official record for bids or protests. Confirm anything important on the linked official award page or SAM.gov.

Campaign-finance figures are public FEC records shown side by side with federal awards. They do not imply any connection, quid pro quo, influence or wrongdoing, and name matches can be wrong. Don't present them as evidence of misconduct.

Support

Found a problem or want a field added? Open an issue on this Actor's Issues tab. More Clearfeed Labs data feeds: clearfeedlabs.com.

Award totals vs. individual transactions

amount is the award's total to date (amountBasis: "award-total-to-date", the sum of all obligations and modifications USAspending has recorded; loans use face value). It is not a single new obligation. In change mode, amountChange is the difference between two snapshots of that total, which may combine several modifications. changeType: "amount-decreased" is flagged possibleDeobligationOrCorrection: true: a deobligation, correction or data revision, not necessarily a cut. Individual transaction (modification) rows aren't returned yet; open the award's USAspending page for the transaction history.

Competition & recompete details (free, on by default)

Each contract row also carries numberOfOffersReceived, singleOfferReceived, extentCompeted, solicitationProcedures, setAside, contractPricingType, currentEndDate, potentialEndDate, daysToPotentialEnd, recompeteWindow (within-12-months, within-24-months, later, ended), baseAndAllOptionsUsd, parentIdvPiid, recipientUei and subawardCount. They come from the USAspending award record's latest transaction. They cost nothing extra; turn off addCompetitionDetails for faster runs. recompeteWindow is a planning hint based on the potential end date, not a confirmed re-solicitation.

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