What USASpending is
USASpending.gov is the official open-data site for federal spending, built on the DATA Act. For contractors, its value is award history: who won what, from which agency, under which NAICS and PSC codes, for how much. The API lives at api.usaspending.gov and requires no authentication.
The endpoint that matters: spending_by_award
Most questions ("show me every 541512 contract the VA awarded last year", "what has our competitor won") are one POST:
curl -s -X POST "https://api.usaspending.gov/api/v2/search/spending_by_award/" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"filters": {
"time_period": [{"start_date": "2025-07-01", "end_date": "2026-07-01"}],
"award_type_codes": ["A", "B", "C", "D"],
"naics_codes": ["541512"],
"agencies": [{"type": "awarding", "tier": "toptier", "name": "Department of Veterans Affairs"}]
},
"fields": ["Award ID", "Recipient Name", "Award Amount", "Start Date", "Awarding Agency", "NAICS"],
"sort": "Award Amount",
"order": "desc",
"page": 1,
"limit": 100
}'award_type_codesA through D are contracts (definitive contracts, purchase orders, delivery orders, BPA calls); IDV codes cover the vehicles themselves.- Filters compose:
recipient_search_text,naics_codes,psc_codes,place_of_performance_locations,set_aside_type_codes, and keyword search all stack inside one request. - Award detail:
GET /api/v2/awards/{generated_unique_award_id}/returns the full record, including transactions and subawards.
What to watch out for
- The DoD lag. Defense contract actions publish roughly 90 days late. Recent-quarter defense analysis will undercount unless you account for it.
- Obligations, not outlays. Award amounts are obligations at action time; money actually spent shows up separately. Mixing the two produces confident, wrong charts.
- Recipient identity is messy. Companies appear under multiple names and UEIs (subsidiaries, mergers, DBA names). Rolling up a competitor accurately means resolving recipient profiles, not string-matching names.
- No opportunities. USASpending is history only. Open solicitations live in SAM.gov; pre-award intent lives in agency forecasts.
From award history to a BD advantage
Award data answers the questions that decide bids: who is the incumbent, what did the contract actually cost, when does it recompete, and which contracting office buys what we sell. That is a join across USASpending, FPDS, and SAM.gov, plus entity resolution, and it is precisely the join the CLEATUS API serves as market intelligence: incumbent lookups, agency spend, contracting-officer histories, and recompete forecasting, queryable by your app or your AI agent in one call.
