U.S. Federal Spending

About

On May 2014, President Obama signed the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act) (P.L. 113-101) into law. As a result, U.S. federal agencies have started to report standardized data about their spending to the U.S. Department of the Treasury. This standardized data is surfaced via a beta API and a beta version of USAspending.gov

My day job involves working on the DATA Act, but everything in this repo has been done in my personal capacity (i.e., unrelated to official government work). I’m a taxpayer eager to dive into the new data–especially the account-level data, which exposes entire areas of spending never before available in a convenient, unified format.

Everything here is obtainable via publicly-available resources.

Writing

• Connecting a grant or contract to its accounting/appropriation fund information

Data

If you want to view the projects’ data without running the scripts that create it:

• FY 2017 obligations and outlays by account, program activity, and object class (as of the end of Q2)
• FY 2017 account balances (as of the end of Q2)

Setup Instructions (WIP)

If you want to set up your own Python environment to run any of the scripts in this repo, follow the instructions below.

1. Install the miniconda Python package manager

2. From a terminal, clone this project repository to your local machine: git clone git@github.com:bsweger/fedspending-scripts.git

3. If you don’t have a GitHub account and want to get a read-only version of the code, use this command instead: git clone git://github.com/bsweger/fedspending-scripts.git

4. Change to the project directory:

    cd fedspending-scripts
   

5. Install Python and dependencies into a conda virtual environment called fedspending-scripts.

    conda env create