Documentation
How USA Outlays works
USA Outlays tracks public spending in two layers: the awards — who got paid, how much, for what — and the approvals that authorized them. Real public records. No synthetic data, ever.
The two layers
Awards
Contract and grant awards from public dollars: the vendor, the amount, and what it was for. This includes procurement line items, which are marked as such — a line item is not a standalone award.
Explore awards →Approvals
The funding decisions that authorized the money — legislature budget votes, county commissions, city councils, school boards, utilities, and special districts.
Explore approvals →Our honesty policy
Amounts shown are stated approval dollars from public records — budgets, bond ceilings, and awards overlap by nature and are never presented as clean spend totals. Missing amounts read not reported, never $0. Agenda-only items are marked as agenda-only, not confirmed spending. Obligations are not outlays. Every record links to its real public source.
Topics & classification
Records are classified by spending purpose, not just the agency involved, into a curated taxonomy: 14 government functions → 58 domains → 209 topics (e.g. Environment & Natural Resources › Conservation & Land Management › Land Acquisition & Easements). Classification is done by a rules engine over source codes (NIGP, UNSPSC, state commodity dictionaries) plus tuned keywords, and every assignment carries a confidence score and its provenance. Records the rules can't place stay free-form in a browsable area rather than being forced into a low-confidence topic.
Vendors
Vendor names are resolved into entities with their aliases merged — “Acme Inc” and “ACME INC.” show as one vendor — so totals follow the real organization, not the spelling. Fuzzy duplicates are merged in a later review pass.
Coverage
New states appear automatically as they're loaded — the ledger is nationwide by design. Coverage notes: some sources publish procurement line items rather than standalone awards (marked po_line); some records carry no stated amount (shown as not reported); classification coverage improves as the rules engine rolls across all states.
API access
Everything on this site is available as a JSON API: awards, approvals, bodies, vendors, topics, and full-text search. Basic keys get 100 requests/day; Enterprise gets 100,000/day. Read the API docs → See pricing →