fedtrace

FedTrace

For any federal grant, contract, or lease: what was the stated purpose, what does the payment and audit record show, and what would a reasonable auditor conclude?

A methodology, not a watchdog. The record applies equally to any administration, any year, any program.

Notebooks

# Notebook Run
01 Reconstruct the financial record for cancelled federal awards — ceiling, obligated, outlays across public data sources Open In Colab
02 Full-scale fetch — pull raw API responses for all 13,440 contracts and 15,887 grants into resumable JSONL checkpoints Open In Colab
03 Assemble the three-number record — join IDV child amounts, compute ceiling / obligated / outlays for every matched award Open In Colab
04 Grant outlays investigation — probe three USASpending API endpoints; all confirmed dead ends for cancelled assistance awards Open In Colab
05 Grant outlays via bulk download — stream-parse Assistance_PrimeTransactions files, filter to matched FAINs, assemble grant three-number record Open In Colab
06 Combined accountability record — unified per-award schema joining contracts and grants; ceiling / obligated / outlays across all 21,873 cancelled awards Open In Colab

Setup

Add a GITHUB_TOKEN_FEDTRACE secret in Colab (key icon → left sidebar) before running any notebook that publishes results. Fine-grained PAT, resource owner fedtrace, Contents: Read + Write.