Data

Purpose

Introduce some of the domain, and specific data elements stored in USAspending and/or pulled over from Broker.

Award Data and Account Data

Largely, data in USAspending can be bucketed as

1. "Award Data": activity around awarding of funds by the government, as either contract procurement or financial assistance. Tracked as transactions for the initial award or any modifications of that award.
2. "Account Data": a comprehensive look at account balances for Federal Accounts funding that an Agency has at their disposal, and the promises-to-pay or actual payouts from those accounts.
3. "Reference Data": a variety of slowly-change data from various authoritative sources that give some dimensionality to the above data sources (e.g. "program activities", "account name/ID", "zip code", etc.)

Award Data and Account Data both deal with Government spending, however they are at either ends of the Government fiscal process.

• Award Data is the "promise to pay". It is the part of government spending where agreements are made, as either a contract procurement or assistance (grant/loan/insurance). This promise or agreement cannot be made unless an Agency can guarantee they have the funding ("Budget Authority") to do so.
• Account Data tracks the "payout" from Federal Accounts to recipients. This is where money leaves the Federal Account and changes hands. It is an accounting of the balances and activity within accounts that fund contracts/assistance primarily around 3 measures (budget, obligation, outlay), and to which awards/programs/"things" that money was disbursed (i.e. the various "dimensions" of spending).

These different domains of Government spending have different focus areas, and therefore track different data elements in distinct systems. Where the data elements overlap, the granularities of each data source may be vastly different.

• The "Procurement" side, dealing with award data, is highly regulated to the point of tracking every changes to contract/assistance, and a great deal of metadata about the award transactions so analysis can be done on who the Government does business with
• The "Accounting" side is very focused on balancing the books and watching the flow of money

We attempt to link data from both sides using the concept of an award in USAspending during the C-to-D Linkage process, which is executed as data on either side is loaded/changed. This allows displays or queries of information about account data or award data to benefit from further information provided in its linked domain area.