USAspending.gov Database on AWS

USAspending.gov data is available for anyone to access via Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).

USAspending.gov is a government website launched in 2007 to provide access to the federal spending data mandated by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006. USAspending.gov includes data on all spending by the federal government, including contracts, grants, loans, employee salaries, and more. This data can be used by researchers, entrepreneurs, and anyone interested in analyzing how federal tax dollars are spent.

About USAspending.gov Data

The USAspending.gov database is available as a PostgreSQL snapshot on Amazon RDS, and is updated weekly. The snapshot provides bulk access to the entire USAspending.gov database that powers the USAspending.gov API.

For more information about this data, please visit the USAspending.gov API documentation. Their API repository on GitHub includes open source software that includes python models for the database structure in this RDS snapshot, as well as the source code for the API that makes use of this database.

How to access the USAspending.gov Amazon RDS snapshot

Deploying the USAspending.gov database using the AWS Management Console

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and select the “US East (N. Virginia)” region in the menu bar.
  2. Open the Amazon RDS console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/rds/.
  3. In the navigation pane, choose “Snapshots.”
  4. In the search filter, select “All Public Snapshots,” and search for 515495268755.
  5. Select the snapshot named “arn:aws:rds:us-east-1:515495268755:snapshot:usaspending-db”
  6. Select “Snapshot Actions” > “Restore Snapshot.”
  7. Fill out details such as instance size and whether it’s publicly accessible and select “Restore DB Instance.”
  8. You will see that a DB instance of the snapshot is being created in your own account.
  9. After a few minutes, you will see that the status has changed to “available,” and you will be able to see the endpoint for your database along with other information about the DB instance.

Deploying the USAspending.gov database using the AWS CLI

You can use the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) to deploy the USAspending.gov database. The following command will copy the snapshot to a new Amazon RDS DB instance called “my-test-db-cli” in your AWS account:

aws rds restore-db-instance-from-db-snapshot --db-instance-identifier my-test-db-cli --db-snapshot-identifier arn:aws:rds:us-east-1:515495268755:snapshot:usaspending-db --region us-east-1

Once the DB instance is launched, the CLI will display information about the instance, including Endpoint.Address, which you can use to connect to the database.

Connecting to the DB instance

After following the AWS Management Console or AWS CLI instructions above, you will have access to the full USAspending.gov database within this Amazon RDS DB instance, and you can connect to it using any PostgreSQL client using the following credentials:

username: root
password: password
database: data_store_api

If you use psql, you could access the database using this command:

psql -h my-endpoint.rds.amazonaws.com -U root -d data_store_api

It is recommended that you change the database password as soon as you access it.

If you cannot connect to the DB instance but think you should be able to, you may need to check your VPC Security Groups and make sure inbound and outbound traffic on the port (usually 5432) is allowed from where you are connecting.

Please raise an issue on the USAspending.gov Website GitHub repository if you have any questions or concerns about this dataset.