The Federal Assistance Award Data System (FAADS) is intended to provide transaction-level information about assistance payments made by the federal government. With the exception of procurement, this includes most kinds of direct government spending: everything from highway grants to nuclear waste disposal. Although USASpending.gov is the authoritative source for FAADS data, Subsidyscope offers subsets of the dataset on a sector-by-sector basis and unique tools to aid in its analysis (for details about how FAADS records are assigned to a sector, please see our Methodology section).
Although it is the best available source for non-procurement transactional spending data, FAADS has several limitations. Most notably, it is incomplete: some programs are not included in FAADS at all; others fail to completely account for their spending. For this reason we have included yearly Treasury outlay estimates on each program's overview page, which can be reached from any FAADS record. Users should check this page before assuming that the FAADS data associated with any program is complete. In cases where the Treasury numbers diverge from the sums calculated from FAADS, it is likely that the FAADS records for the program are incomplete or otherwise of poor quality. Additionally, users should be aware that the transition of responsibility for maintaining FAADS to USASpending.gov seems to have resulted in some discontinuities in data quality around 2007/2008. Please be sure to consider this possibility before drawing any conclusions about spending during this time period.