Data Enhancement and Analysis of Federal Acquisition Databases

Abstract

The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (FFATA) required federal contract, grant, loan, and other financial assistance awards of more than $25,000 be displayed on a publicly accessible and searchable website to give the American public access to information on what the federal government spends every year and how it spends the money. Federal acquisition databases, such as those maintained by usaspending.gov and fpds.gov, serve this purpose. These databases contain contract information for all U.S. departments for the last 20 years. However, little has been done to dig into the data and extract the information that may provide valuable insights on potential ways to improve the efficiency of acquisition management. This paper takes a data science approach to assessing and enhancing the quality of the databases and to discovering patterns that can be potentially useful for acquisition research and practice.