Federal spending data, county by county.

What SpendByCounty Is

SpendByCounty is a data-journalism site. Our purpose is to take county-level federal spending statistics published by the U.S. Department of the Treasury through USASpending.gov and present them in a form a regular person can actually compare and act on. If you are researching government investment in your community, comparing county-level funding, or exploring federal contract and grant opportunities, this site is built for you.

Every page on the site is built from primary-source datasets: USASpending.gov federal obligations data (FY2024), with population denominators from the U.S. Census Bureau for accurate per-capita comparisons. Each statistic is attributed to its source, and the underlying methodology is published on the methodology page.

Who Runs SpendByCounty

Why I Built SpendByCounty

I started SpendByCounty after budgeting for a move and realizing how different household spending patterns — and the federal investment that shapes local economies — are from one county to another. USASpending.gov publishes extraordinary data on federal contracts and grants, but it is buried in spreadsheets and government reporting systems. I wanted a site where a regular person could see, in 30 seconds, how much federal money flows through their county, which agencies are the biggest spenders, and how their county compares per resident — with the sources right there on the page. No paywall, no gatekeeping, just public data presented honestly.

That same need shows up in every vertical we cover: property taxes, cost of living, crime, schools, health, environmental risk. The government already collects this data. Our job is to clean it, verify it, and make it comparable.

How We Decide What to Publish

Two documents govern this site's editorial decisions:

• Editorial Standards — our mission, source policy, AI-usage policy, corrections process, funding disclosure, and update cadence.
• Methodology — the exact data sources, composite-score formula, limitations, and update cadence behind every page.

Both documents carry a "Last reviewed" date and are regenerated when our methodology changes.

Our Relationship to the Data

SpendByCounty is independent. We are not affiliated with the U.S. Department of the Treasury, USASpending.gov, the General Services Administration, or any government agency. We use their public datasets under the licenses they publish — for federal works, that is public-domain release. Each county page credits the data source that drives it.

When we link out — for example, to SAM.gov for contract opportunities or to SBA.gov for small-business lending — we link to primary sources, not aggregators.

AI in Our Workflow

Per-county pages include a short narrative summary generated with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic) from the same statistics shown on the page. This is a tool for turning a row of numbers into a readable paragraph; it is not the source of any data on the site. The narrative prompt is constrained to forbid unsourced inference, financial advice, and claims beyond what the source data supports. The Data Editor reviews the prompt and spot-checks output before publication. When source data is refreshed, narratives are regenerated.

We disclose this clearly because honesty is the right policy — and because Google's policies treat undisclosed AI authorship as a separate problem from AI authorship itself. The fix for AI prose on a data site is not to hide it; the fix is to pair it with a named human editor, a clear methodology, and source-grounded constraints. That is what we do.

Part of the ByCounty Network

SpendByCounty is one site in the ByCounty Network — a family of independent data sites covering property taxes, cost of living, income, crime, schools, health, environmental risk, water quality, weather, and more. Visit CountyScore.com for the network's flagship hub, which combines every vertical's data into a single composite county report.

Contact

For data corrections, source attributions, partnership questions, or press inquiries, write to editorial@spendbycounty.com. See our editorial standards for the corrections process and timelines.