Announcing USAspending.gov on an Amazon RDS Snapshot

The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act) aims to make government agency spending more transparent to citizens by making financial data easily accessible and by establishing common standards for the data all government agencies collect and share on the government website, USAspending.gov.

We are pleased to announce that the USAspending.gov database is now available for anyone to access via Amazon RDS. USAspending.gov data includes data on all spending by the federal government, including contracts, grants, loans, employee salaries, and more.

The data is available via a PostgreSQL snapshot, which provides bulk access to the entire USAspending.gov database, and is updated nightly. At this time, the database includes all USAspending.gov for the second quarter of fiscal year 2017, and data going back to the year 2000 will be added over the summer. You can learn more about the database and how to access it on the AWS Public Dataset landing page.

Now that this data is available as a public snapshot on Amazon RDS, anyone can get a copy of the USAspending.gov’s entire production database for their own use within minutes. Researchers and businesses who want to work with real data about US Government spending can quickly combine it with their own data or other data resources.

When data is made publicly available on AWS, anyone can analyze any volume of data without needing to download or store it themselves, enabling more innovation, more quickly. Users can use this data with the entire suite of AWS data analytics products and easily collaborate with other AWS users.

Learn more about how to launch your copy of the snapshot and how Amazon RDS can be used to share an entire relational database quickly and easily in the blog post here.