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USAspending Playbooks is an interactive digital companion that helps you navigate and understand federal spending data from USAspending.gov. We transform complex government spending information into clear, step-by-step guides called "playbooks." Each playbook walks you through a specific topic — from understanding federal contracts and grants to exploring agency budgets, tracking disaster relief spending, and accessing the USAspending.gov API. Along the way, you can annotate steps with notes, track your progress, earn badges, and level up your data literacy skills.
This platform is built for journalists investigating government spending, researchers and analysts working with federal data, small businesses pursuing government contracts, grant writers seeking funding opportunities, civic technologists building transparency tools, and any citizen who wants to understand where their tax dollars go. Whether you're a beginner just learning what a NAICS code is or a seasoned investigator tracking multi-year contract awards, the playbooks scale from foundational concepts to advanced API queries. The gamified progress system, shared team notes, and watchlist alerts make it equally useful for individual learners and collaborative teams.
USAspending Playbooks is built by a small team of civic-tech enthusiasts and data educators who believe government spending data should be accessible to everyone. We are not affiliated with the U.S. government or USAspending.gov — we are an independent educational companion that curates, organizes, and explains publicly available federal spending data. Our playbooks are regularly updated to reflect changes in USAspending.gov's data model, API endpoints, and reporting standards. We built this on the Base44 platform to keep the experience fast, reliable, and available on any device.