A comprehensive dataset of United States federal procurement from 1979 to 2023

Abstract

The United States government spends hundreds of billions of dollars annually obtaining goods and services from commercial bidders, a process known as government procurement. Without transparency, this process is susceptible to manipulation, corruption, and grift. However, the data required to assess the procurement process, including information detailing the amounts and awardees of government contracts, is difficult to obtain or study, though existing scholarship has made important contributions relying on limited samples of this data. We collect, clean, analyze, and make available the entire corpus of federal procurement contracts from 1979 to 2023, nearly 100 million contract actions over 45 years, and introduce an R package for accessing subsets of the data. Overall, these tools hold great promise for studying representation, corruption, and the connections between business and politics in the United States.