USAspending.gov is missing 38% of federal subcontract reports filed since June 2025

Americans deserve to know where their tax dollars are being spent. The government agrees and has made public tools that allow users to see where and how money was spent. But, since June 2025, over $70 billion of taxpayer funding has had little transparency into how it was spent. We found this issue while building our own tools to view the data, so we have decided to publish them here for free. So how did this even happen?

Prime contractors, large companies who hold a direct contract with the government, often pass part of their work to subcontractors. Because federal funds pay for that work, the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA) of 2006 created USAspending.gov, a publicly available, searchable website that lists funding recipients. It is operated by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service within the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Federal Acquisition Regulation FAR 52.204-10 requires a prime contractor to report each first-tier subcontract of $40,000 or more. The prime contractor’s report must include who received the subcontract, its value, where the work is done and its purpose. Prime contractors file these reports in SAM.gov, which the General Services Administration (GSA) operates, and which replaced FSRS.gov in March 2025. The Fiscal Service then publishes each report on USAspending.gov next to its prime award, so that a reader can follow federal money one level below the prime.

But since June 2025, the Fiscal Service has published fewer reports on USAspending.gov than primes filed, as the figure above shows. In total, about 38% of reports filed from June 2025 through August 2026 are missing.

We noticed this trend when we realized one of our own reports was missing: a $320,000 subcontract that Procura’s parent company, Astradian Technologies, maintains on an Air Force Research Laboratory program. SAM.gov lists it. USAspending.gov does not, and neither do the third-party tools that rely on its data. To verify whether this was a single error, we ran a secondary search across all other subcontract reports.

Procura reads SAM.gov’s subaward reports every day—including deletions—and keys each report by its SAM.gov report ID. The Fiscal Service publishes USAspending.gov’s full database once a month as an archive, and each subaward row features the same ID. We took every live contract subaward report filed in SAM.gov from June 2025 through August 2026 and searched its ID in the latest archive, dated October 6, 2026, as shown in the figure above. Since both use the same key, each report either appears in the archive or it doesn’t.

Of 214,482 reports, 81,924 are not in the archive: 80,851 never appeared on USAspending.gov, and 1,073 appeared in an earlier archive and are missing from the most recent archive. Together they cover nearly 74,000 subcontracts; one subcontract can have several reports because a prime files a new report each time it changes the subcontract. Late filing does not explain the gap: 65.7% of the missing reports were filed by the FAR 52.204-10 deadline (the end of the month after the subcontract is issued).

The Treasury’s About the Data guide, last updated October 6, 2026, illustrates the pipeline: for example, a subaward report filed in SAM.gov on October 31 is available to USAspending.gov on November 1 and published to the site on November 2. Because this guide also says USAspending.gov relies on internal validations from source systems such as SAM.gov rather than running its own, a report that SAM.gov has passed should face no additional barriers to publishing on USAspending.gov.

The Treasury has not released a statement on this issue; it may not be aware of it. It remains unclear how or why USAspending.gov is missing the subcontract reports.

We researched the Air Force’s July 2025 award to Raytheon for Lots 39 and 40 of AMRAAM, its medium-range air-to-air missile, worth $3.4 billion. By the end of August 2026, Raytheon had filed 330 subcontract reports on its prime contract in SAM.gov, worth $945 million and naming 133 subcontractors. Raytheon did what the rule requires—the reports are in SAM.gov. The Fiscal Service has published only four of these reports in USAspending.gov.

Those four rule out the simplest explanations. USAspending.gov lists the prime award, so the reports aren’t delayed by it. The 90-day delay the Treasury applies to Defense procurement data concerns the prime award record, not subcontract reports. The pipeline from SAM.gov to USAspending.gov apparently works for this contract, since four subcontracts made it through to USAspending.gov.

One missing report is a $147 million subcontract to BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems, filed on November 29, 2025. It has never appeared on USAspending.gov. The prime contract does appear on USAspending.gov as of October 19, but its subawards include only four reports worth $1.33 million, none to BAE Systems.

Raytheon’s contract is one of many missing reports. We tallied up the total value of missing contracts partly because the shortfall changes from month to month; therefore, no fixed factor can correct a total calculated using data from USAspending.gov. Data is incomplete for any given prime’s subcontractors, so auditors, congressional staffers or reporters relying on USAspending.gov see an incomplete dataset.

For some programs, the gap covers almost every report. The three Defense contracts in the figure above—for C-17 sustainment, the FFG(X) frigate and AMRAAM—had 2,430 subcontract reports filed in the window. Only 119 of these reports are on USAspending.gov. For each, the public record of money spent stops at the prime contractor.

In terms of contract dollars, the data gap falls almost entirely under Department of Defense contracts. These subcontracts account for $66 billion of the missing dollars. About 2% of reports under civilian agencies are missing, totaling $4.3 billion. The largest civilian agency’s missing reports total $1.7 billion, under the Agency for International Development (USAID). The majority of this value resides in reports that Chemonics filed under one contract vehicle. The second-largest contract is with NASA, valued at $560 million.

Subcontractor data is missing for subcontractors registered in every U.S. state. Virginia leads with about $13 billion, then California with $6.6 billion. Together, these two states account for more than a quarter of the missing dollars. Kansas is third, with $4.7 billion across 736 subcontracts.

Procura is committed to publishing this data for free. FFATA made subcontract reports public, and a public record is only useful when it’s complete. All of this data is viewable on Procura’s explorer pages.

We compiled every missing subcontract into one CSV file with its SAM.gov report ID, prime contract, subcontractor, state and amount. A subcontract is in the file when its latest report is missing, so the file counts slightly fewer missing reports than the headline (see the data and methods sections below for the exact split). The data table for each figure is exportable as an Excel or CSV file. No sign-up is necessary. All of this data is licensed under CC BY 4.0; anyone may view it, export it, republish it and build on it, as long as Procura is credited.

Use each row’s prime award key in the data set to verify whether each subcontract is listed on USAspending.gov. Procura’s contract and company pages list the subcontract reports filed in SAM.gov, so a subcontractor can find its own and compare.