2025/08/06 by Aymane Omari, Nasser Alansari, Brian Libgober +1 · 1 voice
Business, Management and Accounting · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Corruption and Economic Development #Public Procurement and Policy #Taxation and Compliance Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41597-025-05714-1
openalex publication_date 2025/08/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
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.