Inside SAM.gov: An Open Data Demo for Journalists

SAM.gov — the federal government’s System for Award Management — is one of the most underused databases in public-interest journalism. It tracks hundreds of billions of dollars in federal contracts and grants, the companies and organizations that receive them, and entities barred or suspended from doing business with the government. If you cover federal spending, government contractors, nonprofits, or public accountability, this data is for you.

This session is a hands-on demo, not a panel discussion. We’ll walk through what’s in SAM.gov’s open data, how to access and navigate it, and how to start asking it real questions. Then we’ll open it up: Bring your story ideas, and we’ll work through what the data can and can’t tell you.

Attendees will come away knowing:

• What data SAM.gov makes publicly available and how it’s structured.
• How to download and work with the bulk data versus the API.
• What federal contracts, grants, exclusions and entity registration data look like.
• Common pitfalls journalists run into and how to avoid them.
• How to match SAM.gov data against other federal datasets to build richer investigations.

David Zvenyach will lead the demo. He’s a software developer, lawyer and product strategist who has held executive-level roles in three presidential administrations, including as Director of the Government Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services and Executive Director of 18F. He is also the author of GovContrActually, a newsletter on procurement policy, and has spent much of his career making government data more open and usable. is a founder and principal at TandemGov and CEO of MakeGov, where he builds software and data products focused on federal procurement and grants.

Clark Merrefield, senior editor at The Journalist’s Resource, will moderate.