Methodology & source manifest
Everything on the Federal Highway Administration monitor derives from one public source — the USAspending API. This page is the audit trail: what is read, from where, how it is scoped, and what it deliberately excludes.
Contract signal, not total budget
This is the signal tier: the live contract-award feed scoped to the Federal Highway Administration awarding sub-agency. It captures procurement obligations — not payroll, grants, or intragov transfers, and not total budget authority. The appropriation-level view lives on the Department of Transportation monitor.
How the sub-agency is scoped
Filtered to a single awarding sub-tier object — name “Federal Highway Administration” with toptier “Department of Transportation”. Verified against the live API: a single subtier object with toptier_name scopes to the sub-agency; a combined toptier+subtier array does not. If the strings do not resolve to a distinct award set, the ingest throws rather than shipping a silent all-zero monitor.
Source & validation ledger
Live obligations + contracts (USAspending)
extract not present at build time
The signal tier is the reconciliation floor — every bureau on the map, from public data, at ~10% fidelity. The appropriation-level spine (hand-keyed from the budget justification and self-validated to the dollar) is the deeper tier, added on pursuit.