Data & Mapping FAQs

The Emergency Rental Assistance program provided two rounds of funding (ERA1 and ERA2) to states, U.S. territories, and local and Tribal governments to help eligible households pay rent or utility bills. The Consolidated Appropriations Act included $25 billion for ERA1 in December 2020.  The American Rescue Plan Act provided a total of $21 billion for ERA2 in March 2021. 

How was the program administered? 

• State, local, Tribal, and Territorial governments were responsible for distributing the funding to eligible households. 
• These governments had to obligate at least 65% of the ERA1 funds before September 30, 2021.  If they did not, the Department of the Treasury (Treasury) could take back the unspent portion and redistribute the funds to state and local governments that had spent more than 65% of their initial funds. 
• The governments could voluntarily return excess funds to Treasury that they did not need. 

How were funds returned to Treasury redistributed? 

1. If Treasury took back funding, it could then redistribute the funds to other eligible local governments within the same state or locality.  If Treasury found no eligible local governments within the state or locality, it could redistribute to governments outside the state that asked for additional funding.   For example: The state of Alabama returned $42 million to Treasury. The city of Birmingham and Tuscaloosa County in Alabama had requested additional funds, so Treasury redistributed $6.6 million to Birmingham and $6.3 million to Tuscaloosa. 
2. If a government voluntarily returned funding to Treasury, that government had the option of identifying other governments in the state to receive the funding. 
3. Funds returned to Treasury could also go into a “general” pool of funds that Treasury could then transfer to other eligible state or local governments. 

The $350 billion Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund (SLFRF) was established in March 2021 as part of the American Rescue Plan Act. The U.S. Department of the Treasury (Treasury) made funding available to states, local governments, U.S. Territories, and Tribal governments to pay for resources to fight the pandemic, support families and businesses, maintain public services, and invest in long-term growth. Some states and the territories received all their funding in one payment. Other states and local governments received two payments: 50% beginning in May 2021 and the balance approximately one year later.  Tribal governments also received two payments: one in May 2021 and the other in June 2021. 

How recipients may use funds: 

• Replace lost revenues experienced by the recipient due to the pandemic. Recipients may use SLFRF funds to pay for salaries and fringe benefits for local government employees; park improvement projects; the purchase of equipment and supplies for local government operations; renovation of public buildings and facilities.
• Support public health efforts
• Help households, small businesses, impacted industries, non-profits, and the public sector recover economically
• Provide premium pay for essential workers
• Invest in water, sewer, and broadband infrastructure

Who reports, when

• States, territories, cities and counties with populations over 250,000 that received funds by July 15, 2021 were required to submit a Recovery Plan to Treasury by August 31, 2021. Recipients that received funds after July 15, 2021, are required to submit initial Recovery Plans 60 days after receiving their awards.  In addition, recipients had to post their Recovery Plans on publicly available websites. 
• Between March 31, 2021, and December 31, 2021, states, U.S. territories, cities, and counties with populations of more than 250,000; cities and counties with populations below 250,000 that received more than $10 million in SFLRF funds; and Tribal governments receiving more than $30 million reported to Treasury. (Treasury does not publish Tribal information). These recipients will continue to report quarterly. 
• Cities and counties with populations below 250,000 that have received less than $10 million will have reported by April 30, 2022. These recipients will report annually thereafter. 

Definitions 
DUNS —The Data Universal Numbering System was used  by the federal government as the official unique identifier for every organization that received funding from the government.  The DUNS numbers were created and assigned by Dun & Bradstreet at no cost to the organization.  As of April, 2022, the DUNS has been replaced by the Unique Entity ID (UEI) which is assigned to each organization by the federal government.  

 Spending Group – Recipients select one of seven spending groups to describe each project.   

• Public Health
• Negative Economic Impacts Governments could use SLFRF money to help communities, households, small businesses, nonprofits, and the public sector recover from impacts to the economy due to the pandemic.
• Administrative and Other
• Premium Pay
• Revenue Replacement Governments could use SLFRF money to provide services they would have paid for with funds lost due to the pandemic.  
• Adopted Budget and Total Obligation 
• Services to Disproportionately Impacted Communities
• Infrastructure 

Spending Categories – Based on the spending group for the project, recipients then select from 83 spending categories to provide more details about the project. For example, spending categories for Public Health projects include COVID-19 vaccination and medical expenses; for Premium Pay, the category is public sector employees; and Infrastructure includes broadband, and clean water. 

Adopted Budget – This is the budget for each project based on information existing in the recipient’s financial systems and the established budget process.

Amount received -- The total amount received by the prime recipient less funding that the prime recipient has returned to the U.S. Department of the Treasury. 

NOTE: We display the data as we receive it. We do not change, alter, or add to it. 

Find more information on SLFRF at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

The Provider Relief Fund was established by the CARES Act in March, 2020. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) received $186.5 billion to support hospitals and other healthcare providers impacted by COVID-19. Additional funding was provided by the Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act, the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act, and the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.

The payments cover healthcare-related expenses or lost revenues and ensure that Americans who don’t have health insurance can be treated for COVID-19. 

Who received payments?

In addition to hospitals and primary-care doctors, the following, among others, may have qualified for payments: 

• Nursing homes and assisted living facilities
• Dentists
• Psychiatrists
• Eye/vision services
• Home and community-based support
• Dialysis centers
• Chiropractors
• Speech and language pathologists

Recipients of the payments had to: 

• Confirm that they received a payment and the specific payment amount
• Agreed to the Terms and Conditions of the payment

Are there limitations to the data? 

• The charts and graphs display payments to multiple providers with the same name because the data does not include a specific identifier for each provider.  
• States were incorrectly reported for some cities.  For example, Beverly Hills appears as a city for a provider in American Samoa.  

NOTE: We display the data as it has been reported by the providers to HHS. We do not change, alter, or add to it. 

• The All Pandemic Awards dashboard displays one entity in Minnesota that distributes the payments to recipients around the country on behalf of HHS.

More information on the Provider Relief Fund is available at HHS. 

The Coronavirus Relief Fund was established in March 2020 as part of the CARES Act and made available $150 billion to states, eligible local governments, Tribal governments, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Territories. 

Who has reported -- as of June 30, 2022?  

• 964 prime recipients received Coronavirus Relief funds; however, only the 864 primes who received more than $150,000 under the CARES Act are required to report.
• 817 prime recipients have reported on their cumulative sub-recipient data for March, 1 2020 through June 30, 2022. 
• The prime recipients awarded $148.9B to 88,864 sub-recipients. 

When do the recipients report? 

• The first reporting period covered sub-recipient data for March 1, 2020 to June 30, 2020.
• The second reporting period covered July 1, 2020 to September 30, 2020.
• Currently the prime recipients are reporting on a quarterly basis (December 31, 2020, March 31, 2021, June, 30, 2021, September 30, 2021, December 31, 2021, March, 2022, June, 2022, September, 2022). 
• Initially, recipients had until December 31, 2021 to fully incur expenditures. However, that deadline was extended to September 30, 2022 so the Native Alaskan Corporations which received funding after the first distribution would have time to report. The extension means that reporting will continue quarterly through 2022. 

What is the reporting process?

• The prime recipients submit reports to the Treasury Office of Inspector General (OIG) through a reporting portal.
• The prime recipients’ authorizing officials certify the reports.
• The OIG reviews the reports for basic data entry protocols and either approves or rejects them. Rejected reports are returned to the prime recipients for corrections. 
• The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee receives the approved reports from the reporting portal to display on pandemicoversight.gov.

NOTE: We display the data as we receive it. We do not change, alter, or add to it. 

What data is visualized?

• Our data visualizations display prime recipient data for Tribal governments, however, funding distributed to Tribal sub-recipients is not yet publicly available.
• The prime recipient data on the map is based on the prime recipient’s location. For example, CRF funds to the state of New Mexico is mapped to the state capital. The sub-recipient data is based on the sub-recipient’s place of performance or the address for the sub-recipient’s headquarters. The primary place of performance for contract awards is the location where products or goods are manufactured or purchased. For example, California might award a contract for personal protective equipment (PPE) to a company in Nashville, Tennessee. The primary place of performance is Nashville because that is where the PPE was purchased.  For grants, the primary place of performance is where most of the work is performed.

What is the difference between the Prime Recipient Amount and Total Funds Received? 

• The Prime Recipient Amount is the funding originally received by the prime recipient.
• If a prime recipient did not use all the original funding, the excess was returned to the Treasury. The Total Funds Received is the Prime Recipient Amount minus what was returned to the Treasury. For example, the Prime Recipient Amount for the Commonwealth of Virginia is $3,109,502,836. The Total Funds Received is $3,109,262,011 indicating that Virginia returned $240,825 to the Treasury. 

The data on the Funding Overview graphic includes:

• Updates to Treasury appropriation warrants and indefinite appropriations as of January 2021. Indefinite appropriations are appropriations of unspecified amounts of money. An indefinite appropriation may appropriate all or part of the receipts from certain sources, the specific amount of which is determinable only at some future date, or it may appropriate “such sums as may be necessary” for a given purpose. As the appropriation warrant data changes periodically, the data in the graphic will be updated.

There are many reasons why modifications to an award may display negative or zero amounts.

• Negative Amounts:
  • The agency may reduce or rescind (de-obligate) a portion of the original award amount which is indicated by a negative number. For example, the original contract award was for $2M, but six months into the contract the agency changes the scope of work to less than the original $2M and de-obligates $500,000, resulting in a modification with -$500,000.
  • A contract may be completed but not all the original funding was used, resulting in a negative number when the agency closes out the contract. For example, the original contract award was for $2M but at the end of the contract only $1.5M was used; when the agency closes the contract a -$500,000 will be displayed in the final modification.

• Zero Amounts
  • Changes made to an award for administrative reasons are reported as $0. For example, a change in the recipient’s address or the project’s description are reported as $0 in the Action Obligation field.
  • When an award has been completed and all the funds expended, the close-out modification is $0.
  • Also, $0 will be reported when awards are subject to the availability of funds, meaning funding will happen later. 
  • Certain contract types will also show $0 when funding happens later through task orders.

Generally, contract documents are not available for public display due to the possible proprietary information contained in the documents. Interested parties can seek contract documents from the awarding agency through a Freedom of Information Act request.

All the modifications/transactions for an award may not be displayed because PandemicOversight.gov only displays awards and award modifications/transactions related to coronavirus funding and  identified with a Disaster Emergency Fund Code. For example, award modification/transaction 03 would be displayed if the funds are coronavirus related, whereas modifications 01 and 02 might not have been funded by coronavirus legislation and, therefore, will only be displayed on USAspending.gov.

All the data that drives the Funding Charts and Graphs can be exported to a .csv. We will be adding other downloads across the site in the future.

A data dictionary that includes all the data elements on PandemicOversight.gov is available on USAspending.gov.

Limitations on data displayed on Pandemicoversight.gov include:

Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) – The PPP data displayed on the Paycheck Protection Program Dashboard has the following limitations: 

• The Small Business Administration provided data on the jobs retained, however, 6.5% of borrowers did not provide jobs information.
• 76% of the borrowers did not provide their race or ethnicity; and 61% did not provide their gender. 
• In rare instances, the state indicator in the Borrower details popup on the Interactive Map is different from the location of the dot on the map. This discrepancy is due to a difference between the Borrower’s address as reported by the lender and the actual location determined by geocoding. For example, a bank might have reported a loan to a Borrower with an address in Kentucky but based on the zip code, the address was determined by geocoding to be in Kansas. The location of the dot indicating the location of the Borrower is in Kansas.

All Pandemic Awards – USAspending.gov data displayed on the All Pandemic Awards Dashboard has the following limitations: 

• Economic Injury Disaster Loans and Direct Payment (EIDL and EIDL Advance) – When reporting EIDL loans and direct payments, the Small Business Administration withheld certain borrower names, marking them as “Redacted due to PII.” 
• CARES Act Division A, Title IV – The Department of the Treasury was authorized to make loans, loan guarantees, and other investments as follows: 
  •  $454 billion for equity investments into emergency lending programs or facilities authorized by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021, signed into law on December 27, 2021, rescinded $429 billion of the $454.
  • $46 billion for loans to passenger and cargo air carriers and businesses critical to national security. Treasury reported the individual loans on Treasury.gov but did not report such loans at the transaction level to USASpending.gov because they were not financial assistance; therefore, the transactions do not appear on pandemicoversight.gov.  Treasury did not report obligations to USASpending.gov at the aggregate level as required by the DATA Act and it reported individual loans at Treasury.gov. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021, signed into law on December 27, 2021, rescinded Treasury’s authority to make these loans. 
• Economic Impact Payments -- The direct payments to individuals from the U.S. Department of the Treasury are advance payments of a new temporary tax credit that eligible taxpayers can claim on their income tax returns. These payments are aggregated when reported to USAspending.gov and can be identified in the USAspending.gov Custom Account Data download by Treasury Account Symbol 020-X-0905 and the US Coronavirus Rebate Program Activity category.
• Department of Health and Human Services Programs (HHS)
  • Claims Reimbursement to Health Care Providers and Facilities for Testing, Treatment, and Vaccine Administration of the Uninsured -- The USAspending.gov data (available on the All Pandemic Awards Dashboard)  reflects obligations to a single entity that is processing claims reimbursements on behalf of HHS. The full HRSA COVID-19 Uninsured Program Public Use File is updated weekly and represents the list of health care entities who have agreed to the Terms and Conditions and received claims reimbursement for COVID-19 testing of uninsured individuals and/or treatment for uninsured individuals with a COVID-19 diagnosis. The file includes claims reimbursement for COVID-19 vaccine administration fees. 
  • Rural Health Clinic Testing -- The USAspending.gov data (available on the All Pandemic Awards Dashboard) reflects obligations to a single entity that is processing payments on behalf of HHS. The full Rural Health Clinic (RHC) Testing Fund Public Use File is updated weekly and includes payments to RHCs for COVID-19 testing. Payments are made at the Tax Identification Number (TIN) organizational level. This dataset represents the list of providers who have attested to receiving a payment from the aforementioned allocation and agreed to the Terms and Conditions. Because not all providers (who received a payment unsolicited) have yet to attest to accepting that payment, the totals listed for this program in the Public Use File are less than those reflected on USAspending.gov.
  • State Reported Expenditure for Section 6004 and Section 6008 of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) -- Section 6008 of the FFCRA provides a temporary 6.2% increase to each qualifying state and territory’s Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) under section 1905(b) of the Social Security Act (the Act). Section 6004(a)(3)(D) of the FFCRA specifies that the FMAP is to be used 100% for expenditures for covered services provided to beneficiaries under the new optional eligibility group added at section 1902(a)(10)(A)(ii)(XXIII) of the Act. Additionally, a 100% match is available for administrative costs related to providing such services to such individuals under the state plan. The federal share of these expenditures are not funded through a separate Medicaid appropriation. Therefore, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is not able to separately report section 6004 and section 6008 amounts to USAspending.gov, and is, therefore, not available on pandemicoversight.gov. CMS, however, does have the actual section 6004 and section 6008 expenditures that states report quarterly to CMS on Form CMS-64, which is the accounting statement of record. CMS intends to post these expenditure reports on Medicaid.gov once the state-reported expenditures are finalized. 
• Department of Agriculture (USDA) Data -- USDA has identified a reporting issue with outlays that impacted the USAspending.gov data. The outlay data is properly reported in Files A and B, but was unreported for File C. USDA projects that the outlay data will be resolved before July Period 10 reporting begins. USDA is also investigating a DEFC mapping issue which impacts a small number of records. The department is working to get this resolved as soon as possible.
• Coronavirus Relief Fund -- Data on USAspending.gov only includes direct payments to states, localities, and Tribal organization and does not include sub-recipient information. To see this information, visit the Coronavirus Relief Dashboard. The Money Spent to Date column does not include data for Tribal sub-recipients. 
• Non-reporting agencies -- There are 14 independent, legislative branch, and judicial branch agencies who received coronavirus funding but who do not report under the DATA Act to USAspending.gov. Therefore, pandemicoversight.gov will not display this funding. The total amount these agencies received was $272,600,000.
   

The Disaster Emergency Fund Codes (DEFC) are the unique identifiers specific to the coronavirus response that designate the legislation that provided the funding for a particular award.

• DEFC "L"
  • Designated as emergency
  • Public Law 116-123, Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act
• DEFC "M"
  • Designated as emergency
  • Public Law 116-127, Families First Coronavirus Response Act
• DEFC "N"
  • Designated as emergency
  • Public Law 116-136, Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act)
• DEFC "O"
  • Not designated as emergency
  • Public Law 116-136, Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act)
  • Public Law 116-139, Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act
• DEFC "P"
  • Designated as emergency
  • Public Law 116-139, Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act

The PandemicOversight.gov posting schedule for data on contract, grant, and loan awards is:

If federal agencies submit data corrections to USAspending during the month, the data on PandemicOversight.gov will be updated accordingly. 

NOTE: The Department of Defense reports data on a 90 day delay in order to protect operations.

The authoritative source for the data on PandemicOversight.gov is USAspending.gov. The federal agencies that received funding from the CARES Act and three related pieces of legislation report financial data to USAspending.gov and PandemicOversight.gov imports that data through APIs.