Funding sources and accounting bases

Reviewed 28 October 2026. The award source data are as of 11 October 2026.

Federal research funding in this analysis is reported separately for each source and agency. The three sources measure different things, so their dollar amounts are not added together. Earlier combined totals appear only in the historical arithmetic reconciliation file. They do not measure comparable funding volume, agency market shares or annual expenditure.

Three different measures

The NSF API fields distinguish estimated totals from obligated funds. RePORTER's data dictionary distinguishes unique application records from project lineages and fiscal years. USAspending's field mapping maps Award Amount to total obligations.

Selected application context

Each line below covers one source, one agency and one accounting basis. Because the lines use different bases, they cannot be added together. Values are nominal US dollars.

The category labels are historical accounting categories. They are not complete estimates for each ARA area.

Identity, missing values and provenance

Each of the 2,635 ledger rows matched exactly one original source record. Exact source identifiers are used to remove duplicates. In RePORTER, a repeated core project and year is not automatically a duplicate, because distinct application IDs and full project numbers can represent separate supplements or support years.

For 148 source records the award amount is unavailable. These are reported as unavailable, not as zero. A cell where every amount is missing has no dollar total.

A cross-source check compared normalized award identifiers and exact normalized pairs of title and organization. It found no groups of possibly overlapping records in this selection. This check is limited in scope and does not rule out every possible relationship between sources or entities. Records are not matched by investigator name.

The administering agency was corrected for 21 RePORTER rows, where an earlier classifier had assigned CDC component codes to NIH. The source amounts and the historical category assignments for those rows are unchanged. Official PHS component guidance distinguishes NIH, CDC and other components. Here, agency means the administering agency for RePORTER and the award-making agency for USAspending. It does not allocate co-funding among agencies.

The historical categories are mutually exclusive and were assigned from award titles and a classifier. They include one corrected allocation, for award NSF2236302. The other category assignments have not been independently validated, and they do not use the field definitions applied to publications. Negative obligation values, recorded zeros and missing values keep their distinct meanings. A recipient's location does not show where all of the work took place or that it produced a local benefit.

The public financial-record table lists public award and application IDs, amounts and status, the exact source rows selected, the category assigned and file hashes. It contains no investigator names, email addresses or individual researcher profiles. Because the awards are public, counts of awards can be reconstructed from the table, and the way small counts are displayed is not intended as anonymization.

This analysis collected no new awards and does not reconstruct spending within each period. It does not infer any commercialization result or partner commitment.

Data files

• Source panels
• Source financial records
• Provenance
• Chart data
• Definitions
• Identity audit
• Agency-label corrections
• Retained allocation overlay
• Historical arithmetic reconciliation