Fund Tracking

The current administration has, in many cases, quietly reduced or terminated funding, often without public announcements. This lack of transparency makes it challenging to track the full scope and impact of these cuts. In the initial phase of this project, the team built a systematic approach to identifying federal grants and awards to Massachusetts that have been cancelled, rescinded, or otherwise modified since the start of the current administration in January 2025. Using a combination of USAspending data, background research, and exploratory analysis, the team developed and validated a custom classification framework capable of distinguishing between cancelled grants (where funds were never fully disbursed), rescinded grants (where funds were disbursed and later clawed back), partial rescissions, and administrative adjustments. To operationalize this work, the team built an automated ETL pipeline and delivered a Streamlit dashboard that provides a clear, searchable view of when, where, and how federal grant cuts occurred across Massachusetts. This semester, the focus will shift from initial detection to deepening coverage, improving comparability, and strengthening temporal analysis. The team will extend the existing dashboard to incorporate richer award-level data from the USAspending API, including visual indicators that flag newly discovered or previously unknown awards as they appear or change over time. Additional visualization layers will be developed to enable state-by-state and tract-level comparisons, allowing users to examine how federal grant cuts vary across political, social, and economic contexts. Finally, the project will introduce time-series visualizations that track the full lifecycle of awards, highlighting delays, revisions, or gaps in USAspending data updates and making the timing of funding changes more transparent.