How to Look Up Federal Grants to Nonprofits (Without USAspending)

If you’ve ever tried to figure out whether a nonprofit receives federal funding — and how much — you’ve probably landed on USAspending.gov. It’s the official federal spending transparency site, and it has the data. But it wasn’t built for nonprofit research.

The search is clunky. You can’t filter to just nonprofits. And critically, there’s no way to link a federal award to a specific nonprofit’s EIN, which means you can’t connect the dots between a nonprofit’s IRS filings and their federal funding.

There’s a better source for this, and most people don’t know about it.

The Federal Audit Clearinghouse

The Federal Audit Clearinghouse (FAC) is a database maintained by the GSA (General Services Administration). Any organization that spends $750,000 or more in federal funds in a year is required to file a Single Audit. The results go into the FAC.

This is significant for nonprofit research because:

• Every record has an EIN. Unlike USAspending, the FAC uses Employer Identification Numbers as a primary identifier. That means you can match federal funding data directly to a nonprofit’s 990 filings.
• It covers serious money. The $750K threshold means you’re looking at organizations with meaningful federal funding, not one-off small grants.
• It breaks down funding by program. Each audit includes a list of federal programs (identified by CFDA number) and how much the organization spent under each one. So you don’t just know that a nonprofit gets federal money — you know which agencies and programs fund them.
• It includes audit findings. If an organization had compliance issues with their federal funding, it shows up in the FAC. Useful for due diligence.

What’s actually in the data

The FAC publishes two main datasets:

Audit summaries — one record per organization per audit year. Includes the organization’s name, EIN, city, state, entity type (nonprofit, government, higher ed, tribal), fiscal year dates, and total federal expenditures for that year.

Federal awards — the per-program breakdown. Each record shows a specific federal program (like “Consolidated Health Centers” or “Head Start”), the amount expended, whether it was a direct or passthrough award, the awarding agency, and whether it was flagged as a major program in the audit.

Between these two files, you can answer questions like:

• Does this nonprofit receive federal funding? How much?
• Which federal agencies and programs fund this organization?
• Has their federal funding grown or declined over time?
• Were there any audit findings or compliance issues?
• Which nonprofits in Tennessee receive HHS grants over $500K?

The problem: it’s hard to search

The FAC makes its data available as bulk CSV downloads. That’s great for data analysts, but not so great for the grant writer who just wants to look up a specific organization.

USAspending.gov has a search interface, but as mentioned — no EIN matching, no way to filter to nonprofits specifically, and no connection to 990 filing data.

The result is that foundation grant data and federal grant data live in completely separate silos. If you want to understand the full funding picture for a nonprofit, you need to check IRS filings for foundation grants and the FAC or USAspending for federal awards and somehow reconcile the two.

Searching foundation and federal grants together

This is exactly the problem we built 501(see) to solve. We combine both data sources:

• Foundation grants from IRS 990 Schedule I (public charities) and 990-PF Part XV (private foundations)
• Federal awards from the Federal Audit Clearinghouse

And we index them into a single, unified search. You can search by recipient name, filter by state, set amount ranges, and see foundation and federal grants side by side. The source filter lets you narrow to just foundation or just federal results when you need to.

Because both data sources use EINs, every federal award links directly to the same nonprofit profile where you’d see their 990 financials, officers, and foundation grants. One search, full picture.

Who uses federal grant data?

Grant writers researching funders. If you’re applying for federal grants, knowing which agencies already fund organizations like yours — and how much — is critical context. It tells you where the money flows and whether a program is worth the application effort.

Prospect researchers building donor profiles. A nonprofit that receives significant federal funding has a different financial profile than one that’s entirely donor-supported. That matters for major gift strategy.

Consultants and fundraising firms doing competitive analysis. Understanding which organizations in a space receive federal funding (and which don’t) reveals market positioning and opportunity gaps.

Journalists and watchdog organizations following public money. The FAC’s audit findings data is particularly useful here — it surfaces compliance issues that might not show up anywhere else.

Getting started

You can explore federal grant data alongside foundation grants at 501see.app. Search for any nonprofit by name and you’ll see their complete funding picture — private and public dollars, together.

The federal award data is updated monthly from the FAC’s bulk exports, covering audit years from 2016 to the present — nearly 7 million individual federal award records, all matched to nonprofits by EIN. Combined with 15 million+ foundation grants from IRS filings, it’s the most complete grant search available.