We build the API we wished existed.
MakeGov makes federal procurement data easier to work with. Our product, Tango, is the unified API we built after spending years stitching together SAM.gov, USAspending, FPDS, DSBS, GSA eLibrary, Grants.gov, and a half-dozen other federal systems by hand.
Why MakeGov
Public procurement is one of the largest, most consequential markets in the world. It moves more than a trillion dollars a year, and almost every actor in it — agencies, vendors, oversight bodies, journalists, researchers — works with the same handful of data sources. Those sources are public. They are also slow, fragmented, undocumented, and frequently inconsistent with each other.
We started MakeGov because we believe the people building tools on top of federal data should not have to be experts in all of the different schemas and identifier systems, and a decade of undocumented joins before they can ship anything. Tango exists to absorb that work so other builders don't have to.
Who built it
We are a small team. Today, that's the two people named below — plus a long tail of friends, reviewers, and customers we've leaned on to test things, break things, and tell us when we were wrong.
Dave Zvenyach
Dave is a government contracting and data expert, and has served as senior executive in multiple federal administrations, including numerous leadership roles at the US General Services Administration and at the Council of the District of Columbia. His punishment for all of that time is a desire to make procurement data awesome to work with and the foolish belief that it's possible. He lives in Madison, WI, where he enjoys an abundance of excellent cheese and frozen custard.
Yoni Knoll
Yoni has spent over two decades building software with startups, at consultancies, and for the federal government — as a designer, engineer, and leader. He's spent the last several years deep in government data: wrangling fragmented sources, reverse-engineering undocumented schemas, and building the kinds of pipelines that turn a half-dozen inconsistent federal systems into something a developer doesn't have to cry (much) about.
What we ship
We try to be honest about what exists today.
- Tango API — a unified REST API across federal procurement data sources, with response shaping, full-text search, and predictable pagination. Read the docs.
- Tango MCP — an MCP that allows AI assistants and agents to natively work with the Tango API. Read the docs.
- First-class SDKs — tango-python (opens in new tab), tango-node (opens in new tab), tango-go (opens in new tab), and tango-rust (opens in new tab), all with parity on the surface we expose.
- The blog — long-form technical notes on government contracting data. If you want to see how we think about a problem before you commit, start here.
- GOV422 — short documented examples of federal data going wrong in the wild. Lighter reading, useful for context.
What we don't do
We don't sell a dashboard. We don't have a sales team. We don't have outside investors. If you want to evaluate Tango, the fastest path is getting an API key and reading the docs; if you'd rather talk to a human first, email us.