Build With Tango: Reconstruct a program from its budget

Second in the budget endpoint series. Once you've found an account worth your attention (part one), the next question is who already holds the work, and the budget endpoint answers it in both directions.

The problem

You can find the prime on any single contract in USASpending. What's harder is seeing a whole program at once: which funding offices control the money, which primes share it, and how the pieces add up. That's normally a pivot-table exercise across hundreds of award records.

The query: account → recipients

Take NASA's Deep Space Exploration Systems account (080-0124), which obligated $7.83B in FY2024, 88% of it through contracts. Resolve the account id, then pull its recipients:

from tango import TangoClient

client = TangoClient()

acct = client.list_budget_accounts(
    federal_account_symbol="080-0124", fiscal_year=2024, shape="id", limit=1
).results[0]

for r in client.get_budget_account_recipients(acct["id"], limit=6).results:
    office = (r.get("funding_office") or {}).get("office_name")
    name = (r.get("recipient") or {}).get("legal_business_name")
    print(f"{name:38} <- {office:32} ${r.get('contract_obligated'):,.0f}")

What comes back

The Artemis program, decomposed from a single budget account:

Recipient	Funding office	FY2024 contract obligated
The Boeing Company	NASA Marshall	$1.12B
SpaceX	NASA Marshall	$623M
Blue Origin	NASA Marshall	$483M
Lockheed Martin	NASA Johnson	$402M
Aerojet Rocketdyne	NASA Marshall	$367M

Marshall runs the heavy-lift and propulsion money (SLS core stage, the two Human Landing System awards, engines); Johnson runs the Orion crew capsule through Lockheed. That's the shape of the program (funding center, prime, dollars) without opening a single award record.

The reverse: vendor → accounts

Now run it backwards. Given a vendor's UEI, budget-flows answers which federal accounts fund this company across years:

flows = client.get_entity_budget_flows("SML4NN2CT556")  # The Boeing Company
for row in flows["results"][:6]:
    acct = row.get("account", {})
    print(row["fiscal_year"], acct.get("account_title"),
          f"${row['contract_obligated']:,.0f}")

For Boeing's exploration work, the answer is the same account every year (080-0124), running ~$1.0–1.35B annually since FY2020. When one account funds a vendor that consistently, you've found a structural dependency: a recompete or a budget cut there lands directly on that company.

What you'd build with it

• An incumbency map for any account you track. Wire recipients/ into your CRM so each account shows who currently holds the work and which office controls the money.
• An exposure check on a competitor or teammate. budget-flows turns "where does this company's federal money come from?" into one call, useful for diligence, teaming decisions, or sizing up an incumbent before a recompete.
• A program brief on demand. Combine the two: an account's recipients plus each prime's other accounts gives you a one-page picture of a program and its players.

Field definitions are in the Budget API reference. The free tier is enough to run both directions on whichever account matters most to you, and the same endpoint is callable from the Tango MCP server at govcon.dev/mcp.