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Method

How the pandemic relief figures are made

How the pages of the Pandemic relief hub read what their publishers put out, and what that record can and cannot say. The method every topic shares — where a figure comes from, snapshots, freshness and corrections — is on the site’s methodology page.

What the workbook is

The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, a committee of federal Inspectors General set up by the CARES Act, publishes a workbook of pandemic funding by agency and program. Each row is an awarding agency, an assistance listing and PRAC’s title for it, with the amount obligated and the amount outlaid from the COVID-19 supplemental appropriations. PRAC takes the amounts from USAspending and says of them: “We display the data as we receive it. We do not change, alter, or add to it.” PRAC last wrote the file on July 11, 2025. It holds 1,482 rows, 28 agencies and 529 assistance listings.

What a figure is, and what it is not

A figure is money awarded under the laws USAspending marks as COVID-19 appropriations. The mark is on the appropriation an award drew on, not on what the award was for, so a figure here is money from the pandemic laws and not spending on the pandemic. The amounts are as agencies reported them, not audited, and they change after PRAC publishes.

The workbook has no year. Each row is a listing’s total to the date PRAC wrote the file, so no figure on these pages is for a year, and the hub draws no trend from it.

Rows, listings and negative amounts

Many of PRAC’s titles join several assistance listings, where an award was filed under more than one. The file counts such a row under its first listing number, and so do these pages. A listing’s name here is its own title, in PRAC’s words, cased where PRAC printed it in capitals.

23 rows have a negative amount obligated, where more was taken back than awarded. They are printed as negative, and every total includes them, as PRAC’s does.

Obligations and outlays

An obligation is a commitment to pay; an outlay is a payment. The file’s outlays are 101.2% of its obligations. The two are summed separately from what agencies reported, and the file does not reconcile them, so this page does not either.

PRAC’s PPP figure and the PPP hub’s

Assistance listing 59.073, the Paycheck Protection Program, is one row of PRAC’s file: $811.6 billion obligated. The PPP hub counts SBA’s loan-level files, which held $792.6 billion of current approval amount as of September 30, 2024. The two are different measures from different files. They are printed side by side, each with its source, and never added; this page does not say why they differ.

What this data cannot show

  • A figure is a sum of USAspending’s award records as agencies reported them, summed by PRAC: obligations and outlays as submitted, not audited, and as of the date PRAC last wrote the file.
  • A disaster code marks the appropriation an award drew on, not its purpose, so a figure here is money from the pandemic laws, not spending on the pandemic.
  • The file has no year, so no figure here is for a year, and it does not show whether any program worked or whether any award or payment was proper.
  • The file has no state and no recipient, so it does not show where the money went.
  • Money from the pandemic laws that USAspending does not hold, or that an agency had not reported when PRAC wrote the file, is not in these figures.

Sources

Data retrieved