Since 2020, Congress, on a largely bipartisan basis and under two Presidents, has charged the U.S. Department of Commerce with implementing a series of historically significant pieces of legislation that greatly multiplied the department’s budgetary resources. The CARES Act (enacted in 2020), the American Rescue Plan (2021), the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (2021), the CHIPS and Science Act (2022), and the Inflation Reduction Act (2022) have layered on top of longstanding authorities to further advance the Department’s mission to create the conditions for growth and opportunity throughout the United States. This blog provides first-time insights into how Commerce’s full grantmaking slate is reaching across the country. 

Taking stock of an historic period at the U.S. Department of Commerce

The U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) has awarded more than 12,000 grants and cooperative agreements obligating nearly $60.3 billion over the past four fiscal years across all 59 states and territories.^[i] Approximately $46.1 billion of that was obligated under new legislative authorities and $14.2 billion under long-standing programs.^[ii] Non-grant awards such as direct funding to private companies under the CHIPS Program—totaling $30.5 billion as of early January 2025—are not included in this analysis but come on top. 

The Regional Economic Research Initiative (RERI) of the Office of the Undersecretary for Economic Affairs (OUSEA) has created a pilot mapping and data interactive that captures these grant awards and crosswalks them with local area social and demographic information. The interactive itself is not yet public, but this analysis shares insights derived from the publicly available information that feeds into it. The effort primarily draws from USASpending.gov but incorporates some data directly from bureaus and area information from the U.S. Census Bureau.^[iii] Ultimately, the mapping interactive will enable deeper analysis into the locations and characteristics of communities that win awards, with applications for both research and policymaking. 

Methodological considerations for mapping awards

Since our central mission is to analyze the spatial distribution of DOC awards, multiple steps are taken to process and geocode awards consistently across bureaus and ensure each award is associated with both a county and a state. ^[iv]

Geographic assignments are first determined by the primary place of performance listed in the award record. This field from is intended to capture the geographic scope of award activities. However, the data quality of this field is variable and for many records imprecise or ambiguous. In cases where this field may be overly broad or unreliable, deference is given to the recipient location (i.e., the county and state where the organization that received the grant is located) or other information provided in the record (e.g., embedded in the narrative project description). 

Even when overruled for purposes of geocoding, the place of performance field may remain important for qualifying awards that have scopes beyond their county of association. For example, a university grant will be assigned to the institution’s home county even when the activities associated with the award spill beyond county and state boundaries. In such cases, a “state-wide” or “multi-state” place of performance tag provides essential nuance. Given these enhancements, and that the underlying data is subject to administrative error, all estimates should be considered approximate.  

Because the map pins activity to discrete locations, it understates the Department’s broad reach into American communities. Many awards—investments into regional innovation ecosystems, middle-mile broadband lines, coastal restoration efforts and beyond—impact people living in numerous counties but are represented on the map only once. The analysis also understates the full economic significance of awards because many lead to large amounts of private, philanthropic, and other governmental dollars being invested alongside DOC funds. 

Despite those caveats, the information presented here provides one of the most comprehensive overviews yet published of how and where the Department has invested in America in recent years. 

The median state saw nearly $1 billion in obligations across 170 awards in recent years

Entities based in every state and territory have received awards from the Department over the past four years. The median state saw $928m in obligations across 170 awards.^[v] As the most populous state, California ($3.7b) led in absolute awards, but in per capita terms it fell into the bottom fifth. 

A handful of small-population coastal states register the greatest number of awards per person: Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, and Rhode Island land in the top five. In per capita dollar terms, more rural states rise to the top, with Alaska, Montana, West Virginia, and Wyoming in the top five. The District of Columbia, where many nationally operating and sub-grantmaking organizations are located, joins both lists.

Individually, the four major grant-making bureaus achieve comparable coverage across states. The Economic Development Administration (EDA), National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) made awards to recipients in every state plus DC. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) made awards to recipients in 49 states and DC, while the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) reached 37 states with programming and budgets a fraction the size of the other major bureaus. EDA made awards to entities based in all eight U.S. territories and NOAA and NTIA in seven of them. The lone International Trade Administration (ITA) program in the dataset made awards to entities in 17 states.

Two-fifths of all counties host at least one Department of Commerce award from the past four years

The Department of Commerce made awards to entities based in 41% of all counties in the United States over the past four years, 1,333 counties all together (out of a total of 3,222 counties including territories). However, that conservative figure associates only one county with each award. In practice, 30% of awards representing 70% of dollar obligations ($42 billion) reported statewide performance scopes. Such grants often impacted dozens of counties each. 

Thus, every county in the United States is covered in the place of performance of at least one grantee; oftentimes several. For example, NTIA’s Enabling Middle Mile Broadband Infrastructure program made 38 awards to entities based in 36 counties, but the impact of the awards will be felt across 43% of all counties in the United States. 

For counties, the probability of hosting a direct award recipient rises with population. The Department has at least one grantee relationship in almost every one of the nation’s centers of commerce and economic activity: 94% of counties with a population over 500,000 are home to at least one DOC award recipient, compared to 32% of counties with fewer than 100,000 people. 

However, mid-sized counties are most representative of DOC grantmaking.^[vi] Counties with between a quarter and a half million people registered the greatest number of awards and dollars per capita, with nearly $300 in DOC grant obligations per person and 51.4 awards per million residents. Rural counties (with fewer than 50,000 residents) also outperformed their urban peers with 42.3 awards per million residents and $119 in obligations per capita, compared with 25.6 awards per million and $95 per capita in the most populous counties. 

Individually, four counties garnered nearly 200 or more awards from across the Department: Honolulu County, HI; Boulder County, CO; San Diego County, CA; and King County (Seattle), WA. These counties host diversified grantee bases alongside academic institutions or other organizations specializing in the work of the Department. In many cases, substantial portions of the work associated with these awards is executed beyond the counties’ borders. For example, San Diego and Seattle are both hubs of ocean-related research on the Pacific, and Boulder is home to large institutional bases supporting the national (and in some cases global) work of NIST and NOAA.

Colleges and universities are the Department’s most frequent grant recipients

The Department partners with a wide range of entities to advance its mission. Award recipients include institutions of higher education, state and local governments, tribal governments and related entities, non-profit civic organizations, and private businesses. 

In terms of sheer number of awards, colleges and universities were the Department’s most frequent partners, representing 38% of all recipients. This highlights the importance of the Department’s work in advancing science, research, and innovation-led economic development in the United States—competencies typically housed in institutions of higher education. NIST and EDA each issued more than 500 awards to institutions of higher education over the past four years, and NOAA made nearly 3,000 awards to academic partners totaling almost $5b.  

Civic and non-profit entities such as regional economic development organizations represent one-quarter of all recipients. Combined state, local, and tribal governmental bodies account for another 31% of recipients. Together, these buckets demonstrate the importance of local partners in delivering the activities and services that advance the Department’s mission. 

In dollar terms, state and territorial governments received nearly two-thirds of all funding, driven largely by NTIA’s Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program ($33.7b in grant obligations), which provided large grants to states to close their digital divides. Finally, direct grants and cooperative agreements to corporations account for only 4% of awards by count and 2% by dollar.^[vii]

The Department’s Strategic Objectives provide a framework for organizing DOC investment streams across bureaus

The Department of Commerce’s 2022-2026 Strategic Plan sets out to improve America’s economic competitiveness with five strategic goals and nearly two dozen strategic objectives that flow from them. The Commerce Investment Map is a useful tool for tracking the commitments that relate to those goals and objectives. Strategic objectives that align closely with grantmaking programs represented in this data include:

• Revitalize U.S. manufacturing and strengthen domestic supply chains.

Across four programs alone—NIST’s Manufacturing USA Institutes and Manufacturing Extension Partnerships, EDA’s Build Back Better Regional Challenge (BBBRC), and NTIA’s Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund—the Department made 427 awards totaling $2.3 billion across 50 states and Puerto Rico. The flagship multi-billion-dollar CHIPS program aimed at securing and reshoring large parts of the semiconductor supply chain supports this strategic objective, too, but only a fraction of its awards consists of the grants and cooperative agreements captured here.

• Accelerate the development, commercialization, and deployment of critical and emerging technologies.

The Department’s programs to advance innovation and technology made grants supporting a conservatively estimated $409 million across 155 awards and 44 states and territories over the period. The bulk of that funding was obligated in FY 2024, when EDA’s Regional Technology and Innovation Hubs (Tech Hubs) Program made its first awards, alongside the first CHIPS R&D grants and NOAA’s Accelerators and Industry Proving Grounds programs. Many longstanding EDA and NIST programs make additional awards that support this objective, as do NOAA and NTIA’s technological research and demonstration grants.

• Drive equitable, resilient, place-based economic development and job growth.

As the nation’s lead economic development department, much of DOC’s grantmaking can be considered “place-based” in one way or another. The label is intended to identify programs that are designed to advance regional competitiveness through strategic investments into communities—investments that are enabled and guided by federal help but ultimately led by networks of regional actors according with best practices in the field. 

Looking narrowly at four new programs implemented by EDA—BBBRC, Good Jobs Challenge, Tech Hubs, and the Recompete Pilot Program—groups based in 160 counties (but representing nearly 10-times more) received awards worth $2 billion to create good jobs and transform their local communities. Add on NOAA’s two new regional programs (Climate Resilience Regional Challenge and Climate Ready Workforce), and the Department made nearly 400 competitive place-based challenge grant awards under new authorizations over the past four years. 

Widen out further to include both newly authorized programs that have adopted explicitly regional approaches and the large body of long-standing DOC programs that support regional competitiveness, and the full scale of the Department’s place-based grant-making comes into view: approximately $45 billion in funds obligated over the past four fiscal years across more than 4,000 individual grants, touching every state.

• Build sustainable, employer-driven career pathways to meet employers' needs and connect Americans to quality jobs.

Four new DOC programs explicitly target workforce development—EDA’s Good Jobs Challenge, STEM Challenge, and Recompete Pilot Program, as well as NOAA’s Climate Ready Workforce. Together they obligated $679m across more than 100 awards touching at least 38 states and Puerto Rico through FY 2024. Numerous other programs incorporate elements of workforce development into their awards, too, including the large CHIPS for America and Internet for All programs. 

• Advance entrepreneurship and high-growth small and medium-sized enterprises.

Entrepreneurship and small business development is the central focus of multiple Department programs, including MBDA’s Capital Readiness Program, EDA’s Build to Scale, and NOAA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants. Together these three programs alone have made 327 awards over the past four years averaging over $750k each, touching at least 155 counties.

• Expand affordable, high-quality broadband to every American.

From FY 2021 to 2024, NTIA awarded nearly 500 grants obligating approximately $37.5 billion across six new broadband-related programs^[viii] designed to close longstanding gaps in internet access and connectivity facing rural, tribal, and underserved American communities. These awards touched every state at least twice. 

• Strengthen coastal resilience and advance conservation of lands and waters for current and future generations.

NOAA’s applied resilience and conservation programs have some of the broadest places of performance in the Department—entire coastlines or estuaries, for example. With approximately 2,500 awards totaling $4.4 billion, NOAA’s grantmaking to foster resilience and conservation touched nearly every corner of the country. NOAA obligated roughly $1.8 billion through newly authorized Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) programs such as Transformative or Tribal Habitat Restoration alone. 

The Tech Hubs program combines multiple strategic objectives in action

EDA’s Regional Technology and Innovation Hubs program in many ways exemplifies how the Department’s strategic objectives come together on the ground. The program’s overarching goals include equitable, place-based economic development and accelerating the creation and deployment of technologies critical to national security. Every designated Tech Hub integrates workforce development into its plans. Implementation award winners are advancing American manufacturing in semiconductors (e.g., New York’s SMART I-Corridor) and biomanufacturing (e.g., Indiana’s Heartland BioWorks) while others are working to foster climate resilience (e.g., South Florida’s ClimateReady Tech Hub). 

Helpfully, Tech Hubs also defined their regions of implementation, allowing us to explore how investments overlap not only at the county scale, but also at the regional scale that better approximates labor markets and industry geographies.

The Commerce Investment Map identifies nearly 3,400 awards that have been obligated to entities based in counties that are part of designated Tech Hub regions over the past four years. Thus, the $346 million in Tech Hubs obligations are buttressed by a further $8.3 billion in other grants and cooperative agreements from the Department of Commerce in the same areas.^[ix] Looking across bureaus, 23% of EDA’s obligations (excluding Tech Hubs) over the past four years went to entities based in these areas, as did 30% of MBDA’s, 37% of NOAA’s, and 41% of NIST’s.^[x] One measure of success for Tech Hubs will be whether designation acts as a force multiplier and bridges these funding steams. 

Colorado’s Elevate Quantum is the Tech Hub implementation grant winner that hosts the largest amount of Department funding—$2 billion—attributable primarily to NOAA and NIST’s longstanding relationships with local colleges and universities specializing in atmospheric research, measurements and instrumentation, and, of course, quantum computation. Not all DOC grants flowing to Tech Hub regions serve a commercial purpose or a common mission with the local Tech Hub, but they do often share the same ecosystem, workforce, and institutional partners.

Differences in program mission can lead to large differences in populations served 

Award recipients from programs designed to serve economically distressed areas tend to be those based in counties with the highest poverty rates and lowest incomes on average. These include EDA’s Distressed Area Recompete Pilot, Public Works, and Assistance to Coal Communities programs. The median household income of the average county hosting an award recipient from these programs trails far behind the national average.

Similarly, DOC programs most centrally dedicated to advancing innovation and technological development are among those with awardees in higher-income areas on average. This is consistent with awardees’ reliance on highly educated and highly paid workforces. Examples include the CHIPS R&D and NOAA SBIR programs, as well as NOAA’s Accelerators and NIST’s Manufacturing USA Institutes. Median household income in counties hosting award recipients from these programs tends to far exceed the U.S. average. Notably, these programs tend to have high spillover effects with important national and regional benefits.

The challenges and revelations of mapping the Department’s funding streams 

Mapping the Department’s work is an inexact science. Every awardee has a physical location and an associated address, making it straightforward enough to map recipients. However, the work associated with each award is often performed across a much larger and more loosely defined area.

For example, each of NIST’s Manufacturing USA Institutes exists in a discrete location, and each has a distinctive industrial or technological specialty that is typically aligned with the regional economy it calls home. At the same time, precisely because each institute has a unique specialization, it also represents a node in a national network of companies, universities, and other partners. Its scale of impact tends to be national.

Similarly, NOAA may make an award to a Virginia-based organization to do coastal restoration work in the U.S. territories of the Caribbean, or a research award to a team affiliated with a Colorado university to conduct field work in Alaska. A single award can fund work of different natures in multiple locations. NOAA recently launched a mapping and data visualization dashboard for all awards made under BIL and IRA authorizations that incorporates such multi-state associations, but only at the state-level and with the sort of manual record enhancement that remains challenging to do at scale across the full Department.

For its part, EDA administers many programs that are designed to reflect the messy on-the-ground realities that local labor markets and industry clusters defy the neat lines of political geography—straddling state boundaries and blending cities, suburbs, and rural jurisdictions. These programs make awards to entities representing regional economics (i.e. groups of economically interconnected counties), but those regions tend to be self-defined and often vary by award or program, making them difficult to map systematically. 

It is important to take these considerations into account when drawing conclusions and inspiration for future work from an exercise such as this. Zooming in on Southwestern Pennsylvania is illustrative.

Recipients based in Allegheny County, PA, home to Pittsburgh, report 43 awards across four DOC bureaus totaling $98m from the past four years. However, several of those awards are explicitly regional in nature, providing important context for the ring of counties registering zero awards surrounding Allegheny. The county’s dominance reflects Pittsburgh’s centrality to the region; most award applicants, and therefore recipients, are based there, even when they operate on behalf of the entire Southwestern Pennsylvania region.

At the same time, the observation that all the Department’s direct grant funding to this region flows through a single county is significant. On the one hand, the pattern reflects the geography of anchor institutions and civic capacity in the region. Allegheny has a higher median household income than most of its neighbors, but it is representative of the region in terms of poverty, and it is the most racially and ethnically diverse in the area. On the other hand, the nine outlying counties together contain just as many people as Allegheny, and they register higher unemployment and prime age non-employment rates. Such insights may be useful to scholars trying to better define where policy interventions hit as well as policymakers considering how to cultivate a more diversified pipeline of grantees over time.

Towards a more refined approach to mapping federal funding flows

As the example of Allegheny County highlights, mapping federal funding flows is invaluable but demands nuance in interpretation. The strength of this analysis—its breadth covering the entirety of Department of Commerce—also contributes to its central limitation—the need for a common denominator (i.e., a single approach to geographic identification) across a diverse array of programs. 

On the ground, each DOC program tends to operate at its own custom geographic scale. Some target neighborhoods; others target multi-county regions. Some awards go to state-level entities; others go to entities in one place for work in another. Numerous awards operate with multi-state mandates, some of which cover the entirety of each state, others only fractions. Most programs do not collect information on the exact geography at which award activities will be performed consistently, if at all. 

Amid that complexity, several programs operate at the vanguard of defining place of performance. BBBRC and Good Jobs Challenge both required places of performance to be defined in applications, albeit with flexibility and deference to the applicants. The Tech Hubs and Recompete Pilot Programs required even more precisely identified impact areas. Together, winners of these four regional challenge grants represent 52% of all counties and 63% of the U.S. population.^[xi] Those are dramatic figures speaking to the reach of several of the Department’s newest programs. Capturing that reach is only possible because the programs were designed to collect such fine-grained geographic information from the start.

The early experiences of these programs offer important lessons for future inquiries and data collection efforts. First and foremost, one must precisely define the area to be analyzed in order to properly assess the effectiveness with which programs accomplish their goals or target certain communities. For example, the city of Allentown’s Recompete grant precisely targets five economically distressed census tracts close to downtown. The award’s association with much better-off Lehigh County in this analysis is useful for visualizing where funding is flowing nationally, but it is the wrong scale at which to evaluate the grant’s effectiveness down the road. 

Thus, for the immense value of mapping the Department’s awards in one place, most deeper assessments into the people and places represented by DOC funding will need to be done on a program-by-program basis. NTIA recently released a factsheet that demonstrates the value of exactly this, and the Regional Economic Research Initiative is engaged in similar exercises for a variety of other programs across the Department.

In the meantime, creating standardized “neighborhood” and “multi-county” place of performance categories to nest into the zip code, county, state, and multi-state tiering that currently feeds into USA Spending would be one small but meaningful step towards refining the geographic science with which the Department classifies its awards. The multi-county tag especially would help identify economic development-related awards that aim to generate impacts at the scale of local labor markets or regional economies, which represent an increasing share of the Department’s policy portfolio. 

Conclusion

The work of the Department is diverse, multifaceted, and operates at multiple geographic scales. It runs from charting the world’s oceans to closing the prime age employment gap in specific urban neighborhoods and rural communities. Maps can bring these disparate programmatic threads together to reveal complementarities in grantmaking that open new possibilities for coordination. Maps can also uncover gaps that inform better programming and service delivery in the future. This analysis only scratches the surface of what can be learned by visualizing information geographically and combining it with data on the economic and social characteristics of local areas. 

The Regional Economic Research Initiative intends to maintain and continuously improve the Commerce Investment Map. Our aim is to derive insights that can inform the public and feed back into the work of the Department. The strength of this bird’s-eye view of the Departments activities is its ability to reveal patterns in award data and across the multitude of programs represented. We welcome feedback on how to grow and improve the dashboard to create a tool that is maximally useful for stakeholders inside government and beyond. 

About the data

The award data analyzed here was obtained come from USASpending.gov, the official open data source for federal spending information. The Investment Map looks at grants and cooperative agreements from the Department of Commerce for awards made in fiscal years 2021-2024, as of November 2024. Efforts are made to associate all awards to both counties and states, first based on the place of performance entered in USA Spending, secondarily by the location of the awardee if place of performance is not defined.

Awards displayed and analyzed include any with funding updates on USASpending.gov in this time frame, even if the original award was made in a prior fiscal year (i.e., if an award received original funding in fiscal year 2018, but received additional funds in fiscal year 2021, the award total will be the sum of both funding amounts). All data represented on these maps, including award and project locations and funding amounts, is preliminary and non-binding. Actual award funding received may be contingent on meeting certain requirements. This data should not be used for audits or in official financial reports.

The Commerce Investment Map is still in beta form and not yet available to the public. All data is provisional and based on information provided to USASpending.gov. It does not reflect actual outlays and is subject to error and omission.

Acknowledgements

This analysis was prepared by Kenan Fikri, Director of the Regional Economic Research Initiative in the Office of the Undersecretary for Economic Affairs (OUSEA) at the U.S. Department of Commerce. 

The author would like to thank Maria Messick and Meredith Brown for initially creating the Commerce Investment Map. This work stands on the foundation they built. Within OUSEA, additional thanks go to Zacharay Palmer and Shaw Vallier for their contributions in processing and mapping the underlying data, and to Ben Bolitzer and Meghan Maury for their guidance. Finally, the work would not have been possible without numerous stakeholders from across the department who offered their counsel, data, and time to improve our collective knowledge of where the U.S. Department of Commerce invests.

Questions

All inquiries related to the map and data therein should be directed to [email protected].