Methodology

Explore our methodology, sources, and use cases.

Bringing together disparate datasets into an integrated, unified structure starts with our framework below.

Hawai‘i Federal Awards USAspending.gov (Database) usa_spending.hi State Legislature Budget Bill (HTML) hi_state_budget State Dept of Budget & Finance Executive Budget (PDF) hi_state_budget_grants hi_state_request hi_state_request_program_structure hi_state_request_programs hi_state_request_adj hi_state_request_variance

Click on the image components to navigate to the sources

Select a dataset below to explore its sources, methodology, and use cases.

Hawaiʻi State Budget +
hi_state_budget

Overview

This view unifies Hawaiʻi State budget data across multiple sources and fiscal years, providing a longitudinal structure for comparing appropriations, requests, variances, and program narratives at the Program ID level.

This workflow extracts, cleans, standardizes, and organizes budget information from Hawaiʻi State Legislature HTML bill files. Because every bill version (House, Senate, Conference, etc.) is formatted differently, the script uses a layered parsing approach to reliably capture the components listed above. The system reads each bill's HTML, detects program headers and budget lines, corrects inconsistent structures, and repairs malformed entries. It then merges everything into a unified dataset, applies business rules to identify the final budget reported for each fiscal year and links back to the source legislation on the Capitol website.

It combines base budget records, Budget & Finance request data, variance reports, and program metadata.

The resulting dataset supports trend analysis across legislative stages, means of financing (MOF), and fiscal years, with contextual metadata from Budget & Finance PDFs.

Hawaiʻi State Funding

Sources

Available Downloads & Potential Use Cases

Longitudinal State Appropriations

  • → Analyze year-over-year changes in funding by programs, function areas, and departments
  • → Drill down to program-level descriptions and details

State Budget Lifecycle

  • → Uncover differences between departmental requests and final appropriations
  • → Track changes as the budget moves through the legislative process
Hawaiʻi Federal Funding +
usa_spending.hi

Overview

Contains federal award transaction data sourced from the USAspending.gov API and public downloads, filtered to include records where the Place of Performance or Recipient Address is located in the State of Hawaiʻi (HI). The tables and views in this group form the Hawaiʻi-specific subset of USAspending data, providing detailed information on contracts, grants, loans, direct payments, and other financial assistance awarded by federal agencies.

Data are structured and aggregated in a series of materialized views that support:

  • → Integration with FFIS and Hawaiʻi state budget data for cross-sector analysis
  • → Classification of awards by CFDA number, agency, funding type, and BEA/OMB budget category
  • → Mapping of recipient organizations (including nonprofit status from IPEDS and NAICS classification)
  • → Derivation of fiscal year aggregates, award counts, and outlay/obligation totals for local impact assessment

This container serves as the federal transactional foundation for Hawaiʻi-focused fiscal analyses, enabling reconciliation between federal spending data and state appropriation or program records.

Hawaiʻi Federal Funding

Sources & Integrations

Available Downloads & Potential Use Cases

Federal Funding

  • → Comprehensive fiscal trend analysis
  • → Explore recipient type and program category shifts
Hawaiʻi State Contracts +
hi_state_contracts

Overview

A consolidated view of state contracts extracted from departmental PDF reports. State agencies in Hawaiʻi are required to report their active contracts to the Legislature during budget briefings. These "active contracts" tables show every contract that a department has open at the time of reporting.

The Hawaiʻi Legislature's Finance Committee (House) and Ways & Means Committee (Senate) collect these briefing documents as PDFs. This dataset combines contract records across departments and fiscal years into a normalized format.

Hawaiʻi State Contracts

Sources

  • → House Finance Committee (FIN): Budget briefing PDFs published by the House Finance Committee. These include department budget requests and active contracts tables submitted during legislative sessions.
  • → Senate Ways & Means (WAM): Equivalent budget briefing documents from the Senate side. WAM files often include the same department submissions as FIN, enabling cross-reference and validation.

Important Note

These are government PDFs, and their quality varies. Some older documents are image-based scans that cannot be read automatically. Our process identifies and flags these so they are not skipped, but the data they contain may be missing from the dataset until those PDFs are manually transcribed or re-scanned with Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

Available Downloads & Potential Use Cases

Hawaiʻi State Contracts

  • → Explore program-level spending commitments
  • → Cross-departmental comparisons
  • → Vendor ecosystem insights

Guiding Framework