Examining Federal Domestic Assistance Programs: Data Collection Process for Years 2000 - 2007

This study is part of larger research aimed to analyze the availability, requirements, and recipients of federal disaster assistance. The Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) releases a list of all Federal domestic assistance information for each year along with valuable data such as funding amounts, accomplishments, range of assistance, etc. However, though the early 2000's saw several major disaster declarations including the 2004 Atlantic hurricane season and Hurricane Katrina, the format of spending data differs from later years. Organizing this data into a different format is necessary to graph and visualize trends. This poster details a solution: internet archives and Python web scraping tools enabled the conversion of previous data into a more useable format that can be merged with later spending data.