Tracking the Funds
Following Community Project Funding and Congressionally Directed Spending from appropriation, to agency, to recipient, to project completion.
As part of appropriations legislation, Members of Congress can request provisions designating an amount of funds to a particular recipient—such as a local government or nonprofit organization—for a specific project. These provisions are called "Community Project Funding" in the House of Representatives and "Congressionally Directed Spending" in the U.S. Senate.
To help Congress oversee these funds, we recently issued a report that reviewed the status of FYs 2022-2024 projects based on generalizable samples of projects. (See our report for details on how we drew the samples of projects.)
Summary of FYs 2022-2024 Funds
For FYs 2022-2024, Congress designated $39 billion for 20,294 projects that cover a broad range of issues—including community and regional development, natural resources and the environment, and transportation.
Tribal, state, local, and territorial government recipients received the most funds, and they can distribute these funds to subrecipients (such as nonprofits) to implement the projects. In other cases, federal agencies may directly undertake these projects, such as dam-building or river-dredging.
Nineteen federal agencies are responsible for distributing these funds and monitoring how they are used. Agencies must make legal commitments to pay recipients—such as signing contracts or awarding grants—with two-thirds of these funds within 1-5 years; the other one third is available to agencies and recipients with no time constraints.
(Note: Congress did not designate any of these types of funds in FY 2025. We will update this information with our review of FY 2026 funds in the future.)
Status of FYs 2022-2024 Funds
Based on a generalizable sample of 790 projects from FYs 2022-2024, we estimate that, as of the end of FY 2024:
Agencies obligated (made legal commitments to pay recipients) about 61% of the $39 billion.
Agencies obligated and outlayed (distributed the funds for payment) about 16% of the $39 billion.
Community Project Funding/Congressionally Directed Spending, FYs 2022-2024
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Note: Dollar amounts do not sum to the total due to rounding. For more details, including confidence intervals for the estimates, see figure 4 in GAO-26-107944.
Implementation of FYs 2022-2023 Projects
We reviewed a generalizable sample of 167 projects from FYs 2022-2023. We found that, as of the summer of 2025:
Purpose: Recipients generally planned to use the funds for their intended purposes. We found that nearly all recipients' descriptions of projects' purposes were broadly consistent with the descriptions of the projects in the congressional reports accompanying the laws appropriating the funds.
Progress: About two-thirds of the project recipients that moved forward with funding had projects that were underway or completed as of the summer of 2025. About 3% of the project recipients had not yet begun their projects.
Examples of FYs 2022-2023 Community Project Funding/Congressionally Directed Spending Projects
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Challenges: Most recipients reported that they experienced at least one challenge in implementing their project, such as managing time frames or navigating agency systems.
Oversight: We found that the 19 agencies conducted various oversight activities for the projects, such as reviewing how recipients planned to use the funds, conducting site visits at the project locations, and ensuring the work is completed within the timeframes.
