Do I need an API key?

No. All 150 tools work keyless. A handful of sources (Census, FRED, BEA, DOL) accept an optional free key for higher limits, but nothing is required.

Which AI clients does it work with?

Any MCP client — Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, Continue, and more — via a single npx command.

What data does it cover?

US federal and state/local (SLED) contracting opportunities, spending and awards, regulation, and partner vetting: SAM.gov, USAspending, Grants.gov, OFAC, FDIC, EPA, CourtListener, and 45+ more public sources.

mcp-sam-gov — Keyless MCP server for US government contracting data (150 tools)

Quick start

Add one server entry to your MCP client. It runs locally over stdio — nothing to host, nothing to sign up for.

Claude Desktop / Claude Code Cursor · Continue · Codex CLI

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "sam-gov": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@cliwant/mcp-sam-gov"]
    }
  }
}

Then ask your agent, in plain language: “Find active SAM.gov solicitations under NAICS 541512 closing this month.” Prefer to try it first? Run npx -y @cliwant/mcp-sam-gov in a terminal.

What it gives your agent

Seven domains of US government intelligence, unified behind one tool surface.

🔍 Opportunities & solicitations

Search live federal and SLED bids; read the SOW, points of contact, and attachments.

“SAM.gov solicitations under NAICS 541512 closing this month”

💰 Spending, awards & competition

Who won what, where, and for how much — agencies, recipients, PSC/NAICS, expiring contracts.

“Booz Allen wins at the VA last fiscal year”

🕵️ Entity & partner vetting

Screen a firm across sanctions, exclusions, single-audit findings, bank health, and environmental compliance.

“Screen this firm: OFAC, SAM exclusions, EPA compliance”

🛒 Product safety & recalls

FDA / NHTSA / CPSC recalls and enforcement against a supplier’s products.

“Any recalls tied to this supplier?”

⚖️ Litigation & courts

Court of Federal Claims bid protests and federal opinions involving a contractor.

“Bid protests involving this contractor”

📜 Regulation & reference

eCFR, the Federal Register, FAR/DFARS clauses, NAICS/PSC lookups, NIST 800-53.

“What does FAR 52.204-21 require?”

Why this exists

The federal data underneath is public domain. There’s no good reason it should cost a five-figure subscription to query.

Status quo	With this MCP
$30K–$100K/yr per seat for a bid platform	Free, MIT-licensed
API-key registration → wait → quota-tier shopping	`npx` → working in 60 seconds, keyless
5+ separate vendor APIs and scrapers	1 unified surface, 150 tools across 50+ sources
LLMs hallucinate NAICS codes and agency names	Anti-hallucination autocomplete guards built in

Engineered not to lie to your agent

Most tools fail silently — a page size reported as a total, an outage returned as “no results,” a missing value shown as $0. Those quiet lies corrupt an agent’s reasoning. This server holds five honesty invariants, enforced by a 3,400+ assertion fault-injection suite in CI.

A total is never a page length — totalAvailable is the real upstream total or an explicit lower bound, never the row count.
An outage throws, an empty result doesn’t — a 429/5xx/timeout raises a typed error; only a genuine no-match returns empty.
Missing is null, never a fabricated zero — an absent amount is null; a real $0 stays $0.
Shape drift throws — an unexpected upstream response is surfaced, never fabricated into a partial result.
Provenance & freshness are disclosed — non-government sources, snapshot dates, and client-side filtering are labeled.

Keyless & private by design

The server runs locally and collects nothing.

No telemetry, no analytics, no accounts — your queries never reach us.
Each tool calls the relevant official government API directly over HTTPS.
Optional API keys (Census, FRED, BEA, DOL, and a few others for higher limits) stay in your local environment and are sent only to that source.

See the full privacy policy.