U.S. Military construction spending data — build_data

build_data_20260918 returns a data frame containing geocoded location-project-year military construction spending data, for projects in the United States and overseas.

Usage

build_data_20260918

Format

A data frame of location-project-year observations including the following variables:

fiscal_year: Fiscal year of the project.
state_country: Two-letter state or country code as reported. Overseas codes mix ISO2C with legacy FIPS 10-4 and DoD codes.
state_country_name: Readable form of the state or country as reported. The only form available for codes such as ZU (Unspecified Worldwide Locations), which have no country identifier.
iso3c: ISO three character country code. NA for unspecified and worldwide locations. The 392 lines of FY2007-FY2016 that are filed under "Unspecified Worldwide Locations" but name a U.S. installation in their project title ("USA-224: Fort Hood, TX") carry "USA"; state_country and location_name are left as the report prints them, and the installation and state are in location_full_name.
gwcode: Gleditsch and Ward country code. The G&W list has no code for a dependency, so territories carry the custom codes the troop data use for the same places: Puerto Rico 6, Greenland 1002, Diego Garcia 1004, Guam 1008, the Northern Mariana Islands 1011, the U.S. Virgin Islands 1013, Wake Island 1014, American Samoa 1041 and Ascension Island 1042. NA for unspecified and worldwide locations.
location_name: Installation or location, in title case with initialisms preserved. The reports write the same place in block capitals one year and title case the next; a derived list of protected tokens keeps forms like "MCAS Iwakuni", "MacDill AFB" and "RAF Lakenheath" intact.
location_name_reported, project_title_reported: The location and project title as the source sheet wrote them, before case harmonization.
location_full_name: The address sent to the geocoder: the location followed by the country, or by the state and "United States". NA for rows that are not geocoded.
location_code: Comptroller location code.
latitude, longitude: Coordinates of the location, kept only where the geocoded point falls inside the country or state the row is filed under. NA for rows filed under no country (unspecified, worldwide and classified locations), for locations that are a label rather than a place ("Various Locations"), and where no point inside the country or state was found. A point inside the right country is not always the installation: a geocoder that does not know a place answers with the centre of the country, or with another place of the same name. The installations found to be placed that way are corrected by hand (geo_source is "manual"); the few that could not be located have no coordinates.
geo_source: Where the coordinates came from: the geocoding service that resolved the location ("arcgis" for every geocoded row in the current data), or "manual" for a point entered by hand from data-raw/geocode_overrides.csv, which records what each point is and the page it was read from.
organization: Service or agency, harmonized across years to full names: "Army", "Navy", "Air Force", "Defense-Wide", "Special Operations Command" and other defense agencies. Marine Corps construction is carried in the Navy accounts and has no value of its own; guard and reserve components appear in appn_title.
organization_reported: The organization string as the source sheet wrote it, before harmonization.
project_number, project_title: Project identifier and description. The title is in title case with initialisms preserved.
appn_amount, auth_amount, auth_appn_amount, toa_amount: Appropriation, authorization, authorization of appropriation, and total obligational authority, in thousands of current US dollars. Negative values occur for rescissions and reprogramming.
appn_title: Appropriation account title.
budget_activity: Budget activity number. Meaningful only within an appropriation account: activity 1 is major construction in the MILCON accounts but FY 2005 BRAC, new construction or direct loan subsidy in others.
budget_activity_title: Budget activity, harmonized to one label per activity across years. The source workbooks write these inconsistently, with case variants, abbreviations, truncations and typos.
budget_activity_title_reported: The budget activity label as the source sheet wrote it, before harmonization.
facility_category_title_reported: The facility title as the source sheet wrote it, before case and abbreviation harmonization.
facility_category_code, facility_category_title: The three-digit DoD facility category code and its title, in sentence case with initialisms preserved. One code maps to exactly one title.
facility_group_title: The coarse level of the DoD facility taxonomy, in sentence case. The reports carry it under three different headers – "Facility Group Title", "Fiscal Category Title", and, in the most recent years, the facility category column – and all three are collected here. Kept separate from facility_category_title, the finer three-digit level of the same taxonomy, though the split is a reconstruction rather than something the reports maintain; get_builddata() therefore searches both columns from its single facility_category argument.
transaction_type: Type of budget action, where reported ("BUDGET", "REPROGRAM", rescissions). NA for most rows.
sheet_type: Which kind of sheet the row came from: "base" for regular fiscal-year sheets, or "oco" for an overseas contingency operations exhibit. The other supplemental exhibits restate lines of the regular sheets and are not in the data.
source_file, source_sheet, source_row: Workbook and sheet the row was read from, and its position in that sheet counting from 1 below the header. Together they identify one line of one report. A report can list two projects that agree in every other column, and this is what tells them apart.
report_year: Latest fiscal year covered by the source workbook, i.e. the report vintage. Consecutive reports restate the same fiscal years, and every fiscal year here comes from the most recent report that covers it.
is_request: TRUE where the row is a budget request rather than an enacted figure: the fiscal year is the terminal year of its source report, or the row comes from a request sheet. That is all of FY2016, whose later reports are not among the source files, and 26 lines of FY2010 from the overseas contingency operations request sheet ("C1_2010_OCO_Req") that are on no enacted sheet.
classification: Security classification marking carried on the row, "U" for unclassified. FY2011 onward.
dollar_type: Kind of dollar figure the row reports ("Budget" or "Congressional Rescission"). FY2003-FY2005.
existing_mission: Whether the project supports an existing mission, as reported. FY2003-FY2005.
pe: Program element. FY2003-FY2004.
percent_recapitalization: Share of the project classed as recapitalization. No values: only the FY2008 report printed it, and the years it covers are taken from later reports.
state_country_sort: Sort key the source sheet used for the state or country column. FY2006.

Value

Returns the full data frame containing location-project-year observations of U.S. military construction spending, compiled from the DoD Comptroller Annual Report C-1 exhibits. All amounts are in thousands of current US dollars. Each fiscal year is taken from the most recent report that covers it, so a project-year appears once, and each row is one line of that report.

Year coverage

The C-1 exhibit layout changed over time, and a later report does not always print what an earlier one did, so several fields are reported only for a subset of years: transaction_type and appn_title FY2001-FY2002; pe FY2003-FY2004; dollar_type and existing_mission FY2003-FY2005; location_code FY2000-FY2006; facility_category_code FY2000 and FY2003-FY2006; project_number FY2000-FY2006 and FY2013 onward; state_country_sort FY2006; classification FY2011 onward; facility_category_title FY2003-FY2005, FY2007-FY2021 and FY2026; facility_group_title FY2000 and FY2007 onward; state_country_name FY2006 and FY2009 onward. FY2006 reports appropriations only, so toa_amount, auth_amount, auth_appn_amount and budget_activity_title are missing for that year; toa_amount and auth_appn_amount are also missing for FY2000, and budget_activity_title for FY2000 and FY2008. The workbooks that supply FY2004-FY2007 give the service of an Army, Navy or Air Force line in their "Treasury Agency" column rather than under "Organization"; organization is filled from it, and organization_reported holds the letter printed there ("A", "N" or "F"). The series runs FY2000 through FY2026.