Getting Started with BlazingStar Analytics

Hey everyone, Joe here. I'm going to quickly walk you through how to search for an account. If you're on the dashboard, there's a search bar right here at the top of the page. Also in the navigation bar at the top of every page, there's a search icon that will take you to the search page. Let's click it. Let's say that we were looking for the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at NIH, and we want to know what happened in fiscal year 2026.

So let's just put "heart, lung" into the search bar and see what happens. You can see that the account popped up very quickly, but let's just take a second and explore these other tabs before we head to the account. The bill text tab shows you every time that the search term has showed up in an enacted appropriations act. The recipients tab shows you all of the times that your search term has matched the name of a recipient.

And the grants tab shows you the grant opportunities, the NOFOs, that have your search terms in them. But let's head to the account. Let's click on it. And as I said before, we're really interested in the 2026 funding. But what you'll see here is the newest money floats to the top, and then the expired years are at the bottom. You can also filter here to limit the list, and we'll just click on that, and now we're in the account. Thanks.

Hey everyone, Joe here. I'm going to show you how to find an account using the agencies feature. You'll see it up here in the toolbar. It's got a little building next to it. Let's click it. Here at the top, we have the cabinet agencies. If you are interested in an account in a small agency or commission, just click this arrow, and all of those agencies will appear.

We're looking for the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health for Fiscal Year 2026. That's in Health and Human Services. Let's click that. Now that we got that page open, let's take a look down here at sub-agencies. Let's click on NIH. Now on NIH's page, we have a couple of things. We have a weekly velocity of awards by week to give you an idea of when the money flows at NIH.

And then down here at the bottom, we have a list of large recent awards. But the thing I want to draw your attention to is the account structure tab. And if you click it, at a glance, you get a summary of all of the accounts at NIH. We're looking for the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. You can see it here. You see that there are $4 billion of budgetary resources and that they had obligated $3.5 billion of them.

And then they have $571.1 million left unobligated. If you click the little arrow next to it, you'll be able to find the account. Let's click it. And that's how you can find an account using the agencies tool. Thank you.

Hey everyone, Joe here. Now I'm going to walk you through an account page. You can see at the top, we've got some summary cards that show you the amount of budgetary resources that are both apportioned and unobligated, followed by a time strip that gives you important milestones for this particular fund, with important dates like the date of the first obligation, the date the bill was enacted, and then apportionments.

The magic here is really in these tabs that are below. You can see it starts on an overview tab, which gives you at a glance key information from all of the other tabs. The tabs basically work, you know, according to the lifecycle. They start with the budget request, and then we go into the appropriation. In this tab, it pulls the enacted appropriations language from the relevant appropriations bill, and then it gives you a link to the explanatory statement and the committee reports.

We also allow you to compare this bill text to any prior bill text that we have in the system. So you can see here that the 24 enacted and 26 enacted differ only by a number. The apportionment tab lists all of the apportionment that OMB has given for this particular funding. The execution tab is data about the performance of those funds, how much is obligated, how much has been outlaid and uses the SF-133 execution data that OMB publishes monthly.

Just a note, the first reported month is November. It goes through September, the end of the fiscal year. For fiscal year 2026, we're still waiting on the year end data for the month of September. The ledger tab gives you a summary of the status of resources, but what I find most useful is the obligations by object class, which helps you determine what kind of money is going out.

Is it for grants or is it for personnel compensation and benefits? How much is in contracts, and if it's for contracts, what type of contracts are they? You can find all that here in the ledgers tab. The opportunities tab links this funding to notices of funding opportunity that are typically awarded from this type of money. And then in the awards tab, we show you all of the linked contracts and grants to this particular account or this particular variant of account, this appropriation.

You can see that we have contracts at the top, and if you scroll to the bottom, you'll be able to see all of the assistance or grants listings. And if you have a particular recipient in mind, you can always filter here. let's say Denver, and it'll filter those results by the name of the grantee that you're looking for. That's the account page. Thank you so much. Have a great day.

Hey everyone, Joe here. Now I'm going to walk you through the location feature in the awards tool. This is a great way to find out what types of funding is going to a state, a congressional district, or even a zip code. Let's take a look up here in the toolbar. You'll see that there's a little dollar sign with like a little receipt. That's the awards tool.

Let's click on it. While there's a lot of good tools in here, I want to focus on the locations tab for now. In this toolbar, you'll be able to either browse by a state, a territory, jump to a specific congressional district, or go to a specific zip code. For demonstration purposes, I'm going to start with the state of Vermont to give you an idea of what's going on.

So this is the dashboard for the state of Vermont. Up top, it shows you the federal money that's gone to this place over the last few fiscal years. There's a map of all the awards by zip code, and if you kind of hover over them, they tell you the largest recipient in each zip code. And if you click in, you'll be able to go to that specific zip code and see what types of awards are going on there.

But back to the state, I want to draw your attention to this area where you can see what are the awarding agencies that have given funding to this district or this state. So for Vermont, it's Department of Health and Human Services. You can also click over here on the recipients tab, and it'll switch and tell you who the largest recipient was through all the federal sources of funds.

So in this case, the Vermont Agency of Human Services is the largest recipient. Let's go back to agencies for a second. Let's say we're interested in National Institutes of Health awards. So we click here, and what we see here are all of the assistance listings or different federal programs that have awarded funds to that particular state. And if you were to click on, say Cardiovascular Diseases Research, you'd be able to click and you can follow a particular entity or a particular grant.

In this case, we're looking at all of the funds that have gone to the University of Vermont from the federal government. And then if we click on National Institutes of Health, we'll be able to say, Oh, hey, I'm interested in Cardiovascular Diseases Research. And you can click on that and it'll bring up an individual award. If we go to this particular award, it'll have a description of what the award's doing.

Click here to show more to see if there's more information. And then the cool part is that this shows the federal funding accounts that have funded this particular award. So if you were to click in to say this account, we'd go right back to the good old account page so you can kind of go from a location down to a particular recipient and then end up linked back to the account, which links to the appropriation, the apportionment, and all the execution data. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.