Tango
by Tango
Give an agent federal procurement intelligence — contracts, opportunities, entities, protests and budget data consolidated from FPDS, SAM.gov and USAspending. Five tools in the vendor's docs, four in Anthropic's directory, and a documented refresh cadence you can actually plan a bid deadline around.
Verified connector
Listed by Anthropic as a partner connector in its Connectors Directory.
Connection checked by Agentman on .
Anthropic states this reflects the level of review a connector received, not a security audit.
Connect Tango via MCP
https://govcon.dev/mcpWorks in any MCP-compatible client. In Agentman Studio it is one click — no config file to edit.
Tango Tools & Capabilities (4)
Tool names from Anthropic's directory listing. This server requires sign-in, so we could not read tool descriptions or parameter schemas.
Limits
- Summary statistics are a capped sample, and Tango says so unsoftened. Its documentation warns against reporting
total_obligatedas market size, becauseinclude_summaryprofiles at most 250 matching records — described as a hard cap, not a ceiling a narrow filter escapes. When more records match, the response setsis_capped_sample. - Summary distributions are awarding-side only. Tango documents
org_distributionas keyed onawarding_office, so a summary cannot break spending down by funding organisation even when you filtered on funding organisation. That is a subtle way to get a defensible-looking wrong answer. resolvereturns ranked guesses, not lookups. Tango grades matches high, medium or low and states that a low match should be verified before use. An agent that reports the top candidate without the grade has converted a probability into a fact.- The aggregator is not the system of record. For any live solicitation, the authoritative source is the government system that publishes it — SAM.gov for notices, FPDS for award data, GAO for protest decisions. Tango consolidates those feeds on a stated cadence; it does not replace them. Confirm any response deadline you intend to act on against SAM.gov itself.
- Refresh cadence is described as typical, not guaranteed. Opportunities and entities sync in a window Tango calls typically 20–60 minutes. FPDS-sourced contract data updates twice daily. Forecast cadence has no stated number at all — it varies by agency feed.
- Provenance exists internally but is not queryable. Tango tracks which source last set a field and what changed, and states plainly that it does not currently expose those tables in the public API. You cannot ask why a value differs from what SAM.gov shows.
- Upstream sources disagree with each other. Tango's own provenance page says the systems it ingests overlap, disagree and update on different cadences. Consolidation makes that tractable; it does not make it disappear.
- The free tier is 100 requests per day. One multi-step research question can spend a tenth of that. Burst is 25 per minute.
- Enrichments are paywalled, and their absence is silent by design. On a free plan a gated field returns HTTP 200 with the field simply omitted and an upgrade hint in the response metadata — not an error. An agent may not notice that ownership or past-performance data was dropped.
- Anonymous access is impossible. The endpoint returns 401 to an unauthenticated handshake. Every call needs an OAuth token or an API key.
- We could not verify tool behaviour ourselves. The gated endpoint blocked
tools/list, so no schemas and no safety annotations were readable. Tool names come from Anthropic's directory, corroborated and extended by Tango's docs. No tool here carries a safety annotation we have seen. - The directory listing is incomplete. It names four tools where Tango documents five, and surfaces none of the seven static MCP resources.
- Prompts are unconfirmed. Anthropic's snapshot lists no prompt names, and the gated endpoint blocked our own
prompts/list.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Tango MCP server free, or does it need a paid account?
It needs an account, but a free tier exists. Tango's plans page states every plan including Free provides complete access to contracts, entities, opportunities, grants, protests and budget data. Free is capped at 100 requests per day and 25 per minute. Paid tiers from Small upward raise those limits and unlock Tango-computed enrichments such as resolved corporate ownership and OCR'd solicitation attachments.
How fresh is the federal contracting data behind the Tango MCP server?
It depends on the dataset, and Tango documents each one. Opportunities and entities refresh from SAM.gov on a cadence Tango describes as typically 20 to 60 minutes. Contract data follows the ingest pipeline, with FPDS updating twice daily and USAspending inputs daily. Forecast cadence varies by agency feed. That per-dataset disclosure is unusually specific for this catalogue.
Why does the Tango endpoint use govcon.dev when the documentation lives on makegov.com?
Because they are the same server under two names, and the wire evidence proves it rather than the marketing copy. The RFC 9728 descriptor at govcon.dev names `https://tango.makegov.com` as its authorization server, and the 401 response carries a content-security-policy permitting connections to that host. Tango's docs confirm govcon.dev is the original endpoint, still supported and not deprecated.
What does the Tango resolve tool actually do?
It converts a company or agency name into ranked candidate identifiers. Government contracting has a severe identifier problem — UEI, CAGE, legacy DUNS and countless name variants — so resolve runs a Bayesian resolver over name plus optional state, city and freeform context. Free tier returns three candidates; paid tiers return five with a `match_tier` quality grade Tango tells you to verify before using.
What is the difference between search and search_opportunities in Tango MCP?
One is a dispatcher over historical records, the other is typed to live solicitations. Tango's docs describe `search` covering 13 record types including contracts, IDVs, subawards, protests and budget accounts, selected by a type parameter. `search_opportunities` is purpose-built for open SAM.gov solicitations and agency forecasts, filtering on response deadline, set-aside type and notice type.
Can you trust Tango's summary numbers as federal market size?
No, and Tango says so plainly. Its documentation warns against reporting `total_obligated` as market size, because the statistical profile returned by `include_summary` is computed over at most 250 matching records. That is a hard cap. When more records match, the response flags `is_capped_sample`. For true full-population totals Tango directs you to different, purpose-built queries.
Does the Tango MCP server list more tools than Anthropic's directory shows?
Yes. Anthropic's directory snapshot of 2026-08-16 names four tools. Tango's own MCP documentation, fetched 2026-08-19, describes five — the same four plus `fetch_api_docs`, which pulls curated reference material for a Tango resource. The docs also list seven static MCP resources the directory does not surface at all, covering set-aside codes and NAICS lookups.
Sources
- Tango MCP documentation — https://tango.makegov.com/docs/mcp/ (the
documentationURL Anthropic's directory publishes; 301-redirects to https://docs.makegov.com/mcp/, fetched 2026-08-19) · retrieved 2026-08-19 - Tango Plans & Data Access — https://docs.makegov.com/getting-started/pricing/ (fetched 2026-08-19) · retrieved 2026-08-19
- Tango Name Resolution API reference — https://docs.makegov.com/api-reference/resolve/ (fetched 2026-08-19) · retrieved 2026-08-19
- Tango Provenance & auditing — https://docs.makegov.com/api-reference/concepts/provenance/ (fetched 2026-08-19) · retrieved 2026-08-19
- Tango opportunities data dictionary — https://docs.makegov.com/data-dictionary/opportunities/ (fetched 2026-08-19; source of the 20–60 minute sync cadence) · retrieved 2026-08-19
- Tango entities data dictionary — https://docs.makegov.com/data-dictionary/entities/ (fetched 2026-08-19; UEI, CAGE and ownership fields) · retrieved 2026-08-19
- Tango contracts data dictionary — https://docs.makegov.com/data-dictionary/contracts/ (fetched 2026-08-19; FPDS twice daily, USAspending daily) · retrieved 2026-08-19
- Tango forecasts data dictionary — https://docs.makegov.com/data-dictionary/forecasts/ (fetched 2026-08-19) · retrieved 2026-08-19
- Tango protests data dictionary — https://docs.makegov.com/data-dictionary/protests/ (fetched 2026-08-19) · retrieved 2026-08-19
- Tango docs machine index — https://docs.makegov.com/llms.txt (fetched 2026-08-19) · retrieved 2026-08-19
docs.makegov.com/robots.txtallows all user agents with no disallow rules and points at a sitemap of 70+ pages; noContent-Signaldirectives are present (fetched 2026-08-19).tango.makegov.comserves no robots.txt and no llms.txt (both 404).govcon.dev/robots.txtreturns HTTP 403 from its object store — an infrastructure response, not a policy signal · retrieved 2026-08-19- Live RFC 9728 protected-resource descriptor — https://govcon.dev/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource (fetched 2026-08-19; the path-append and path-insert forms return identical bodies, all naming
https://tango.makegov.comas the sole authorization server andreadas the sole scope) · retrieved 2026-08-19 - Live RFC 8414 authorization-server metadata — https://govcon.dev/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server and https://tango.makegov.com/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server (both fetched 2026-08-19; the two documents differ on supported grant types and PKCE methods) · retrieved 2026-08-19
- Live anonymous probe — 2026-08-19: an
initializePOST to the endpoint returns HTTP 401 withwww-authenticate: Bearer resource_metadata="https://govcon.dev/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource"and acontent-security-policywhose only permitted connect target ishttps://tango.makegov.com· retrieved 2026-08-19 - Anthropic connector directory — https://claude.ai/directory/af83346b-0499-4fcc-ae7c-22235705bdcd (snapshot 2026-08-16;
permissionspublished as "Read only", four tool names, no prompt names) · retrieved 2026-08-16
Use in Agentman
Connect once and your agents call these tools on their own — on a schedule, in a workflow, with nobody at the keyboard.
Open in Agentman StudioServer Info
- Category
- Data & Research
- Developer
- Tango
- Tools
- 4
- Domain
- govcon.dev
Using Claude Desktop or another MCP client? Setup docs — the connection URL above works anywhere.