Returns FEC Schedule B disbursements — itemized records of money flowing OUT of a federal committee to organisations: vendor payments, media / ad buys, consulting firms, payroll services, and committee-to-committee transfers

Returns FEC Schedule B disbursements — itemized records of money flowing OUT of a federal committee to organisations: vendor payments, media / ad buys, consulting firms, payroll services, and committee-to-committee transfers. The OUT-flow counterpart to get_fec_contributions (Schedule A, money IN). ORGANISATIONS ONLY: per-record rows are served only when FEC codes the payee as a committee or organisation (COM, CCM, PAC, PTY, ORG). Rows naming a natural person — individual payees (IND), candidates (CAN), unclassified payees, and people a filer coded as an organisation — are withheld per record under the FEC sale-or-use rule (11 CFR 104.15). Refunds of contributions to individuals are withheld with them. Source: api.open.fec.gov/v1/schedules/schedule_b/ — the official FEC public-disclosure API. Live queries cover every itemized row; the cached fallback subset carries a $1,000+ ingestion floor (filters small-vendor / payroll noise). Publication-lag caveat: disbursements only surface when the spending committee FILES its report — monthly filers lag ~20 days, quarterly filers up to ~50 days after the spend. Short since/until windows on recent dates will miss rows whose reports haven't been filed yet. Killer query patterns: - What does candidate X's campaign spend money on? Pass spender_committee_id (their principal campaign committee from get_fec_candidate_profile). Sort by amount DESC for big spends. - Which campaigns pay consulting firm Y? Pass recipient_name='Y'. - Ad-spending patterns: disbursement_purpose_category='ADVERTISING' + cycle=2026 + sort_by=disbursement_amount DESC. - Money moving between committees: disbursement_purpose_category= 'TRANSFERS' — recipient_committee_id on each row names the receiving committee. Filter combinations note: server-side indexes support one equality filter (spender_committee_id / candidate_id / disbursement_purpose_category / recipient_state) combined with date or amount sort + cycle. Other filters (recipient_name substring, entity_type, exclude_memos) are applied client-side after a wider pre-fetch. Purpose categories (disbursement_purpose_category): ADVERTISING, CONSULTING, CONTRIBUTIONS, FUNDRAISING, PAYROLL (labeled 'SALARIES' on some rows), TRANSFERS, TRAVEL, ADMINISTRATIVE, MATERIALS, EVENTS, LOANS, REFUNDS, POLLING, OTHER. Memo rows: FEC tags certain aggregate / subtotal rows with memoed_subtotal=true. These DUPLICATE dollars already counted on other rows — KeyVex DEFAULTS to exclude_memos=true to show real money movement; pass exclude_memos=false to include the raw memo rows (e.g. for matching FEC's own row counts).