Every number has a definition. Every dataset has limits.
Here is how to read this ledger—and how to check our work.
The overview uses Treasury Monthly Treasury Statement data. Outlays measure payments, and receipts measure incoming revenue. The deficit is outlays minus receipts. These cash-flow measures differ from obligations and budget authority.
USAspending non-loan award search returns lifetime award amounts for awards with activity during your date range. State geography uses net obligations in the selected fiscal year. Do not add these measures together or interpret an award total as a unit price.
National debt is measured at a date; the deficit covers a period. Gross federal debt includes debt held by the public and intragovernmental holdings. Debt changes can differ from the deficit because of cash balances and other financing adjustments.
Connections group only loaded awards, by reported recipient UEI or exact name. They do not establish common ownership, political ties, wrongdoing, or fraud. Evidence requires corroboration with contract documents and other records.
| Source | Used for | Coverage / treatment |
|---|---|---|
| OMB Historical Tables | Budget totals, revenue sources, functions, agencies, state/local own-source expenditures | FY 2027 tables 1.1, 2.1, 3.1, 4.1, and 14.2. Actual years only, through 2025. Annual spending from 1901; nationwide state/local own-source expenditure from 1948. Excludes grouped early periods and the separate 1976 transition quarter. |
| U.S. Treasury | Debt, receipts, outlays, departments | Historical debt from 1790. Monthly budget snapshots from 2015 include prior-year comparisons. Overview stops at completed FY 2025. Department breakdown fixed to FY 2025. |
| USAspending.gov | Contracts, grants, direct payments, loans, programs, recipients, subawards, geography | Live paginated award queries and source-wide obligation aggregates. Forty starter examples span four non-loan types; 499 source awards are preserved across five types. Combined award searches query each type separately. FY 2025 geography includes grants, direct payments and contracts. Subawards are nested, not additive. |
| Bureau of Labor Statistics | CPI, purchasing-power adjustment | CUUR0000SA0, all urban consumers, all items, not seasonally adjusted. Annual averages require 12 reported months. No interpolation across missing years. |
| World Bank WDI | GDP and population context | NY.GDP.MKTP.CD and SP.POP.TOTL. Calendar-year observations matched to fiscal-year debt; contextual ratios rather than official fiscal-year ratios. CC BY 4.0. |
| Census / state & local portals | Source discovery | Directory only. State and municipal transactions are not yet ingested. OMB Table 14.2 supplies the separately labeled nationwide own-source expenditure aggregate. |
| IRS via ProPublica | Nonprofit organizations and Form 990 finances | Live name/state searches, EIN profiles, extracted financial history, and original filing links. Name matches are not verified EIN-to-UEI joins; total revenue is not federal grant revenue. |
Bundled source snapshots were retrieved September 5, 2026. Debt attempts a live refresh when the overview opens; live contract searches are explicit. Live provider responses are cached for five minutes with their retrieval timestamps. Snapshot and source observation dates are different: an older observation does not become current when downloaded again. Historical figures can be revised. Where Treasury reports more than one historical observation for a year (1843), the annual chart uses the later date. Monthly budget charts use the same publication vintage as their annual total. The money map uses OMB FY 2027 revisions; those can differ from the Treasury MTS vintage on the overview.
Failed live searches display an error and retain the previously labeled result set. Missing values are not silently converted to zero or replaced with invented estimates. Downloads include source and measure context.
Inflation-adjusted dollars equal nominal dollars multiplied by target-year CPI divided by observation-year CPI. The calculator uses the same ratio. These annual CPI values approximate a national consumer basket, not every household’s expenses. Calendar-year CPI is used alongside fiscal-year budget data and is labeled accordingly.
The 1971 marker identifies the suspension of international gold convertibility. Domestic redemption had ended earlier. A chart does not estimate the causal effect of this change; nominal growth also reflects inflation, population, and economic growth.
Your notebook is stored in this browser’s local storage. No account, advertising analytics, or third-party tracking is included. Search terms are sent to this app’s server and USAspending to retrieve records. Export saved records before clearing browser storage or moving devices.
This release does not score or label recipients for fraud. A useful next stage needs procurement competition fields, amendment histories, verified vendor hierarchies, subawards, audit reports, and reproducible anomaly definitions. The current connection view exposes reported agency–recipient–award relationships only.
State and local integration requires source-specific ingestion, fiscal-calendar normalization, entity resolution, provenance, and federal-transfer reconciliation. Directory sources are candidates for that work, not claims of completed ingestion.
This independent project draws design inspiration from the National Design Studio’s clear typography, civic orientation, and focus on usable public services. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Studio, the U.S. government, or any data provider.
Visit the design referenceNo. spending.wtf is an independent public-data project. It links observations to original sources and distinguishes reported data, calculations, live queries and coverage gaps.
Source & context ↗