Have you ever felt confused when hearing about the federal budget? Do you feel that the frequent debates in Washington about deficit and spending are complex, and you wish you understood them? Then A People’s Guide to the Federal Budget is the book for you. The book is written in very simple language, making it accessible for the average reader with absolutely no previous knowledge of the federal budget.

This is a guest post from Hudson Hollister, Executive Director of the Data Transparency Coalition and former Counsel for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. President Obama appears to agree that the Recovery.gov model is the future of federal spending transparency. In June 2011, he established a new panel of ...

This is a guest post from Hudson Hollister, Executive Director of the Data Transparency Coalition and former Counsel for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Three and a half years ago, Congress passed the federal stimulus law, which required 28 federal agencies to spend hundreds of billions of ...

Having access to a single, comprehensive source for U.S. federal spending data isn't a partisan matter. We support the DATA Act because accurate spending information is critical to an informed budget conversation.

Tracking federal spending is tricky, but it's critical to having an informed discussion about the budget. Because "federal spending" can mean different things and involves multiple sources of data, we often don't know exactly how much is spent on a particular program. The DATA Act wants to fix that.

The White House used to put out a Citizen's Guide to the Federal Budget every year, but it was discontinued during the George W. Bush presidency. President Obama has not resurrected the practice. Meanwhile, valuable information about how the federal government spends our tax dollars is going extinct