Budget Matters Blog

Transparency Camp 2013 Opening Session. Photo by TamasSzemann.

Earlier this month, I represented NPP at Transparency Camp, the Sunlight Foundation’s annual gathering of people interested in making governments transparent and accountable. Transparency Camp is an unconference, meaning that its agenda is set by participants. That’s part of the magic, since 500 attendees come from all over the world and represent a wide range of perspectives: government employees, programmers, activists, watchdog organizations, lobbyists, and the media. Taking a few days off from business-as-usual and immersing yourself in these varying outlooks is enlightening and energizing.For example, a few of ...

The Medicare program accounts for around 14 percent of the entire federal budget, but you wouldn’t know it from USAspending.gov. USAspending.gov is a website that’s supposed to make government spending transparent. But if you use it to investigate how much the government spent on Medicare benefits last year, you’ll find a surprising number: zero. That’s not a reporting error; there are many such problems in USAspending.gov, and it’s a sign of opaque government. In 2012 Washington actually spent more than $500 billion on Medicare. Citizens should have access to that information – both ...

In just over a month, hackers will descend on over 80 locations across the United States, including Amherst, Massachusetts. But don’t worry—these are civic hackers: volunteer technologists, designers, and citizens coming together and using publicly-released data to solve challenges relevant to their towns and states.

In January, President Obama called for a national day of civic hacking. National Priorities Project heard the call and put Western Massachusetts on the map of national and international events taking place on June 1-2, 2013.

NPP is offering up our federal budget data and partnering with a great team of local organizers ...

When President Obama released his FY2014 budget, he endorsed a plan to use an alternate measure of inflation – known as chained CPI – to shrink the cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security beneficiaries.

Social Security Programs

Social Security insurance covers more than just retirees; benefits are also paid to those with disabilities and family members of deceased workers. Combined, these groups received about $720 billion in benefits during fiscal year 2011.

The newly-updated Federal Priorities Database has state and county-level spending data for all three of these groups: 

Social Security retirement benefits

Social Security disability benefits

Social Security survivors benefits

Nearly 90 ...

How does money from the federal budget affect you and your neighbors? Where do those Social Security, food stamp, and Medicaid dollars end up?

NPP has released the latest version of the Federal Priorities Database, the interactive tool that connects the dots between our tax dollars, the federal budget, and programs or services in your community. The Federal Priorities Database can answer these questions, and now it contains data from USASpending.gov.

USASpending.gov for the Average Citizen

Although USASpending.gov is a public website, it provides raw, low-level records and a search form that’s useful for data wonks ...

April 15—Tax Day—is fast approaching. As we do each year, NPP has published an interactive, personalized receipt that tracks your income tax dollars to the penny.

This year, we’re also launching a new Tax Day tool: trade-offs. Trade-offs estimates how much your city, congressional district, county, or state paid for federal programs in 2012. For example, right here in Northampton, MA, we paid about $7 million dollars for homeland security. Live in the Big Apple? You paid almost $10 billion towards interest on the debt. And the great state of California contributed about $19 million towards the ...

2007 Economic Census Data courtesy of the Census Bureau

In recent weeks, NPP has written about the effects of sequestration on education, transportation, and health programs. We’ve also released a series of state-level fact sheets about sequestration and the Pentagon. But what about the effect of sequestration on government-produced data?

Last month, the Commerce Department estimated that sequestration will cut a total of $46 million from the Census Bureau, delaying the release of critical economic and demographic data and delaying preparations for the 2020 census. NPP recently signed on to a letter from the Census Project urging that the ...

One of the many sources of open government data that NPP scrubs and publishes in the Federal Priorities Database is U.S. Federal Tax Collections. We're highlighting federal income taxes this week as tax season gets into full swing.

With sequestration and Fiscal Cliff II looming, Congress and President Obama are once again tackling the spending side of the federal budget. But spending is only half of any budget. The income taxes due on April 15 — along with the excise, payroll, estate, trust, and gift taxes that we pay — are the other half of our nation's budget: revenue ...

The last time we talked about the DATA Act in this space, Hudson Hollister of the Data Transparency Coalition was guest blogging about its unanimous passage in the House of Representatives and its re-introduction in the Senate. You can read the version that passed the House here.

Unfortunately, the 112th Congress ended without the DATA Act becoming law. Now that a new Congress is in session, the bill will have to be re-introduced.

So what is the DATA Act, and why should you care about it?

Despite the multitude of current debates about how the U.S. spends money, it ...

During the 2012 presidential election, many speculated that voters receiving the most assistance from federal programs are the most likely to vote Democratic.

Last week, Alex Klein from Newsweek and The Daily Beast published Why the Republican Party’s Narrative on Income and Voting Failed, an article that uses NPP’s Federal Priorities Database to take a closer look at that claim.

For nearly every U.S. county, he compared Federal Aid to Individuals and voting records from the 2012 race, finding no correlation between the two.

Chart courtesy of Alex Klein and The Daily Beast

So what does this ...