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 ...

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 ...

Kiki McClean, No Labels co-founder/ Photo by No Labels

This country is desperately in need of facts. That was the overwhelming message I took away from two exciting things that happened last week. First, there was a national conference for No Labels, an organization committed to getting beyond political party affiliation in order to support real problem solving in Washington. The second event was at the New York Public Library, Mid-Manhattan branch, where I spoke about A People's Guide to the Federal Budget.

"Congress is a fact-free zone," said Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT), one of a dozen members of ...

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 ...

If we want to have a say in how our tax dollars are spent, we need to have a say in who represents us.

Fortunately, we do have a say in who represents us – in theory, at least. In practice, a majority of Americans of voting age don’t have any role in determining their representation. According to the Census Bureau, just 37 percent of eligible voters actually voted in the 2010 midterm elections. Frankly, that stinks.

At TurboVote, we’re trying to change that. TurboVote is an online voting tool that gives the voting process the same accessibility that ...

This is the second part of 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. Read the first part here.

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 administration officials, known as the Government Accountability and Transparency Board, to figure out how to expand the Recovery.gov approach to all spending. He appointed Earl Devaney to lead the effort. Last December the Government Accountability and Transparency ...

This is the first part of 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. Read part two here.

Three and a half years ago, Congress passed the federal stimulus law, which required 28 federal agencies to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to stabilize the economy. To oversee the program, Congress established the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (Recovery Board). President Obama appointed Earl Devaney, the inspector general of the Department of the Interior, to lead the Recovery Board.

The stimulus law required ...