As fans of transparency, we’d like to be transparent about the inner workings of the Federal Priorities Database.

We’re grateful for the kind words we got after yesterday’s launch. We were also happy to receive some feedback: a request to add spending information for Adult Education.

Like all programs in the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, the master list of federal programs and services that assist the American public, Adult Education yearly expenditures are reported, aggregated, and published in the Census Bureau’s annual Consolidated Federal Funds Report (CFFR).

We’ve loaded the complete CFFRs back to 1993 (almost 10 million rows of data) and as a result have spending information for everything in the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance.

We don’t expose all of it because there were over 3,000 programs in FY2009 alone. Our goal is to surface the data people care about the most, not bury it among esoteric line items like the National Wool Act.

So we’re happy to consider requests for spending data on other programs, especially those that relate to the social indictors. And if you do want to know how much money your state received under the National Wool act, the entire CFFR is available via our API.*

Find the newly-added Adult Education expenditures here.

*In beta, not fully released, not fully documented, and subject to change. It’s on the list.