How ImpactLine reads a budget

Every figure on ImpactLine originates in a record a government published itself. Nothing is scraped from secondary commentary, and no figure is sourced from another aggregator.

• U.S. Treasury Monthly Treasury Statement (MTS)Federal receipts, outlays and the monthly deficit or surplus.
• USAspending.govFederal awards, contracts and grants by agency and recipient.
• Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED)Economic context — GDP, employment and price indices.
• U.S. Census Bureau Annual Survey of State and Local Government FinancesComparable state and local revenue and expenditure actuals.
• State enacted budget documentsBudget authority as passed by each state legislature and signed by its governor.
• City and county adopted budgetsDepartment-level appropriations from each city's adopted budget.

Where a jurisdiction publishes both a machine-readable data service and a budget document, the data service is preferred and the document is used to check it. Where only a document exists, the figures are entered from that document and the page says so.

The single most common misreading of a government budget is treating the enacted figure as the amount spent. Budget authority is permission to spend, granted for a fiscal year. Outlays are money that actually left the treasury. The two rarely match, and the gap can run to tens of billions of dollars at federal scale.

ImpactLine labels which of the two a view is showing rather than blending them. Where both are available for the same jurisdiction and year, both are shown, because the difference between them is often the substantive finding.

Jurisdictions are reorganised into a common structure so that comparable things sit next to each other — a department in one state lines up with the equivalent department in another. That reorganisation is presentational. It changes how a figure is grouped, never the figure itself.

Amounts are never adjusted, interpolated, deflated or projected. If a government has not published a value, the page shows it as unavailable rather than filling the gap with an estimate. If a government revises a figure, the revised figure replaces the original at the next refresh.

Where a comparison is drawn between jurisdictions, the page states which funds and which fiscal years are in scope, because a comparison between two governments that account for the same service differently is not a like-for-like comparison and should not be read as one.

The Impact Score is a 0–100 signal, not a measurement published by any government. It is derived from the scale of the budget, how much of the jurisdiction’s data is available through a public API rather than a document, and the severity of any estimates the jurisdiction itself flags in its filings.

It is a reading aid for judging how much of a budget can be verified against source records — not a rating of a government’s competence, honesty or performance, and it should not be cited as one.

It depends on the government. Federal Treasury statements publish monthly. Most states publish once a budget cycle. Census state and local finance actuals lag by roughly two years, which is why they sit alongside enacted figures rather than replacing them.

Every page states the fiscal year its figures belong to. If a page shows FY2025 budget authority next to FY2023 Census actuals, that is deliberate and both years are labelled.

ImpactLine is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or funded by any government or agency. It reads records that governments publish and presents them in one place.

Reading budgets on ImpactLine is free and does not require an account.

If a figure here does not match the published record it cites, that is a defect and we want to know. Corrections are made against the source document, and a figure is changed only when the source supports the change.