The chances are good that you will take up Google Maps or Gps on your cell phone just before you head off on a trip somewhere you’ve never been before. Type in your starting point and the target of your location, and then a couple of taps afterwards, bingo, you’ve got a chart showing you every information you need to get there.
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But just try that with the federal budget, as OpenTheBooks ( OTB ) recently did, and you’ll quickly learn two genuinely unsettling facts. How’s how OTB described it:
Americans now understand that they require a detailed description of the federal government and how much money has been spent on each organization over the years.
When we began that labor, we soon found another issue. Record keeping within the Federal Register, which is supposed to become the definitive guideline to government legislation,  , is startlingly negative.
At least 75 companies listed that are essentially former or outdated, they’ve been subsumed by another entities, renamed, or don’t even occur any longer.
Not only are companies listed that are long-defunct, but information of those agencies are often not updated, so members of the public may do serious research to discern the composition , of their own state.
But that’s not where OTB stopped. In fact, those discoveries gave rise to yet another desperately needed program from a team that has already done more than any other volunteer advocacy party to advance the cause of accountability and transparency in the federal government.
MAPPING GOVERNMENT GROWTH: Agency Data Through the Years is the new program.
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What OTB is finding, as illustrated by the vast information compilation for the first 50 agencies included in the MGG collection, is that one style is crystal clear — when launched, spending on federal programs heads in one way, UP!
That is true regardless of whether the issue for which a certain program was created is improving or getting worse; the saving curve is always moving. Consider the National Institutes of Health ( NIH), which opened its doors in 1962.
Measured at five-year intervals, NIH paying went up at every place on the curve from 1962 through 2010. In that 2010-2015 interval during the Obama administration, NIH spending went down, from$ 33 billion in 2010 to$ 29.3 billion in 2015.
Spending for NIH went down another$ 34 million in 2016, but then in the first year of the Trump presidency, and ever since then, the storm of NIH saving became more and more powerful.
Then, take a look at the increase in spending and the number of tax-paid federal staff employed by NIH, which in the MGG collection started in 2000 and reached 16, 937. It grew once in each of the following two five-year lengths, peaking at 19, 435 in 2010.
The entire dropped significantly in the following two five-year distances, bottoming at 18, 667. But in the most current period, new workers have poured into NIH, reaching 20, 570 in the last year of the Joe Biden management.
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In other words, the headcount at NIH has grown by 21.5 %, while spending exploded by 301 %! It’s no wonder that President Ronald Reagan once infamously said that a national program is the closest point to the existence that we will always have on Earth.
Another example is the Federal Emergency Management Agency ( FEMA ), which provided compelling evidence that Biden was using it as a political tool to punish voters in the Western region of North Carolina, who typically vote Republican.
What about the Federal Emergency Management Agency ( FEMA)? They have been criticized for having a shortfall in the Disaster Relief Fund and for spending large amounts to rent out establishments to immigrants. Their worker count really increased considerably, but it’s just that their spending however outpaced it by miles.
FEMA staff grew 290 percentage. But investing swelled more than seven times faster – by 2, 096 percent! There must be a more effective and proper way to deliver aid to disaster-stricken areas, which also avoids mission creep, such as migratory housing.
Democrats on Capitol Hill, the Left ( which has benefited from billions of dollars in federal tax dollars ), the Mainstream Media ( MSM), and billionaire Elon Musk have all been the target of barrage after barrage of hyper-critique from the president and billionaire Elon Musk.
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The DOGE guru kids conducting the modern assessment of governmental agencies are uncovering example after example of spending that either represents an absurd misuse of hard-earned tax dollars, such as paying for trans or sex-reassignment surgery in Latin America, or which cannot be identified due to criminally careless accounting.
The DOGE audit is expected to be finished on July 4, 2026. Is there still a reason not to hire private individuals to serve as citizen auditors in light of the enormously useful transparency tools that are currently and soon to be available?
