USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources
Dear USA Facts team, we would like to offer you few hints for public spending visualizations based on our experience. We are the creators of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;us.wikibudgets.org&#x2F;w&#x2F;united-states-budget-2016" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;us.wikibudgets.org&#x2F;w&#x2F;united-states-budget-2016</a>.<p>- Government spending is only a small part of the public finance. People need to see all public organisations: states and cities, departments, offices, bureaus and agencies, schools, hospital and prisons and obviously all public benefit corporations. If they spend our money we have the right to see their budgets.<p>- Governmental organisations borrow money outside of the government budget(!). This increases the government debt but does not show in the deficit. Just because the deficit is smaller than last year does not mean the debt is not growing faster.<p>- There is a world outside the US. The internet needs a one time stop for all public spending of the world, not just the US. Also you may want to connect the government receipts and expenditures from&#x2F;to the international organisations, OSN, World Bank, the foreign aid etc.<p>- Public spending and receipts do not follow a tree hierarchy, it is a pseudograph. You will have to deal with so called offsetting receipts, extra budgetary fees, negative expenditures, positive taxes, transfers between organisations etc. We believe the only suitable visualisation style is a sankey diagram.<p>- There are huge size differences between individual budget items. Inside the executive branch you do not want to hide the $3 million sent to Marine Mammal Commission (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;us.wikibudgets.org&#x2F;w&#x2F;united-states-budget-2016?n=f224f7560" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;us.wikibudgets.org&#x2F;w&#x2F;united-states-budget-2016?n=f22...</a>) but you can not realistically show it next to the $7.52 billion sent to the Railroad Retirement Board (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;us.wikibudgets.org&#x2F;w&#x2F;united-states-budget-2016?n=3caea97da" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;us.wikibudgets.org&#x2F;w&#x2F;united-states-budget-2016?n=3ca...</a>). We solved this by a zoomable interface. (They call it the universe of public spending so let&#x27;s give them a map!)<p>- The federal government does not even have a definite list of all governmental agencies. I am not kidding.<p>- You will never get all the data but you could build a wiki platform where city officials, school principals, government employees etc contribute with their bits and pieces. They can connect their receipts to the spendings of the superior organisations. If it does not match, citizens can investigate why. (If you want ordinary people to contribute with data you may need a human friendly editor too.)<p>- Different data dimensions will be useful to different people. Show the spending by agency, by programme, by function, by geography, by source etc. Let people combine the dimensions and create custom aggregates.<p>- Let people seamlessly share custom views and comparisons to social media (with relevant OG tags). We have a fake news industry to fight.<p>We wish you best luck.