Federal finance · research & tooling
A research and development project into how federal money actually moves — appropriation to outlay. Owned by Joanna Broderick, it grew out of six years of doing this work inside the Department of Veterans Affairs; the published version: the mechanics explained, the tools open-sourced, every figure cited.
The chain at the center of the project — appropriation → apportionment → allotment → fund distribution → obligation → outlay — is the spine of everything on this site.
The research is built on public data — USAspending, Treasury Fiscal Data, FRED, CBO vintages — with open tooling behind each claim. No internal figures, no internal systems; where a number appears, its source is on the page.
The Public Ledger — the running record of the research: how federal money actually moves, in plain English, timed to the live budget cycle.
Eleven modules, 48 narrated steps, one data spine: the training program that ties the whole portfolio together — what each module teaches, how every number is frozen and self-tested, and how to work through it.
One frozen snapshot of federal budget data through three modern stacks: a diffable Power BI model in TMDL, a dbt + DuckDB warehouse with 82 tests — and the five things the tests caught in real data.
A natural-language-to-SQL copilot with no LLM in it: a deterministic router, 40 pre-approved SELECTs, results frozen at build time, and a refusal taxonomy — out-of-scope, untracked-agency, injection, and more, each with a named reason.
Open-source projects, all on public data. The blog goes deeper on each; every repo stands alone, and every number traces back to a public source.
The data spine — an ETL that pulls USAspending, Treasury Fiscal Data, and FRED into one SQLite database, with a ten-query pack.
simulationA static web app that walks a real appropriation from budget authority to outlay, with scenario sliders for sequester, CR, lapse, and rescission — plus a backtested year-end projection.
copilotA deliberately limited copilot: 40 pre-approved SELECTs, the SQL shown next to the frozen result, and a named refusal for anything outside the catalog.
The 11-module, 48-step interactive program that walks all of the above — live simulations, a glossary, narration for every step.
owner Joanna Broderick
email [email protected]
blog The Public Ledger
* Any corrections or wrong data, please notify by email.