Lauren Bauer
Appearances
Planet Money
The Big Government Money Pipe Freeze
That's a really good question. I'm going to write that down as a thing we should do.
Planet Money
The Big Government Money Pipe Freeze
I am not worried if someone pulls my access to this, because if they do, then that is actually a paradigm shift of lights out into the public's insight into how much money the Treasury has. and where it's coming in and where it's going. And so I actually feel quite proud that we've pulled something that I dare you to remove the public's access to the federal government's balance sheet.
Planet Money
The Big Government Money Pipe Freeze
Did they restart things? It just, it got very confusing and we didn't know what the answer was.
Planet Money
The Big Government Money Pipe Freeze
And so I had experience from COVID with something that's called the Daily Treasury Statement.
Planet Money
The Big Government Money Pipe Freeze
You can imagine when there's this empirical question, did the Trump administration stop the flow of funds, that we had a resource here that nobody really knew about.
Planet Money
The Big Government Money Pipe Freeze
Yeah, it is. So what you see here, so if you click it, it opens. Look, I've already done it once today. You can get the daily treasury statement.
Planet Money
The Big Government Money Pipe Freeze
And it shows the cash balance of the U.S., like what is in the Treasury general account, which is like the U.S. 's bank account. It basically looks like a balance sheet.
Planet Money
The Big Government Money Pipe Freeze
And on the left-hand side is the deposits. So like when you pay taxes into the treasury, your taxes get totaled on that day into an incoming line item. But what is important for this moment is the withdrawals. And so it varies in level of detail, but we have on the withdrawal side, all of the outlays that treasury is making to departments, to the other branches of government, to programs.
Planet Money
The Big Government Money Pipe Freeze
You can see if the Trump administration is funding the judiciary. You can see if they are funding Congress. So it will be able to show many things that I think now are, you know, worth monitoring. And so we were in a staff meeting and we're just talking about this. And I was like, oh, there's an API.
Planet Money
The Big Government Money Pipe Freeze
We can build something that people can use because the Treasury statements, it's like it's a PDF. You only see one at a time. It like replaces, you know, it's a website where. That day's PDF at 4 p.m. gets replaced with a different PDF. But there's an API under that.
Planet Money
The Big Government Money Pipe Freeze
And if we could grab the information, then we could reproduce it in a form where people could see whether the Trump administration had actually stopped the flow of funds.
Planet Money
The Big Government Money Pipe Freeze
Like if I were writing a paper that were to accompany this, I would do a lot more stuff. You know, like seasonal adjustments, rolling averages. But... We didn't because we had to go fast because there was this incredibly open, like important, open, empirical question, did money stop flowing? And the way to see that is the straightforward way.
Planet Money
The Big Government Money Pipe Freeze
We built like the roughest version of it basically on day one. And so we do a Monday morning research staff meeting. And so everyone on that call said, Can I swear? Oh, yeah, please. Okay, great. So this is my whole staff, and I'm looking at the update while everyone's giving their little reports, and I go, oh, they actually defunded USAID.
Planet Money
The Big Government Money Pipe Freeze
And so everyone saw my face go like, oh, my God, the thing we thought we could do, it did. And so that was when it became clear that this tool could in fact show that the money was not sent to USAID because they didn't request it.
Planet Money
The Big Government Money Pipe Freeze
It is, right. So if you can see here. This is the one-year chart.
Planet Money
The Big Government Money Pipe Freeze
You know, Snap looks a little low. Maybe, but it bounced right back up, which is consistent with its thing, with its overlines. But, you know, if a reporter, who is you, or any other reporter were to call me and say, did you see something in the Snap line that is concerning to you? I would say, not yet, but I'm watching it.