There has been chaotic uncertainty around billions of dollars allocated by Congress. The Trump administration ordered a pause on — and review of — certain types of federal assistance. A judge blocked that freeze. But reports continue to emerge that certain parts of the government were not getting their money.As a result, hundreds and hundreds of people have lost their jobs, clinics and daycares across the country have been left wondering if they'll have money to operate, retirees have worried about getting their payments.But the United States is a country of transparency. And if you know where to look, there is a way to cut through all the confusion. Because there's this one big pipe from the US Treasury through which most federal spending flows.So, today, we discover a way to go look at that money pipe. And we'll look at some of the people and the programs on the other end of that pipe. And we tell you about a tool (it's at The Hamilton Project! Right here.) that you can use to follow along from home, right now, as this gigantic federal spending story continues developing and developing.Find more Planet Money: Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.Listen free at these links: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts.Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the giant money pipe mentioned?
There is a gigantic money pipe. This unfathomably large hose through which hundreds of millions of dollars flow every single day.
At least that's how we think of it. More officially at the Treasury, it's known as the secure payment system.
the federal government basically runs through that money pipe. Almost 90% of all federal payments flow through it. Payments to Medicaid and Veterans Affairs and Customs and Border Protection.
Payments to the Library of Congress, the SEC, the FCC, the FCIC. That's the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation.
Congress allocates trillions of dollars to go to specific parts of the government. And when those parts of the government need a chunk of their allowance, they request it. And Treasury sends it through the old money pipe. And then a few weeks ago, the pipe, what's the way to put this, got frozen, I guess, partially frozen.
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Chapter 2: How did the Trump administration impact federal funding?
The Trump administration ordered a pause, a freeze on a huge chunk of federal spending on federal assistance, grants and loans and subsidies, that kind of thing. saying, basically, do not request your funds. All of those need to be reviewed.
Then the courts blocked that freeze. But then, reportedly, some parts of the government were still not getting their money. Nobody seemed to know what was happening. And there have been enormous consequences amid all this confusion. Hundreds and hundreds of people lost their jobs. Clinics and daycares across the country don't know if they will have money to operate.
Retirees fretted about getting their payments.
But the United States is a country of transparency. And if you know where to look, there is a way to cut through all the confusion and peer deep into the giant money pipe for answers. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Erika Barris.
And I'm Mary Childs. Today on the show, we go where to look. To that one place with the tiniest bit of information, of facts, in this chaotic stretch of federal action and freezes and unfreezes. We get a strikingly clear look inside the big money pipe through which most federal spending runs. And at some of the people and the programs on the other end of that pipe.
Plus, a tool you can use right now if you want to follow along at home as this gigantic federal spending story continues developing and developing.
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Chapter 3: What tools can help track federal spending?
When everybody was running around trying to figure out what was happening with federal government money, apparently folks at the Brookings Institution, well, they were kind of running around too. Did they stop certain things?
Did they restart things? It just, it got very confusing and we didn't know what the answer was.
Lauren Bauer works for something called the Hamilton Project within Brookings. They're a nonpartisan group. They do policy research.
And, you know, pretty tough to do policy research when you have no idea what is happening with federal spending.
But Lauren remembered something, another chaotic moment, when she'd also wanted to check government spending.
And so I had experience from COVID with something that's called the Daily Treasury Statement.
The Daily Treasury Statement, the DTS if you want to sound really cool, is just one of a gazillion documents put out by the federal government.
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Chapter 4: How does the Daily Treasury Statement work?
In terms of popularity, it gets Googled way less than the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, but maybe slightly more than the Short-Term Cash Investment Report, so you know. Not popular.
But what the daily treasury statement does is show how much money flows through the giant government money pipe every single business day. And Lauren thought the daily treasury statement might be the key to everything, to understanding this present moment of spending freezes and unfreezes and confusion.
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.
Can we look at the thing together and you, like, tell me about it? Sure. Let me show you what the actual website is. To be clear, the daily treasury statement is not a secret document. You don't need treasury clearance. You don't need to be a researcher requesting special access.
Real Treasury heads? They'll probably know about this PDF. But it is easily overlooked. It's like the digital equivalent of a piece of paper under a giant stack of papers on your desk. Okay, great.
So this is fiscaldata.treasury.gov.
Love it. Beautiful. And this is a homepage for you, basically. This is like a commonly visited site.
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.
And that's it. You click it, download. It's a PDF. It's like 80 kilobytes, not even close to a full megabyte. There's a new one every business day at 4 p.m.
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Chapter 5: What does transparency in government spending look like?
Rachel says if the public doesn't know the facts, it can't make informed decisions. Transparency is crucial to a working democracy. And this is something we can take for granted here, that of course our government publishes this data. They basically always have. But Rachel says this level of transparency was a choice.
We're really asking the government to open its checkbook every day and to show us what's coming in and what's coming out. That's extraordinary access the public has. And I think it demonstrates the values that our government does place on transparency and communication.
While the government has chosen to have this access, not everybody knows about it or thinks about it.
Right. Like not everyone knows that to find the daily Treasury statement, you need to go to fiscaldata.treasury.gov and then click on one of like eight hyperlinks to dataset details and then click a little download cloud icon to get the actual PDF. But you know who did know? Our girl Lauren Bauer at the Brookings Institution.
So there was Lauren at Brookings a few weeks ago after a lot of confusing headlines over the weekend about federal spending and freezes. When Lauren was like, oh, yeah, the daily Treasury statement.
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.
Like the Treasury's website has an API, which is the computer way of saying a way to turn those daily Treasury statements into something bigger.
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.
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.
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Chapter 6: How did the Daily Treasury Statement become essential during spending freezes?
So they build a basic program to turn all these daily treasury statements into an interactive graph. And in theory, because it's pulling new information once a day, it would allow them some clarity on federal spending in something approximating real time. Of course, that is all assuming that it works at all.
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.
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.
And so that was still an open question at the time.
Oh, yeah. It was an open question.
Yeah. Their daily Treasury statement tracker had shown that all of the money had suddenly stopped flowing to USAID. USAID had been functionally shuttered. And all of this, of course, would become an ongoing legal dispute.
But for Lauren, in that moment, she had seen proof of concept. Watching the daily Treasury statement every day was a way to get real answers about what was happening. And the widget they'd made? It worked. Lauren and her team published the widget and opened it up to the public.
After the break, we take the money pipe tracker on the road for some use cases of who might be tracking the federal money pipe.
We wanted to look at this money pipe monitor tool out in the real world to get a sense of the ways it might be useful and to whom.
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Chapter 7: What was the outcome of tracking the federal money pipe?
Okay, so that is use case one. Use case number two, we're going to call the am I going to get my money or not case.
And in this specific case, it's more like is Stephen Hellman going to get his money or not? I notice you have literally nothing on your walls here.
Chapter 8: Who benefits from tracking federal funding?
Can you, and like maybe an equation, a real beautiful equation on this whiteboard?
What's that? Just some stuff I was scribbling, computing some simple probabilities of some things.
Steve is an assistant math professor at USC. He is supposed to be getting a grant from the National Science Foundation. That grant is for his research into complexity theory.
It's to study some problems in computer science using some math tools. I guess that's the short description. I try to prove what computers can't do. I try to find the limits of computation using math tools.
The grant is for $199,006 over three years. It would pay for a student to work with him, for travel money to attend conferences, and for the summer when he doesn't get a salary. And the university takes some of the money into their budget as well.
But will that money actually come through now? Steve is not sure. There's a lot of uncertainty. Theoretically, the money would start coming March 1st.
We reached out to the NSF. They referred us to their web page about executive orders, which does seem to say the NSF is still requesting its congressionally allotted funds and distributing them. But you know what might be useful? Look at the money pipe tracker. We pull up the graph of outgoing money to the National Science Foundation to see if there are any signs.
And looking at it, you can sort of see the story of the last couple weeks pretty clearly.
Let's see. A lot of volatility. Looks like I see a big, well, sort of levels out, drops down to zero, and then a big spike after that.
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