Editorial & Corrections Policy

How Pages Are Produced

PlainSpending's state, county, and agency pages are generated from documented public datasets, principally USASpending.gov, the official federal spending data source maintained by the U.S. Department of the Treasury under the DATA Act of 2014. We load Treasury's published figures into a structured database and render each page from that database. The numbers you see, total federal spending, spending per capita, award-type breakdowns, and rankings, are computed directly from the official records, not hand-typed and not invented by us.

This is a data-publishing model: one template renders thousands of pages so every state, county, and agency is covered consistently. The editorial work goes into the data pipeline, the methodology, and the written guides, not into hand-authoring near-identical pages, which would add no accuracy and invite inconsistency.

Sourcing Standards

• Primary sources only. Spending figures come from USASpending.gov's published award and account data. Contract- and grant-termination figures come from the DOGE.gov savings API. Our methodology names each dataset and its vintage.
• Attribution in context. Each data page names its source and reference fiscal year near the figures and links to the methodology.
• Claimed figures are labeled as claimed. DOGE savings are amounts reported by DOGE.gov, not independently audited; every page that shows them says so. We do not present a claimed figure as a verified one.
• No invented data. Where a value is unavailable for an entity, the page omits it rather than filling the gap with a guess.
• Place-of-performance basis. State and county totals reflect awards whose place of performance falls in that jurisdiction; we state this basis rather than implying a different denominator.

Update Cadence

USASpending.gov publishes federal spending data on a rolling basis, and figures for a fiscal year continue to settle after the year closes as agencies report de-obligations and Treasury reconciles accounts. We refresh our database from the source and recompute every derived figure; the reference fiscal year (currently FY2025) is shown on the data pages and in the methodology. Between refreshes the numbers are stable because the source itself does not change.

Corrections Process

If a figure on PlainSpending looks wrong, please tell us. Because our pages are generated from official data, a genuine error almost always traces back to either the source data or our processing of it, so this is how we handle a report:

1. Report. Email us through the contact page with the page URL and the number that looks off.
2. Trace. We compare the displayed value against the source record and our processing step to find where the discrepancy arises.
3. Fix at the source. If the error is ours (a processing or display bug), we fix the pipeline and re-render every affected page, not just the one reported.
4. Attribute upstream errors. If the figure faithfully reflects the source but the source itself is wrong, we say so and link to the upstream record so you can see the same value we did.

Independence

PlainSpending is an independent publisher and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the U.S. government, the Department of the Treasury, or the DOGE office. We publish the public data as faithfully as we can and label our own analysis as analysis.