The federal government launched a new site allowing users to track spending across communities, recipients, and other categories. The site, beta.usaspending.gov, mostly under construction and “coming soon,” visualizes a lot of its data in maps and charts and could be a conduit to more federal transparency. The website displays on its homepage some top level information from the entire budget in cleanly designed, infographic-style bits. For example, the very first banner tells visitors in 2016, the government spent $3.85 trillion. This spending is broken into categories, which the site breaks down graphically into sections. National Defense and Medicare are tied at second and third place of the top five categories, each clocking in at 14.9 percent of 2016’s spending, or $595 billion. According to Reuters, the site is the result of a three-year project and comprised of “400 different data sets from more than 100 federal agencies, extracting spending information from thousands of divergent computer systems across the government.”
US Space Command Should Always Be Led by a Guardian
Sept. 12, 2026
General Stephen Whiting took command of U.S. Space Command in January 2024, and if customary three-year tenures hold, his tour would end in January 2027. The question now before the President and Senate is who should follow him? Whoever they choose, it has to be a Guardian—and so should every successor…
