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.”
The use of a military counter-drone laser on the southwest border this week—which prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to abruptly close the airspace over El Paso, Texas—will be a “case study” on the complex web of authorities needed to employ such weapons near civilian areas and the consequences of agencies…
