Just before you head out on a trip someplace you have never before visited, odds are good you will pull up WAZE or Google Maps on your cell phone to get directions. Type in your starting point and the address of your destination, and then a couple of clicks later, bingo, you've got a map showing you every detail you need to get there.
But just try that with the federal budget, as OpenTheBooks (OTB) recently did, and you quickly discover two genuinely disturbing facts. Here's how OTB described it:
It’s become clear that Americans need an exhaustive map of the federal government and how much spending at each agency has grown over time.
When we began that work, we immediately found another problem. Record keeping within the Federal Register, which is supposed to be the definitive guide to government policy, is shockingly bad.
At least 75 agencies listed there are effectively defunct or obsolete; they’ve been subsumed by other entities, renamed, or don’t even exist any longer.
Not only are agencies listed that are long-defunct, but records of those agencies are often not updated, so members of the public must conduct deep research to ascertain the composition of their own government.
But that's not where OTB stopped. In fact, those discoveries provided the spark for yet another much-needed initiative from a group that has already done more than any other nonprofit advocacy group to advance the cause of transparency and accountability in the federal government.
The new initiative is MAPPING GOVERNMENT GROWTH: Agency Data Through the Years.
What OTB is finding, as illustrated by the immense data compilation for the first 50 agencies included in the MGG database, is that one pattern is crystal clear — once launched, spending on federal programs heads in one direction, UP!
That's regardless of whether the problem for which a particular program was created is getting better or worse, the spending curve heads steadily upward. Take the National Institutes for Health (NIH), which first opened its doors in 1962.
Measured at five-year intervals, NIH spending went up at every point on the graph from 1962 through 2010. In that 2010-2015 interval during the Obama administration, NIH spending went down, from $33 billion in 2010 to $29.3 billion in 2015.
Spending for NIH went down another $34 million in 2016, but then in the first year of the Trump administration, and ever since then, the blizzard of NIH spending became more and more intense.
Now, compare the upward spending curve with the number of tax-paid federal employees working at NIH, which in the MGG database begins in the year 2000, with 16,937. It grew again in each of the next two five-year intervals, peaking at 19,435 in 2010.
The total dropped marginally in the following two five-year intervals, bottoming at 18,667. But in the most recent interval, new hires have poured into NIH, reaching 20,570 in the last year of the Joe Biden administration.
In other words, the headcount at NIH has grown by 21.5%, while spending exploded by 301%! No wonder President Ronald Reagan famously said that "the closest thing to eternal life we will ever see here on Earth is a federal program."
Here's another example, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which provided significant evidence of being used by Biden as a political tool to punish voters in the Western part of North Carolina who tend to vote Republican:
What about the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)? They’ve come under fire for shortfalls in their Disaster Relief Fund, and for spending big sums to house migrants in hotels. Well, their employee count actually did rise significantly – it’s just that their spending still outpaced it by miles.
FEMA headcount grew 290 percent. But spending swelled more than seven times faster – by 2,096 percent! There has to be a better way to get aid to disaster zones that’s more timely and efficient – and get away from mission creep like migrant housing.
President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk have been subjected to barrage after barrage of hyper-criticism by Democrats on Capitol Hill, the Left side of the non-profit advocacy community (that has benefitted from billions of federal tax dollars), and the Mainstream Media (MSM) for unleashing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The DOGE whiz kids doing the digital audit of federal agencies are turning up example after example of spending that either is an outrageous misuse of hard-earned tax dollars, such as paying for trans or sex-reassignment surgery in Latin America, or the recipients of which cannot be identified, thanks to criminally negligent accounting.
The DOGE audit is scheduled to be completed on July 4, 2026. Considering the tremendously useful transparency tools now and soon to become available, is there any remaining reason not to recruit private individuals to serve as citizen auditors?
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