Government · Fiscal transparency

Your taxes fund every agency. You audit none of them.

Public spending is scattered and unaudited. ImpactLine brings every federal, state and local budget into one workspace with line-item detail and citations.

Who it's for

One dataset. A viewfor every reader.

Residents, researchers and analysts each get the view built for the questions they ask — from a single city line item to a fifty-state comparison.

Residents
Local budget view showing a city's spending by department
Researchers
Agency spending compared across fiscal years with source citations
Analysts
Side-by-side benchmark of comparable jurisdictions

Track how government money is spent

Follow your taxes from the federal budget down to your city's line items.

Explore budgets, agencies, and public spending

Compare agencies and fiscal years, then cite the filing behind every figure.

Compare fiscal data across states, cities, and years

Put one jurisdiction next to comparable ones on a single normalised schema.

Inside a jurisdiction

Four ways intothe same budget.

Open any government on ImpactLine and the same set of tools is waiting, whether it is a federal department or a city of forty thousand.

See every line of the budget

  • Every line, not just totals

    Each item of spending gets its own row, with the agency and fund it belongs to.

  • Open up any total

    Start at a department total and go straight to the individual programmes inside it.

  • Always dated

    Every figure shows the fiscal year it belongs to and the filing it was published in.

Explore federal spending
Budget ledger view listing appropriations by agency and programme
How it works

From a headline numberto the filing behind it.

The same three moves work on every government on the site — a city department reads the same way as a federal agency.

  1. 01

    Pick a government

    Start with the federal budget, or go straight to your state or city. Every jurisdiction opens on the same overview, so you never have to learn a new layout.

  2. 02

    Open the budget

    Revenue, appropriations and agency-level detail, broken down so you can see what sits underneath each total instead of stopping at the headline figure.

  3. 03

    Follow it to the source

    Each view shows the fiscal year it covers and points back to the published record behind it, so you can read the original for yourself.

FAQ

Before you dig in,the common questions.

Short answers on what ImpactLine costs, where the figures come from and which governments are covered.

Yes. Reading budgets on ImpactLine costs nothing and doesn't require an account.

From each government's own published filings and data services. Every view shows the fiscal year it covers and links back to the record it was drawn from, so you can read the original yourself.

We don't add estimates or fill in values a government hasn't published. Figures are presented as they were published for the fiscal year shown, reorganised into a common structure so jurisdictions can be compared side by side.

It depends on the government. Some publish continuously, others once a budget cycle. Each page states the fiscal year the figures belong to, so you always know which year you're reading.

All 50 states have reported FY2024 general expenditures from the Census Bureau, with FY2023 comparisons and downloads. Six existing state dashboards and Mississippi also have enacted-budget records. Federal coverage and four city dashboards retain their own sources and fiscal periods. The city directory also includes 35,395 municipal and town/township identities from Census public-use files, with source flags and reporting limits on individual finance entries.

No. ImpactLine is independent and not affiliated with any government or agency. It reads public records that governments publish and presents them in one place.

It's your money. Go and look at it.

Start with the federal budget, then narrow to your state and city —the same breakdown, the same sources, all the way down.