About Fiscal Receipts

Mission

Fiscal Receipts makes federal defense spending legible: every budget figure, contract award, and lobbying filing is linked back to its exact source document. Our goal is to reduce the distance between a number on a government website and the original document that number came from — to zero.

Correlation is not causation

Fiscal Receiptsshows lobbying expenditure and federal contract obligations side by side for the same company family, and identifies which budget programs a company's lobbyists mentioned in their filings. This is presented for transparency and research purposes.

We do not assert that lobbying caused any particular award.The relationship between lobbying activity and federal contracts involves many confounding factors, including competitive procurement rules, technical requirements, past performance, and market structure. Our data quantifies the lobbying activity and the awards; inference about causal relationships requires the reader's own analysis and judgment.

The budget-to-contract crosswalk is also an inference (not a direct database join), tiered by confidence level. See the full methodology for all confidence tiers and known limitations.

Corrections Policy

We follow a supersede-not-delete policy. If a figure is found to be wrong:

The incorrect record is marked superseded — it is never deleted.
A new corrected record is published and becomes the current value.
Existing permalinks continue to resolve permanently. They show the current best value alongside the correction history.

To report an error, include the citation that contradicts the published figure (document title, page, and the value you believe is correct). We will investigate and respond.

Data Provenance

All data originates from official government sources: comptroller.defense.gov, USAspending.gov, lda.senate.gov, paymentaccuracy.gov, gao.gov, and Census Bureau population estimates. We do not manufacture, estimate, or interpolate figures — we extract and link what the government publishes.

Every rendered number is in one of three citation states: directly cited (linked to a PDF page, workbook cell, or API endpoint), XML-path traced (zero-dollar line from structured budget XML), or citation tier pending (dataset where row-level linkage is a work in progress). No number is displayed without disclosing which state it is in. See methodology for details.

Open Data

All underlying datasets are available as Parquet exports with full provenance metadata — see the Downloads page. The source data pipeline is open-source. Researchers, journalists, and oversight advocates are encouraged to build on it.