Research tools / Map
Follow the dollar
What the Pentagon requested and what it committed on contracts. Each view has its own years, units and source receipts.
The two rivers use different measurement systems. Their totals cannot be added together, divided into each other, or reconciled into a single number. Each block opens to its source.
Budget river — intent
USD thousands — FY2026 President's Budget (R-1 + P-1).
A request for one fiscal year, as published in the justification books. It is a plan, not a payment.
Spend river — obligations
USD — DoD prime contract obligations for the selected fiscal year (FY2017–FY2026; FY2026 is a partial year).
Money committed on contract actions, which may pay for work requested in an earlier year — and often does.
How budget years and contract years differ
A request dollar is not an obligation dollar, and a budget year is not an obligation year: multi-year appropriations, continuing resolutions and contract timing all put the two on different clocks. So the two rivers here are drawn to their own scales and neither is presented as explaining the other. Charts that show one total for “defense spending” have usually chosen one of these systems without saying which — the choice is the whole answer, and it is rarely stated.
Where the two can be connected, they are — and how far that gets is measured, not assumed. See the bridge between them below the chart. Each block opens to its citation.
Loading the flow chart…
The bridge between them
The bridge records associations between budget lines and award records. Its coverage is measured in budget request dollars; it does not allocate a contract's obligations to a particular program line.
Budget→contractor links are drawn for 461 of 536 crosswalked PEs — 59.1% of the FY2026 request is not yet crosswalked: an honest gap, not an absence of contractors. why is so little bridged? →
An appropriation account can fund many program elements, so an account match alone cannot identify which line paid for a contract. Stronger links need evidence about the program itself. See the evidence and coverage limits →
And the lines themselves move
Program elements can be renamed, realigned and merged. Before comparing one across two years, check its identity history. The separate lineage map uses equal-width links: a cited relationship carries no claim about the amount transferred. One funded line, all the names it wore →