SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
With the Trump administration and its DOGE team moving quickly to make big cuts across so many agencies, it has been hard for the usual government watchdogs to know what's really going on. So they are making new tools. Mary Childs from our Planet Money podcast tells us the story of one of them.
MARY CHILDS, BYLINE: Lauren Bauer is a researcher at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank. She pays a lot of attention to government social programs, so when the administration started talking about spending cuts, she knew exactly where to check to see just what was being cut.
LAUREN BAUER: I had experience with something that's called the Daily Treasury Statement.
CHILDS: The Daily Treasury Statement. It's a simple PDF published every business day showing how much money the U.S. Treasury has sent and to whom through its secure payment system. And this is not a tremendously popular document. It's a small accounting report published quietly on a Treasury website. She showed it to me.
BAUER: This is fiscaldata.treasury.gov. So if you click it, it opens. Look, I've already done it once today. You can get the Daily Treasury Statement.
CHILDS: This PDF has a very official, fancy Treasury insignia at the top. It's two columns. On the left, deposits, incoming money. On the right, money going out to Medicaid and Veterans Affairs and Customs and Border Protection, the Library of Congress, the SEC.
BAUER: People could see whether the Trump administration had actually stopped the flow of funds.
RACHEL SNYDERMAN: That's extraordinary access the public has. And I think it demonstrates the values that our government does place on transparency and communication.
CHILDS: That's Rachel Snyderman. She's a managing director at the Bipartisan Policy Center, and she traces this kind of digital access back to bipartisan laws starting in 2006 that mandated that all federal spending data be displayed publicly online in one place.
SNYDERMAN: Before that time, there was really no single way to track government spending across agencies. And it made it really difficult to use data to inform evidence-based policy decisions.
CHILDS: You know, so American citizens can see if their tax dollars are being spent wisely or are being wasted, because if the public doesn't know the facts, Snyderman says, it can't make informed decisions. Transparency is crucial to a working democracy.
SNYDERMAN: It's really powerful what can be done with all of this data.
CHILDS: So when Lauren Bauer of Brookings started to see reports of funding freezes and that maybe USAID was being defunded, Bauer and her team decided to take that Daily Treasury Statement data and make it into a tool people could read themselves.
BAUER: We built, like, the roughest version of it basically on Day 1.
CHILDS: Her team took hundreds of older Treasury statements and set up a way to automatically add the new data as it is published each day. The result is an interactive graph showing over time what money went to each line item. And on Monday, February 3, they hit refresh and one of the lines, the one for USAID, drops to zero.
BAUER: That was when it became clear that this tool could, in fact, show that the money was not sent to USAID.
CHILDS: So even without official announcements, Bauer can see precisely what programs are still getting money, which aren't and what's changing down to the day. Mary Childs, NPR News.
DETROW: On the latest episode of Planet Money, you can hear more about the act of impoundment and what money a U.S. president can legally withhold from spending.
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