How this is built
Every figure is reproduced from an official public source. Nothing here is estimated, modelled or filled in. If a number is missing, it is missing.
Sources
| Source | What it provides |
|---|---|
| U.S. Census — State Government Finances https://api.census.gov/data/timeseries/govsstatefin |
Money in and out for the 50 state governments, FY2022. |
| U.S. Census — State & Local Government Finances https://api.census.gov/data/timeseries/govslocalfin |
District of Columbia only, consolidated state+local. |
| USAspending.gov https://api.usaspending.gov |
Federal child-welfare awards FY2023 (CFDA 93.658, 93.659, 93.090, 93.472). |
| OpenStates v3 https://v3.openstates.org |
Bills and recorded votes, each jurisdiction's own latest session. |
Caveats that change what a number means
- Census amounts are published in thousands of dollars and are converted here to whole dollars.
- Insurance trust (pensions, unemployment, workers' compensation) is reported separately. Folding it into general revenue overstates both sides.
- The District of Columbia performs both state and local functions, so its figures are state+local consolidated and are not strictly comparable with the state-government-only figures for the 50 states.
- Aggregate rows (Census) and award rows (USAspending) are different grains and are never summed together.
- 'Public welfare' is a broad Census function, wider than child welfare alone.
Children’s privacy
The public product contains no child-level data at all. It is aggregate money and aggregate counts, which cannot identify anyone. Case-level records (AFCARS/NCANDS) are access-controlled by the federal archive and are not part of this site. Before publication, any count of children below ten is suppressed, so no family can be identified by arithmetic. That rule runs at the export boundary, in code, on every build — not as a promise.
Audit
The pipeline is reproducible: the same scripts, run against the same public APIs, rebuild every number on this site. That reproducibility is the audit — anyone can check a figure against the source rather than taking it on trust.