Methodology & source manifest
Everything on the Department of Agriculture monitor derives from public records — the USDA FY2027 Budget Summary, OMB's Historical Tables, the USAspending API, and reachable USDA OIG / GAO oversight documents. This page is the audit trail: method, sources, validation, and every flag.
Method
Mandatory vs. discretionary
The cardinal rule for USDA. Most USDA spending is MANDATORY — the nutrition-assistance entitlements (SNAP and the Child Nutrition Programs), the Federal crop-insurance program, and the farm-commodity / Commodity Credit Corporation programs — set by law, not annual appropriations, and far larger than everything else. DISCRETIONARY (WIC, the Forest Service, research, rural development, food safety, departmental operations) is what Congress sets each year. This monitor reports the two in separate frames and never sums them into a single “USDA budget” figure. SNAP alone — the single largest program — is also the source of USDA's audit qualification.
The band reconciliation
The spine is built from the FY2027 Budget Summary Overview figures: New Budget Authority (Figure OV-1) and Outlays (Figure OV-2). The mandatory + discretionary (+ supplemental) bands re-add, per fiscal year, to the published USDA totals ($250B / $224B / $206B BA; $227B / $239B / $224B outlays) — asserted at build time within the figure's whole-$B rounding, and flagged where the published rounded total differs (never absorbed). The dense two-column appendix per-agency tables do not extract reliably and are not hand-keyed — an honest scope limit, flagged rather than papered over with approximations.
Source documents & validation ledger
The history layer is shown in nominal dollars only — OMB Historical Table 5.2 publishes no constant-dollar basis, and no deflator is synthesized. The audit layer states USDA's qualified opinion (FY2024 & FY2023) and its SNAP basis explicitly; no clean streak is invented.