Methodology & source manifest
Everything on the Department of Commerce monitor derives from public records — the CRS FY2027 CJS appropriations tables, the OMB FY2027 Budget Appendix and Historical Tables, the USAspending API, and reachable OIG / GAO audit reports. This page is the audit trail: method, sources, validation, and every flag.
Method
USPTO is fee-funded — gross vs. net
The Patent and Trademark Office carries roughly $5B of gross spending authority that is fully offset by the patent and trademark user fees it collects — so its net appropriation is $0. This monitor carries every bureau as gross, its own offsetting receipts, and the resulting net, and only the NET enters the department discretionary headline. Folding USPTO's gross into the department total would overstate Commerce's appropriated base by about a third; the gross/offset/net columns keep the fee-funding legible rather than hidden.
Census is cyclical — the decennial clock
The Census Bureau's budget is not a flat baseline: it ramps in the years before each constitutionally mandated decennial census — the next is the 2030 Census — and collapses afterward. Bureaus flagged cyclical move with that clock, so a year-over-year swing is structural, not a policy change. The history arc shows the same rhythm as a decennial sawtooth, distinct from the one-time FY2022 CHIPS spike; reading a Census change like an ordinary appropriation is the cardinal error in the Commerce budget.
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. It is agency-wide budget authority, which includes the cyclical decennial ramps and the one-time FY2022 CHIPS appropriation; neither is conflated with the annual discretionary base.