Methodology & source manifest
Everything on the Environmental Protection Agency monitor derives from public records — the EPA FY2027 Budget in Brief, the OMB FY2027 Budget Historical Tables, the USAspending API, and reachable EPA OIG / GAO audit reports. This page is the audit trail: method, sources, validation, and every flag.
Method
One dimension, all discretionary
EPA's budget has a single dimension: the statutory appropriation account. Unlike a multi-bureau department, there is no organization or component lattice to reconcile — every dollar sits in one of roughly ten appropriation accounts, and the whole agency is almost entirely discretionary. That makes the spine simple to validate: the appropriation accounts sum to the Budget-in-Brief's published Agency Total, and this monitor recomputes that sum to the dollar (thousand) rather than trusting the printed total. There is no mandatory-vs-discretionary split and no component roll-up to get wrong.
Base vs. the one-time infrastructure surge
The history arc's FY2022 spike — an order of magnitude above the surrounding years — is the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act pushing one-time water and State Revolving Fund money through EPA. It is a one-time appropriation, not a new baseline, and reading it as a trend is the cardinal error in the EPA budget. The two figures are kept separate throughout: the history layer (OMB Table 5.2) includes the IIJA/IRA supplementals and is disclosed as such, while the appropriated topline and account spine deliberately exclude them per the Budget-in-Brief's own terminology note.
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 one-time FY2022 IIJA/IRA infrastructure surge; that surge is never conflated with the annual discretionary base tracked on the appropriations view.