Methodology & source manifest
Everything on the Department of Labor monitor derives from public records — the DOL FY2027 Budget in Brief, OMB's Historical Tables, the USAspending API, and the reachable DOL Agency Financial Report / KPMG Independent Auditors' Reports. This page is the audit trail: method, sources, validation, and every flag.
Method
Mandatory vs. discretionary
The cardinal rule for DOL. Most DOL spending is MANDATORY — the Unemployment Trust Fund (state UI benefits and administration), plus Workers' Compensation (FECA / Black Lung / Energy Employees), PBGC, and Trade Adjustment Assistance — set by law and driven by the economy, not annual appropriations, and the Unemployment Trust Fund alone is several times the entire discretionary budget. DISCRETIONARY (Employment & Training / WIOA, the worker-protection agencies, ILAB, BLS, and departmental S&E) is what Congress sets each year. This monitor reports the mandatory accounts in their own frame and the discretionary agency groups in another, and never sums them into a single “DOL budget” figure. The Unemployment Trust Fund swings with the labor market — into the hundreds of billions of obligations in the FY2020-2021 pandemic.
The discretionary reconciliation
The discretionary spine is the FY2027 Budget in Brief's Summary of Discretionary Funds (p. 37). Every agency group's Budget Authority sums, to the dollar per fiscal year, to the published Total Department of Labor Discretionary Funds ($13.60B FY25 / $13.66B FY26 / $11.06B FY27) — asserted at build time. Separately, the All Purpose Table department frame foots Total Discretionary + Total Mandatory to the published Grand Total, also to the dollar. The two published discretionary totals (the Summary-of-Discretionary- Funds total vs the All Purpose Table's “TOTAL, DISCRETIONARY”) differ by the FY2027 legislative proposals and CTE advance scoring — both carried, the difference flagged, not absorbed.
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. OMB Table 5.2 reports agency budget authority from FY1976 forward; the Department of Labor was established in 1913, so the series is the modern reported history, not the founding — pre-1976 years are not in the source and are not fabricated. The audit layer carries the qualified-opinion record (each year since FY2022, scoped to the pandemic UI estimates, with one material weakness over the Unemployment Trust Fund) explicitly, alongside the historical clean run.