Methodology & source manifest
Everything on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration monitor derives from public records — the NASA FY2027 Budget Estimates (President's Budget Request Summary), OMB's Historical Tables, the USAspending API, and reachable NASA OIG / GAO oversight documents. This page is the audit trail: method, sources, validation, and every flag.
Method
Discretionary vs. WFTC mandatory
The cardinal rule for NASA. NASA is funded almost entirely through annual DISCRETIONARY appropriations — the “NASA Total” that Congress sets each year, organized by account and mission directorate. The Working Families Tax Cut Act (P.L. 119-21, §40005) provided $9.995B in special MANDATORY appropriations, available through FY2032, for Mars, Artemis, and Moon-to-Mars. This monitor reports the WFTC program in its own frame as planned obligations by fiscal year, and never folds it into the discretionary NASA Total. Conflating the FY2027 WFTC planned obligation with the discretionary request would be the one error that discredits a NASA budget monitor — so it is structurally impossible here.
The account reconciliation
The discretionary spine is the FY2027 President's Budget Request Summary (Budget Authority by account). Every appropriation account's Budget Authority sums, to the dollar per fiscal year, to the published “NASA Total” ($24,838.3M FY25 / $24,438.3M FY26 / $18,829.1M FY27) — asserted at build time. The FY2027 mission-directorate and sub-account rows reconcile to each account's published request within the source's own one-decimal ($0.1M) rounding — flagged where they round (the SSMS sub-lines), never absorbed, and thrown beyond the tolerance. FY2025 and FY2026 sub-line detail is shown as “--” in the source and is therefore not broken out (not treated as zero).
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 series begins FY1976, where that table starts, so NASA's pre-1976 Apollo-era peak is not shown (omitted, not fabricated). The audit layer carries the standing GAO acquisition-management high-risk designation explicitly alongside the 14-year clean streak on the financial statements.