Methodology & source manifest
Everything on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission monitor derives from public records — the NRC FY2027 Congressional Budget Justification (as reported in CRS R48944), the USAspending API, and reachable NRC OIG / GAO oversight documents. This page is the audit trail: method, sources, validation, and every flag.
Method
Fee-funded: gross, fee recovery, net
The NRC is largely fee-funded. Under NEIMA (P.L. 115-439) it recovers roughly all of its appropriation from fees on its licensees, booked as offsetting collections. So this monitor carries three frames and keeps them strictly separate: gross budget authority (the program total, ~$0.9B for FY2027), the NEIMA fee recovery offset (~$0.76B), and the net appropriation (~$0.14B — what general appropriations actually fund). Net is never shown without gross and the fee-recovery offset. The business-line gross rows reconcile to the published gross topline (CRS $0.1M rounding flagged, not absorbed), and the identity net = gross − fee recovery is asserted to the dollar. Folding gross into a headline would overstate the appropriated base six- to sevenfold; the three columns keep the fee-funding legible rather than hidden.
Why the history arc uses USAspending obligations
The usual OMB agency-history source does not exist for the NRC. OMB Historical Table 5.2 (Budget Authority by Agency) publishes no NRC row— the agency is folded into “Other Independent Agencies (On-Budget).” Rather than fabricate a split, the history arc uses the NRC-specific USAspending agency obligations series (toptier 031) instead — disclosed, not papered over. And USAspending's own total_budgetary_resources for the NRC is excluded as non-spending: it is corrupted by the Nuclear Waste Fund financing-account balance, which shows as trillions of dollars. Only the clean agency-obligations figure drives the series; both gaps are flagged in the layers below, not silently handled.
Source documents & validation ledger
The history layer is shown in nominal dollars only — no deflator is synthesized — and it is gross agency obligations (execution), not the net appropriation after NEIMA fee recovery. Gross, fee recovery, and net are kept distinct throughout the monitor.