Methodology & source manifest
Everything on the Department of the Treasury monitor derives from public records — the Treasury FY2027 budget request, the OMB FY2027 Budget Appendix, OMB's Historical Tables, the USAspending API, and reachable GAO audit reports. This page is the audit trail: method, sources, validation, and every flag.
Method
Mandatory vs. discretionary — why interest is held apart
Treasury's reported budget authority is dominated by mandatory, non-program money — chiefly Interest on the Public Debt, a permanent and indefinite payment on money already borrowed. At roughly 88% of Treasury's total budget authority, interest is about a hundred times the entire discretionary program budget. This monitor leads with that distinction and keeps the two frames strictly separate: the discretionary program budget (the bureaus, IRS-dominated) is one number; interest on the debt and the mandatory tax-credit accounts are another. Interest is never folded into program spending, and the program budget is never swallowed by the agency-wide total.
What validates, and the honest gap
The discretionary side validates to the dollar: every keyed appropriation account sums to its published bureau-group subtotal; Management & Financial + the IRS equal the published base discretionary; and the full chain — adding the asset-forfeiture rescission, the international programs, and the international-accounts rescission — ties to the published Total, Treasury, per fiscal year (FY2025 / FY2026 / FY2027). The mandatory side is NOT summed to a grand total: there is no single citable FY2027 mandatory total table, so the largest accounts are shown and the all-in anchor is the OMB Historical Table 5.2 total Treasury budget authority. That gap is stated here, not papered over with an inferred sum.
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 (mostly interest on the debt), not the discretionary program budget; the two are never conflated.