Methodology & source manifest
Everything on the USCIS monitor derives from public records — the DHS Budget-in-Brief, the appropriations explanatory statements, and the USAspending API. This page is the audit trail: method, sources, and validation.
Fee-funded vs appropriated
USCIS is largely fee-funded. The four mandatory fee accounts — the Immigration Examinations Fee Account, the H-1B Nonimmigrant Petitioner Account, the Fraud Prevention and Detection Account, and the EB-5 Integrity Fund — provide the overwhelming majority of its resources, while the appropriated net-discretionary base is small and shrinking. This monitor keeps the two as separate dialects: fee spending is a mandatory estimate funded by collections, not an appropriation. They are reconciled to Total Budget Authority with the split always shown, and are never folded into a single conflated headline.
The FY2026 continuing-resolution caveat
The FY2027 Budget-in-Brief presents FY2026 at a Full-Year Continuing Resolution level, not as a separately enacted appropriation. We label that column “FY2026 (Full-Year CR)” throughout rather than “enacted.” The most recent year with a true full-year enacted DHS appropriation is FY2024 (P.L. 118-47); its program-level detail — shown on the budget page — comes from the appropriations explanatory statement and sums exactly to the appropriation total carried in the Budget-in-Brief.
Self-validation
Every subtotal in the budget spine re-adds to the dollar at build time against the printed DHS Budget-in-Brief figures; the ingest throws on any mismatch. The fee accounts sum to Total Mandatory/Fees, the appropriated accounts sum to Net Discretionary, and the two dialects reconcile to Total Budget Authority — across all three fiscal columns, including full-time-equivalent (FTE) counts. The FY2024 program-level detail sums to its appropriation total.