Brief · Index
Analysis
Every brief published here, newest first. Each answers one question from the data behind a topic, with its queries and the values they returned checked in beside it.
- PPP loans approved in August 2020 were charged off 20 times as often as the program's first loans
PPP loans ·
Of the Paycheck Protection Program loans SBA approved in August 2020, 13.6% had been charged off by September 30, 2024. Of those approved in April 2020, the program's first month, 0.7% had.
- Five stars, by who owns the hospital: 44.6% of rated VA hospitals, 5.0% of for-profits
Health ·
Of the hospitals CMS rates, five stars go to 44.6% of VA hospitals, 13.2% of private nonprofits and 5.0% of for-profits.
- Bank offices fell 23.6% from their 2009 peak
Banks and credit unions ·
FDIC-insured banks and savings institutions had 75,545 offices in the fifty states and the District of Columbia at 30 June 2026, by the FDIC's Summary of Deposits. That is 23,398 fewer than the 98,943 of 2009, the most in any year the survey covers: a fall of 23.6%.
- Where a published federal salary is highest, by OPM's locality pay area
Federal salaries ·
Where a federal civilian employee is stationed decides part of what the job pays. The General Schedule adds a locality payment for each of the pay areas OPM defines, and OPM's workforce file records the area of every employee whose duty station it publishes. Across the 58 areas in the month this hub leads with, the median published salary is highest in Washington-Baltimore-Arlington, at $154,263 over 191,325 salaries. It is next highest in San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, at $138,007. The lowest is Fresno-Madera-Hanford, at $64,239 over 7,518 salaries. Against the national median of $110,956, 20 of the areas are higher.
- Who the House pays, by the names on its own payroll
Federal salaries ·
The House of Representatives publishes every payroll line it pays, by the name of the person paid, in its quarterly Statement of Disbursements. Added up by name over the calendar year, the House paid 18,441 printed names $1.05 billion in 2025. The median name was paid $45,756, and one in ten was paid $147,000 or more. 3,847 names were paid $100,000 or more, 1,761 were paid $150,000 or more, and 546 were paid $200,000 or more. The most paid under one name was $282,816.
- Women were 40.7% of college athletes and 55.1% of students
Sports ·
Women were 40.7% of the athletes at the colleges that reported their athletics to the Department of Education for 2024–25, and 55.1% of the same colleges' students: 14.4 percentage points apart.
- 1,288 of 2,037 colleges report athletics revenue exactly equal to expenses
Sports ·
1,288 of the 2,037 colleges that reported their athletics for 2024–25, 63.2%, reported revenue exactly equal to expenses, to the dollar. All 2,037 together reported $28.3 billion of athletics revenue and $27.6 billion of athletics expenses to the Department of Education.
- OPM withholds the salary of nearly half the federal workforce, and not at random
Federal salaries ·
The Office of Personnel Management's file of the federal civilian workforce holds 2,024,832 employees in the month this hub leads with. It publishes an annual salary for 999,162 of them, 49.3%. For another 68,638 it gives no annual salary and does not mark the pay withheld: they are paid hourly, per diem or on another basis, or have no pay recorded. For the remaining 957,032, 47.3% of the file, where the salary would be it prints the word redacted.
- Where Medicare Advantage choice is thin
Health ·
CMS lists Medicare Advantage plans in 3,162 counties for contract year 2027. The median county has 42 of them; Hillsborough, Florida, has the most, 124. At the other end, 346 counties have fewer than ten — 10.9% of the counties CMS lists.
- A tenth of farm payees received nearly two-thirds of the money
Farm subsidies ·
In 2025 the Farm Service Agency paid $24.4 billion to 1,030,325 payees, across 4,063,479 separate payments. The largest ten percent of those payees, 103,033 of them, received 64.2% of the money. The other 927,292 shared 35.8%.
- Farm payments' two biggest jumps were paid mostly under new program codes
Farm subsidies ·
Farm program payments rose most, between one whole year and the next, in 2020 and 2025. In both years most of the money was paid under accounting codes that had never appeared in USDA's files before.
- Half of the PPP loans charged off were sole proprietorships'
PPP loans ·
By September 30, 2024, the date of SBA's latest file, 643,039 of the 11,468,210 Paycheck Protection Program loans had been charged off: 5.6% of them. Half of those, 322,999 or 50.2%, were loans to businesses that gave their type as a sole proprietorship.
- Public school enrollment fell in 40 states after 2019–20
Schools ·
Public schools in the fifty states and the District of Columbia enrolled 47,786,390 students from kindergarten to grade twelve in 2024–25, 1,424,354 fewer than the 49,210,744 of 2019–20: a fall of 2.9%.
- Two farm programs paid more than half of 2025's money
Farm subsidies ·
The Farm Service Agency paid $24.4 billion in 2025 under 71 accounting programs. Two of them carried more than half of it.
- Two official figures for what the military costs
Defense ·
Ask what the United States spends on its military and the federal government gives two official answers, from the same API, for the same year. In fiscal year 2025 the budget heading called National Defense carried $1.30 trillion of outlays. The Department of Defense reported $501.6 billion of obligations on awards.
- CMS documents what its two suppression markers mean, and the counts do not fit
Health ·
Medicare's Part D file names every prescriber in it and then, for some of them, declines to say what they prescribed. The blanks are not errors and not zeroes. They are deliberate, they are marked, and CMS documents why they are there.
- Doctors contest almost nothing, and the record says why that is not reassurance
Health ·
Drug and device manufacturers have reported 93,978,144 separate transactions with doctors since 2019 — general payments, research funding and ownership interests together, which is the population a dispute can be raised against. Doctors have contested 2,808 of them.
- Medicare's prescribing totals are complete; the breakdowns beneath them are not
Health ·
Prescribers billed Medicare Part D for 1,709,828,271 prescriptions and refills in 2024. There were 1,416,883 of them. Both of those figures are complete: CMS withholds a prescriber's total from nobody, and not one of the 1,416,883 rows carries no total.
- The composition inverted while the total fell
Immigration and the border ·
Customs and Border Protection publishes its nationwide encounters split two ways that are easy to confuse. One is the legal authority an encounter was processed under. The other is which part of the agency recorded it: the Office of Field Operations, which works the ports of entry, or the Border Patrol, which works the ground between them.
- What an encounter is, and what it is not
Immigration and the border ·
Every figure the immigration hub publishes rests on one word, and the word does not mean what most readers take it to mean. This is what CBP counts when it counts an encounter, in the publisher's own categories, across the 7,143,058 encounters in the series this site holds.
- "Revenue" means four different things depending on the nonprofit
Nonprofits ·
Every organization here reports a figure called total revenue, and the Internal Revenue Service prints it in the same box on the same form. Across 26 NTEE major groups it describes four different activities.
- A hundred organizations hold a fifth of reported nonprofit revenue
Nonprofits ·
The Internal Revenue Service has a Form 990 on record for 722,188 organizations. Between them they reported $4.6 trillion of revenue.
- A quarter of large nonprofits have no classification, and the gap is not random
Nonprofits ·
Every category page on this site is built from one column of the IRS's organization file: a National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities code, assigned when an organization is recognized. It is how you can ask what a nonprofit does.
- Arrests by race and sex, and what the data cannot support
Crime and justice ·
The FBI's own tables — arrests by race, sex, age, offense and state, with a chart of the rates — are on Crime statistics by race. This analysis is the argument about them: what the denominators are, and what the figures can and cannot support.
- Most federal spending is not a contract
Federal spending ·
Ask what the federal government spends money on and the picture that comes to mind is usually procurement: aircraft, consultants, construction. In fiscal year 2025 the government reported $5.3 trillion of obligations, and contracts were 14.7% of it.
- The county that receives the most federal money does not
Federal spending ·
Ask which county receives the most federal money and the federal government's own data gives a clear answer: Hennepin County, with $188.0 billion of obligations recorded in it in fiscal year 2025. It is not a large county. 1,281,565 people live there — fewer than in Los Angeles County, which has 10,014,009 residents, records $80.1 billion, and ranks 7th.
- The fall in federal spending that was a change of category
Federal spending ·
Federal obligations reported to USAspending fell between fiscal year 2013 and fiscal year 2014 from $3.97 trillion to $2.79 trillion — a change of -29.8%.
- The state that receives the most federal money per person
Federal spending ·
Ask which state receives the most federal money per person and the federal government's own data gives a clear answer: North Dakota, at $123,129 for every one of its 799,358 residents. That is 15.0 times the figure for Utah at the bottom of the same ranking, on $8,226 a resident. Second place goes to District of Columbia on $70,535.
- The year the crime data broke, and what it still hides
Crime and justice ·
In 2021 the FBI retired the summary system American police agencies had reported crime through since 1930 and moved to incident-level reporting. Agencies transitioned at different times, and many reported nothing at all that year.
- Two official figures for federal spending, $1.71 trillion apart
Federal spending ·
In fiscal year 2025 the federal government reported $5.3 trillion of obligations on federal awards, and the Treasury reported $7.01 trillion of outlays. Both numbers are official, current, and published by the same department. They are $1.71 trillion apart — a difference of 32.2%.
- What a clearance is, and what it is not
Crime and justice ·
The FBI publishes how many reported offenses police agencies closed. It is the closest thing in this data to a measure of whether anything happened after a crime was reported, and it is routinely read as something it is not.
- What the federal debt costs, and what it now outranks
Federal spending ·
The Treasury reported $689.2 billion of interest expense on public issues of the federal debt in the last complete fiscal year, 2025. In fiscal year 2015 — the first year of the same published series — it reported $237.3 billion. That is 2.9 times as much over 11 fiscal years.
- Who the largest federal contractor is, and why there are two answers
Federal spending ·
Ask who the largest federal contractor is and USAspending gives a clear answer: Lockheed Martin Corporation, with $34.1 billion of contract obligations in fiscal year 2025. Second is Optum Public Sector Solutions, Inc. on $22.5 billion.
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