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Everything the Factbook holds

648 pages, grouped the way you would look for them: every topic, every page type beneath it with how many pages it has, and a way into each. Built from the same lists as the XML sitemap crawlers read, and a test holds the two against each other.

American Factbook Research

Federal spending

Federal awards, contracts, grants, and agency obligations, as reported by agencies to USAspending.

Crime and justice

Offense and arrest counts reported by law enforcement agencies to the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer.

Immigration and the border

Encounters, apprehensions, and enforcement actions published by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

States

Every topic organises by state. These are the pages where the three meet: all 51 side by side, and one entry each.

Briefs

Written analysis, each built from checked-in queries.

  • Arrests by race and sex, and what the data cannot support

    Law enforcement agencies reported 7,139,243 arrests to the FBI in the most recent year it has published in full. This is what those arrests look like broken down by the arrestee's race and sex, what population each rate divides by, and — at as much length — what the figures do not establish.

  • The year the crime data broke, and what it still hides

    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.

  • What a clearance is, and what it is not

    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.

  • Most federal spending is not a contract

    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 $5.30 trillion of obligations, and contracts were 14.7% of it.

  • The county that receives the most federal money does not

    Ask which county receives the most federal money and the federal government's own data gives a clear answer: Hennepin County, with $171.9 billion of obligations recorded in it in fiscal year 2026. 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 $68.0 billion, and ranks 7th.

  • The fall in federal spending that was a change of category

    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

    Ask which state receives the most federal money per person and the federal government's own data gives a clear answer: North Dakota, at $108,417 for every one of its 796,568 residents. That is 14.3 times the figure for Utah at the bottom of the same ranking, on $7,573 a resident. Second place goes to District Of Columbia on $61,942.

  • What the federal debt costs, and what it now outranks

    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.

  • Two official figures for federal spending, $1.7 trillion apart

    In fiscal year 2025 the federal government reported $5.30 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%.

  • Who the largest federal contractor is, and why there are two answers

    Ask who the largest federal contractor is and USAspending gives a clear answer: OPTUM PUBLIC SECTOR SOLUTIONS, INC., with $19.9 billion of contract obligations in fiscal year 2026. Second is TRIWEST HEALTHCARE ALLIANCE CORP on $15.3 billion.

In development

The header offers these and they have no pages yet. Nothing is published under them until a snapshot backs it, which is why they are named here rather than left out of a page whose whole subject is completeness.

  • Health

    Drug approvals, adverse-event reports, provider records, and hospital data published by federal health agencies.

    U.S. Food and Drug Administration · Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services

  • Nonprofits

    Tax-exempt organizations as they appear in IRS Form 990 filings and the Exempt Organizations Business Master File.

    Internal Revenue Service

About this site

Pages about the Factbook itself, rather than about a topic.

  • Home

    Where the three records stand today.

  • Every dataset

    The register: publisher, licence, cadence, fetch date, row count, and what each source cannot show.

  • Methodology

    How each figure is computed, and the denominator it uses.

  • Corrections

    Every published number that turned out to be wrong, dated.

  • About

    Who publishes this and who edits it.

  • Every page

    This page: the readable index of everything the Factbook holds.

  • Search

    Across every page, dataset and brief. Not indexed, because a results page is thin.

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