I’m a budget analyst. I’ve spent the last six years inside the Department of Veterans Affairs doing the unglamorous work of following federal money: where it’s authorized, how it’s allotted, who controls it, when it’s obligated, and whether it’s actually spent the way Congress intended.

Most of what the public sees about the federal budget is politics — who wants what, who’s blaming whom, and whether the government will stay open. That matters, but it isn’t the mechanics. The mechanics are a chain with a specific name at each link: appropriation → apportionment → allotment → fund distribution → obligation → outlay. Break one link and the money stops moving, even when everyone agrees it should. That’s a fact, not a partisan take, and it’s the thing I want this blog to be about.

What you’ll get here

Three kinds of posts, roughly in this proportion:

  1. Federal money, explained — the mechanics above, one step at a time, in plain English. What an “obligation” actually is (and isn’t). Why a continuing resolution freezes more than just spending. What the difference between a no-year appropriation and an annual one means for an agency at year-end. Timed to the live budget cycle, because the best teaching moment is the one happening this week.
  2. The modern data stack, applied — the same analysis, done the way a 2026 analyst does it: Python, SQL, Power BI, pulled from free public sources (USAspending, Treasury Fiscal Data, FRED). When a post includes a chart, the data behind it is public and the query is in the post.
  3. The work itself — the projects and tools from category 2 live in a public GitHub portfolio. The blog explains; the repos prove.

The rules of the road

I work for the federal government. This blog is mine, it is not my agency, and nothing here represents my employer. To keep that true in practice, three rules apply to every post:

  • Public sources only. Everything is drawn from documents the public can read — the President’s Budget, enacted appropriations, GAO reports, OMB circulars, USAspending, Treasury data. No internal figures, no internal systems, no screenshots of anything I can’t hand you a URL for.
  • Every figure is cited. If a number is in the post, the source is in the post.
  • Hypotheticals are labeled. When I need an example that isn’t a public document, it’s synthetic and it’s marked as such.

The first rule is also the interesting one. It turns out the public record is deep enough to explain almost everything about how the budget works — you just have to know where to look. Teaching that, and looking, is the whole point.

The first real post is on the way: the federal budget cycle, end to end, mapped against this year’s actual calendar.

— Joanna