About
What's on this site
The site started as an interactive read of the Mayor's proposed budget and has grown to cover several adjacent datasets that give fuller context to each agency:
- Proposed budget chapters. Operating and capital budgets for 90+ agencies, extracted from the CFO's budget chapters. Searchable, sortable, and drillable to the line-item level. Grouped by appropriation cluster and by DC Council committee.
- Performance Accountability Reports (PARs). Roughly 2,000 performance measures from the Office of the City Administrator's annual PARs, including objectives, KPIs, and measure-level targets and actuals, shown alongside each agency's budget.
- Capital projects. Project-level detail behind each agency's capital number: what the money is funding, across which fiscal years, and from which source.
- Procurement (PASS data). Contracts and payments pulled from the DC PASS system. Every agency page shows its top vendors; every vendor page aggregates spend across agencies so you can see who is really getting paid.
- Federal funding (USAspending). Federal grants and awards flowing to each DC agency, for context on revenue risk and programs that depend on federal dollars.
- Vacancy rates. Per-agency vacancy rates computed from the DC employee salary API, using operating plus capital FTEs as the denominator.
- Flagged items. A personal bookmark list. Flag any agency or line item to build your own punch list for hearing prep or follow-up.
Budget scope: General Funds vs. gross funds
DC's FY27 budget is reported two different ways depending on the audience:
- Gross funds (~$21.2B) — the total proposed FY27 operating budget across every fund type: Local tax revenue, Special Purpose Revenue (program fees), Dedicated Taxes, Federal grants, Federal payments, Federal Medicaid, Private grants, and Enterprise & Other (e.g. housing finance authority).
- General Funds (~$12.7B) — the slice the District has the most discretion over: Local + Dedicated Taxes + most Special Purpose Revenue + a portion of federal payments. The operating chart on the homepage shows this slice because it's the figure Council committees mark up.
The biggest line item that's in gross funds but out of General Funds is federal Medicaid: about $4.0B in FY27, mostly flowing through the Department of Health Care Finance. See the Medicaid funding note below for why that matters when comparing agency totals.
Medicaid funding
DC pays the operating cost of the Medicaid program but is reimbursed by the federal government for roughly 70% of qualifying claims. Those federal reimbursement dollars (~$4.0B in FY27) flow through the Department of Health Care Finance (HT0) and a handful of partner agencies, but they sit in the Federal Medicaid fund type — not in General Funds.
That's why the operating chart on the homepage shows the Human Support Services cluster at ~$2.7B (its General Funds share) even though total HHS spending across all funds is closer to $7.3B once federal Medicaid is added in. Both numbers are real; they just answer different questions. The federal grants page at /federal.html breaks out the federal side in more detail.
Data sources
Budget figures come from the DC Office of the CFO budget chapters and the DC Council Budget Office. Performance data is from OCA PARs. Contracts and payments come from DC PASS, federal awards from USAspending.gov, and salary/vacancy data from Open Data DC.
Who built it
This site is built and maintained by Josh Jacobson. Josh serves as Chair of ANC 1E.
Contact
Glossary
Acronyms used throughout the DC budget documents and this site.