United States¶
| Level | country |
Governments covered
- United States federal government (national; 1 investigation(s))
- Texas (state; 2 investigation(s))
Investigations
| Investigation | Status | Headline |
|---|---|---|
| United States: how federal spending is controlled, and the Social Security and Medicare trust funds | Revision 1 (Oct. 6, 2026), not yet independently reviewed | Spending is controlled against appropriations, not authorizations ($494B of FY2026 money went to programs with expired authorizations); mandatory programs were 59.5% of FY2025 outlays; general revenue paid $571.7B of Medicare Parts B and D in 2025; Social Security's retirement fund runs out in late 2032 and Medicare Part A's in 2033. |
| Harris County, Texas: FY2027 budget | Revision 2 (Sept. 23, 2026), independently reviewed | General Fund departmental appropriations rose 11.8% to $3.095B; a $181M planning gap was closed with the maximum no-election tax rate, $82.9M of one-time revenue and a $16M surplus drawdown; pay and spending decisions are disclosed but dispersed across separate votes and tables. |
| Houston ISD: funding and spending, FY2019-FY2027 | Second edition, 2026-10-08 (history back to FY2019; labeled budget and forecast figures through FY2027); independently reviewed 2026-10-08 and rechecked 2026-10-12, corrections applied | After four General Fund surpluses (FY2019-FY2022), HISD ran $497 million of deficits in FY2023-FY2025 and its reserves fell below the FY2019 level; per-student state formula funding did not fall, and the state's larger share since 2023 is mostly tax-compression backfill that also ended HISD's recapture payments ($969 million over 2018-19 to 2024-25). |
Governments in the United States are organized in layers: the national government, 50 state governments, county governments (called parishes in Louisiana and boroughs in Alaska), municipalities (cities, towns, villages, townships) and thousands of special-purpose districts (school, hospital, flood-control, port, utility and transit districts among them). Each layer sets its own budget and, for most of them, its own property or sales tax rate. govspends files each government under its state and level, so the same questions can be asked of any of them.