Google Data

Posted by John Lyman, Public Data Partnerships

We launched Public Data Explorer in Google Labs nearly a year ago to help make the world’s public data more easily accessible and useful. Since then we’ve added a number of interesting datasets from U.S. government agencies, including the Census Bureau, Energy Information Administration, Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Economic Analysis. Recently, we made another addition: the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

The OMB‘s mission is to help the President of the United States prepare the budget and oversee its application to federal agencies. As a result, it is also the central clearinghouse for U.S. budget data -- statistics that are now available for the first time in Public Data Explorer.

So what does the data show? Check it out and you’ll find a number of interesting things. For example, below are the OMB’s historical and projected net outlays (i.e., money spent) for the federal government. Note the line for “interest on national debt,” which will outpace the Social Security Administration and Department of Defense by 2015.


Net outlays as a percentage of GDP is also interesting:


Finally, have you ever been curious how the US Budget gets funded? The chart below shows the distribution in 2009.


As always, there are a number of caveats to this data, and we encourage folks to follow up with experts to better understand what it truly means. That said, like all of our public data visualizations, we hope these simple charts will help inform the public debate and illuminate trends and key insights. We encourage you to explore the data, and stay tuned for more!