SB Sentinel · Government Oversight
Follow the Funding
Where federal money actually comes from, how it is allowed to move, and where it goes — because a fraud case or a bill means little until you know whose money it was.
How the money is raised
- Taxes
- The federal government's main income: individual income tax, payroll taxes (Social Security and Medicare, withheld from wages), corporate income tax, and smaller streams such as excise taxes and customs duties.
- Fees & program income
- Some programs fund themselves in whole or part — application and user fees, premiums, and collections. Where a program is fee-funded, an oversight entry says so.
- Borrowing
- When spending exceeds revenue, the Treasury borrows the difference by selling securities. The interest on that debt is itself a federal expense, paid from future revenue.
How the money is allowed to move
- Appropriations
- Congress authorises spending through appropriations bills — the annual discretionary budget. Money may only be spent for the purposes and periods Congress sets; spending outside that authority is what auditors flag.
- Mandatory spending
- Programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid spend under standing law rather than annual appropriations. Their eligibility rules and payment formulas are the law itself — which is why falsified eligibility, as in the Conn disability case on the Fraud Ledger, obligates real money automatically.
- Trust funds
- Social Security and Medicare Part A are financed through dedicated trust funds fed by payroll taxes. A trust-fund dollar taken by fraud is a dollar collected from workers' wages for a named purpose.
- Block grants & pass-throughs
- Washington often sends money to states to administer — TANF is the standing example on this site. The funding is federal; the spending decisions, and the oversight failures, can sit at either level. The funding-source line names both.
The rule on this site
Every oversight item published here — every Fraud Ledger entry, every bill breakdown, every scorecard line — carries a funding-source line: where the money came from before it was spent, stolen or misdirected. Appropriation, fee, trust fund or borrowing. If the source document does not establish the funding stream, the entry says that too.
Read the lines together and a pattern emerges that no single press release shows: which streams of public money are watched closely, and which ones leak.