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The Broadside — The Government Never Sent You a Receipt. So I Built One.

The government spent $7,009,973,667,049 on your behalf last fiscal year. It never sent you a receipt. So I built one. The Broadside is a single web page: type what you paid in federal tax, and it prints an itemized receipt — to the dollar — of where your money actually went. Not a chatbot you ask about the budget. A receipt: the thing a store hands you without being asked, that the largest spender in human history somehow never does.

The Broadside intro poster — a punk-broadside headline reading THE BROADSIDE over the line “the government took $7,009,973,700,000 last year and never mailed you a receipt.”

What it is

The numbers aren't estimates. The grand total is fetched live, in your browser, from the U.S. Treasury’s own public API the moment you open it — real FY2025 actuals, nothing sent to any server. The line items are those same actuals by function, cross-checked against the API (Social Security and Veterans' spending match Treasury to the dollar). Then it shows you the part they'd rather you didn't add up: you paid more just to cover interest on money already borrowed than you paid for the entire military — about 7× what you paid for NASA, all foreign aid, and every national park combined. And for every $1 you paid, Washington spent $1.34 — the other 34¢ borrowed in your name. Slide your number and the whole receipt re-prints live, per year, per day, or per work-hour, each with a generative stamp, barcode, and share link.

How it’s built

  • The FY2025 grand total is pulled client-side from Treasury’s Monthly Treasury Statement API (fiscaldata.treasury.gov, CORS-open) — Table 5, "Total Outlays" = $7,009,973,667,049.30. No server, no key, nothing stored.
  • The itemized breakdown is the FY2025 budget-function actuals (summing to that $7.010T net total; deficit $1,775B), cross-checked live against the same API so the big lines match Treasury exactly. Your share allocates your tax across spending in proportion — the way the White House's own "taxpayer receipt" once did.
  • Art-directed as a punk broadside: Anton display type, a riso acid/magenta palette, print grain, a torn-paper thermal receipt, and a generative rubber stamp + barcode seeded per receipt. Shareable by link, mobile-checked, runs entirely on your machine.
An itemized federal tax receipt on cream paper with a red PAID IN FULL stamp, listing Social Security, Medicare, interest on the debt, defense and more with each line’s dollar share of a $14,279 tax bill.
Type what you paid; it itemizes to the dollar — Social Security, Medicare, and interest on the debt run the receipt.
A bold statement reading “You paid $1,876 just so the government could pay interest on money it already borrowed,” noting it is 7× what you paid for NASA, foreign aid and national parks combined.
The part they’d rather you didn’t add up: interest now outranks the military.

On the theme

Go get that 'murica data. This is the most 'murica data there is — your taxes — technically public and functionally invisible, buried in Treasury statements no one opens. Punk isn't another dashboard on top of it; it's taking the government's own live numbers and handing them back to the person who paid, itemized, with the uncomfortable total at the bottom. The government never built this app because the government would never build this app. Punk isn't dead. It's compiling.

Try it →Code →All the builds →

Shout-out

Part of the competition is cross-referencing other builders. So: shout-out to Kyle Sebestyen — whose polished, graphic data work (and the bar Eric keeps setting) is why this one isn't just a table. The Broadside is the same idea from the other side: data that's as art-directed as it is honest.

Built for Summer Into AI 2026 (Competition #2), hosted by Eric Rhea. More in the build log.