GovSpendTracker
Data Articles
Data-driven writing on government spending and fiscal policy — every figure and chart is drawn from the GovSpendTracker warehouse.
Why involuntary treatment is Olympia's job — and what Seattle can still do
The power to confine someone for treatment is written in RCW 71.05. The county runs the court. The state runs the hospitals. The city can deliver people to the door and pay for buildings. It cannot write a third track.
Large-scale involuntary treatment is Olympia's job because only the Legislature can write who may be detained, DSHS runs the state hospitals, and HCA/Medicaid pay for most community psych beds. King County — not Seattle — employs the Designated Crisis Responders, staffs ITA court at Harborview, and provides the prosecutor and public defender. The mayor can still change SPD drop-off practice, site and fund E&T and secure-detox buildings, and buy county DCR/defense capacity. A hospital without lawyers is how UW's new civil wards sat empty.
October 7, 2026 · 8 min read
How French government spending actually works
The real numbers behind the viral memes — where €1.7 trillion goes each year
A plain-language guide to French public spending, built from official EU and French statistics: how much the state spends, the biggest line items, how many people are immigrants, and how immigration-related spending actually compares with pensions and the wider social safety net.
October 7, 2026 · 7 min read
A four-year plan for Seattle: more homes, faster buses, fewer untreated people on the street
Legalize the last apartments, unstick the entitled pipeline, give buses the curb, build treatment-grade shelter at the scale of the unsheltered count — then keep the sidewalk. City, county, state, and federal, in that order of what City Hall can actually do this term.
Seattle's binding constraints in 2026 are not the zoning map. Permits crashed from about 17,400 units in 2020 to under 2,000 in 2025; King County's unsheltered count is 11,829 against 5,269 shelter beds; Metro is adding riders into congestion; Sound Transit is $34.5 billion short of the ST3 map. This draft is a four-year sequence: pass Centers and Corridors, cut MHA on starts, buy bus lanes and renew the Transit Measure, add about 3,000 high-service beds, staff the ITA courts, and only then write a citywide camping rule. Housing First keeps people housed. It does not treat psychosis or restore a park.
October 7, 2026 · 10 min read
Why Seattle is not building the homes, buses, and treatment beds it already voted for
The city is spending more than $7 billion a year. The gap is not a household-style cash shortage. It is fragmented government, a general-fund hole, a coalition that will not do Grants Pass plus hospitals, and a production crash that a 2027 task force will not unstick in time.
Seattle is not ignoring housing, transit, or street homelessness. It is doing the pieces that match Mayor Katie Wilson's coalition and a $175 million general-fund hole — service-rich shelter at a fraction of the unsheltered count, social-housing acquisitions, bus lanes on a few corridors, and a housing task force that reports in 2027. The parts that would actually close the gap — unsticking ~8,000 entitled units now, 3,000 high-service beds, staffed civil-commitment wards, and a camping rule once a bed exists — sit in other governments, cost more than she will raise, or split the coalition that elected her.
October 7, 2026 · 9 min read
Fact-check: 'Billions for Ukraine, nothing for the fires'
The viral claim blames aid to Ukraine for France's wildfire losses. The official record shows the opposite — and Ukraine actually sent firefighters to France.
A widely shared claim says France poured billions into Ukraine while its forests burned for lack of money. The budget documents, Senate and National Assembly reports, and the fire response itself tell a different story: the real constraint was an aging aircraft fleet, the one relevant budget cut was small and domestic, and at the height of the 2026 megafire Ukraine sent 70 firefighters to help France.
October 7, 2026 · 8 min read
What would actually give Seattle ITA power — and what homelessness spending buys
What a statute could give the city, what an interlocal can do this year, and what homelessness budgets look like next to jail and prison
An ordinance cannot create ITA powers. A statute can — city DCRs, AOT petitioners, bed contracts, a no-refusal door. Seattle's 2026 homelessness budget is $225M; KCRHA is ~$200M (do not add them). Labeled regional spend is ~$20k per PIT person; prison is $81k; jail all-in is ~$196k.
October 7, 2026 · 14 min read
Fact-check: do immigrant families get €6,000 a month for having children?
No. The viral CAF documents are real but were one-off catch-up payments; the benefits follow legal residence, income and often work — not nationality; and undocumented migrants get almost none of them.
A recurring French meme claims immigrant families pull in about €6,000 a month just for having children. The authenticated CAF documents behind it were one-time back-payments, not monthly income; the benefits are tied to legal residence, income and — for several of them — to working or having worked, not to nationality; undocumented migrants are excluded from the cash benefits entirely; and the money involved is tiny next to pensions and health.
October 7, 2026 · 8 min read
The federal budget spends slightly more than five dollars on each older adult for every dollar on each child
In 2023 federal outlays were $7,340 per child and $37,650 per adult 65 or older. The children's share of the budget is projected to shrink.
Federal outlays in 2023 were $7,340 per child under 19 and $37,650 per adult 65 or older, slightly more than five to one. Children received $567 billion, 9 percent of federal outlays, and Kids' Share projects that share toward 6 percent. Social Security benefits were $1,448 billion in fiscal 2024 and Medicare $870 billion. By 2054, CBO projects that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for people 65 or older will exceed half of noninterest federal spending. The Old-Age and Survivors Insurance fund is projected to pay 77 percent of scheduled benefits after reserves run out in 2033. An age-neutral budget would renegotiate that path instead of closing it with a higher payroll tax on current workers.
October 7, 2026 · 8 min read
Major U.S. cities are not building the housing the shortage requires
The national gap is still 3.7 million homes. New York and Chicago authorize a fraction of the homes per person that Dallas and Houston do.
Freddie Mac still puts the U.S. housing shortage at 3.7 million units as of the third quarter of 2024, almost unchanged from 3.8 million at the end of 2020, because new households absorbed the 5.8 million units added in between. In 2024 the New York metro authorized 2.9 homes per 1,000 residents and Chicago 1.9, against 8.6 in Dallas–Fort Worth and 8.4 in Houston. Auckland's 2016 citywide upzone, which roughly tripled capacity on about three-quarters of residential land, is the measured version of the reform those cities have not made.
October 7, 2026 · 8 min read
Incarceration is not the cheaper homelessness policy
Prison is at least twice an operated housing unit. The jail we actually run is closer to ten times the regional homelessness budget per person. That gap is the ceiling.
Incarceration is not a cheaper substitute for King County's existing homelessness spend. A state prison year is 2.4× an operated Health Through Housing unit and about 4× the regional homelessness budget per person on a given night; King County jail all-in is about 10×. That ratio is a political ceiling: at prison-level money per person, the line becomes "you might as well lock them up." The region is not at that line. Doubling current labeled homelessness investment would still be cheaper than the cheapest real custody average — and locking 12,000 people would not stay at today's average, because the beds do not exist.
September 21, 2026 · 8 min read
Immigration in France
A precise breakdown of France's foreign nationals — where they come from, EU vs non-EU, developed vs developing — set against France's own demographic and labor-shortage projections.
Memes treat 'immigrants' as one undifferentiated mass. In fact France is home to about 5.3 million foreign nationals born abroad — most of them long-settled workers — and the non-EU, developing-country group the debate actually targets is on the order of 3.3 million people. Meanwhile France's own statisticians build +150,000 net migrants a year into their central projection — and still forecast a shrinking working-age population and ~800,000 retirements a year to replace by 2030.
September 18, 2026 · 9 min read
'France had no money for the fires'? How the French budget actually works
A state that has run a deficit every year since 1974 doesn't 'run out of money' for an emergency — it allocates and borrows. Here's how French budgeting works, and why aid to Ukraine can't be the lever behind the wildfire response.
Some argue the real problem with France's wildfire response wasn't old aircraft but a lack of money — with cash supposedly diverted to Ukraine. That misreads how public budgeting works. France spends far more than it collects every single year and borrows the difference; most firefighting is funded by local authorities, not the state; the national budget allocates money mission by mission so Defence and Civil Security don't trade off day-to-day; and in an emergency a permanent-deficit state mobilizes resources and borrows. Budget choices did shape the aging fleet over years — but that is a story about long-run investment, not a cash shortage on the day, and never about Ukraine.
September 18, 2026 · 9 min read