At the recent International Open Data Hackathon, Justin Grimes put the DC budget into a “treemap,” a chart that shows a lot of items as rectangles of different sizes. This makes it very easy to understand how much money is going to different functions.

View larger chart.

Since Justin’s spreadsheet was public, I was able to make a copy to tweak a few things. I modified some of the titles to get the agency’s abbreviation to the start, so that you can understand more of them in the top-level chart, and revised the color scale to one that should be more perceptible to color-blind readers.

The colors represent which categories increased or decreased in FY2013, the budget approved last year for the fiscal year we’re in now. Green boxes increased more, while purple boxes decreased. Though sometimes categories in the DC budget grow and shrink because functions get shifted from one to another, so it can be tricky to really understand increase and decrease numbers without delving into the budget deeply.

What do you notice in the budget?

And if you make a better treemap using a tool without some of the limitations of the Google one, or make a treemap for another area jurisdiction’s budget, let us know at info@ggwash.org.

Thanks to Sandra Moscoso for the tip.

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Tagged: budget, data openness, dc, technology

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.