Goverment Budget Silliness

 As a final project for one of my courses I am supposed to devise the energy policy of the United States (or the world, but lets be realistic here).  I was wondering what sort of budget I was dealing with, and I found a neat little semi-interactive chart (left) that breaks down how the U.S. Budget.  It doesn't explain how each of the smaller components utilizes its funds (I sent them an email asking for this feature to be released in the next update). 0.84% of the budget is spent on Technology Programs, and it seems that the DOE labs as "Other Science and Research Laboratories" (anything not NASA) getting 0.39% of the national budget.  I think that might make it worse than it seems; there is probably lab science money buried in the Defense.

Speaking of defense, check out the following two charts (source data).

Source Excel

I only plotted certain items that I found interesting; that is why the total doesn't look like the sum of the lines underneath it.  I was then curious to see if the defense budget dropped after the end of WW II, or if just continued to rise.  As shown below, it did drop a little.

Source Excel

 I will end my trend of badly scaled buget plots by one more, which shows how certain "functions" fared.  I have no idea what a function is other than the name that was provided in the source data.






Finally, do you know where the energy in your house goes? 

Stolen from Dr. Steve Koohin

There is a reason why I don't get any of my work completed.