The record is the story. Keep the record.
Six tools for reporting on how public money is spent, and one engine that takes the resulting claims apart. Every figure traces to a document you can pull yourself.
Seven instruments on one engine.
Six tools for reporting on how public money is spent: one to find what a state does and does not require, one to read a registry, one to hold every claim to a source, one to prove your footage is untouched, one to take a report from someone who can't use their name, and one to watch the laws that decide whether any of it stays legal. The seventh takes the claims that come out the other end and shows what they compressed.
Claim Decomposition
Take a public claim about money apart into the parts a reader can check, and grade what is left.
engine runs in your browser Grid 01Public Program Integrity
What each state requires before it pays, and what it does after. 51 jurisdictions, 34 fields.
306 of 1,734 cells sourced Tool 02Provider Cluster Screening
Load a licensing registry, group records that share an address, draft the records request.
150-row sample Tool 03Claim Ledger
Every claim in a piece, its timecode, its source, and whether the named subject was asked.
not ready to publish Tool 04Footage Seal
Fingerprint raw files at capture. Hand anyone the receipt and let them check it themselves.
chain empty Tool 05Protected Tip Intake
A report form that never asks who you are, plus the official channels that also have jurisdiction.
no name required Watch 06Press Freedom Bill Watch
Bills that change what a reporter may record, ask, publish, or request.
37 bills, 35 states not reviewedOne case, moving through all seven.
A tip arrives with no name attached (05). The registry shows nine licenses at one suite number (02). The grid says this state never required a site visit before the first payment, and publishes no inspection counts (01). You go there, and the raw files are sealed the same night (04). Every number that ends up in the piece has a record behind it and every business named was asked to answer (03). And when a bill appears afterward that would make the next one harder, it is already being tracked (06).
Then somebody in office describes what you found in a single sentence with one number in it. That sentence is a compression of the whole chain above, and the engine (00) takes it back apart.
Neither rule is negotiable.
A pattern is a reason to pull records, not a finding.
Shared addresses, fast license growth and repeated owner names are all lawful and common. None of these tools produce a score or a verdict, because a score invites publishing an inference as if it were a fact.
What is open gets counted.
Every unfilled cell shows as a number instead of a blank. A half-filled grid published honestly is worth more than a full one nobody can check.
Each tool runs entirely in the page. Open it from a phone, a laptop, or a thumb drive. None of them send anything anywhere — and because that is a claim like any other, the checks that prove it run in your browser, not ours.