The Big Government Money Pipe Freeze

Summary

Planet Money: The Big Government Money Pipe Freeze Released on February 14, 2025

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Introduction

In the episode titled "The Big Government Money Pipe Freeze," NPR's Planet Money delves into the intricate mechanisms of the United States federal payment system, affectionately dubbed the "big government money pipe." Hosts Erica Barris and Mary Childs unravel the complexities of federal spending, unprecedented freezes, and the tools developed to monitor these financial flows. Through insightful discussions and expert interviews, the episode illuminates how transparency and data accessibility play pivotal roles in understanding and managing government finances.

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The Government's Payment System

Mary Childs opens the discussion by describing the federal payment system as a "gigantic money pipe," highlighting its critical role in channeling hundreds of millions of dollars daily to various government departments and programs.

Mary Childs (00:06): "There is a gigantic money pipe, this unfathomably large hose through which hundreds of millions of dollars flow every single day."

Erica Barris adds that officially, this system is known as the Secure Payment System managed by the Treasury Department, responsible for approximately 90% of all federal payments. This includes disbursements to agencies like Medicaid, Veterans Affairs, Customs and Border Protection, the Library of Congress, the SEC, FCC, and the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation.

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The Freeze on Federal Spending

The episode recounts a tumultuous event when the Trump administration ordered a temporary freeze on a significant portion of federal spending, affecting federal assistance, grants, loans, and subsidies. This directive demanded that requests for funds be reviewed, effectively halting the regular flow of money through the Secure Payment System.

Erica Barris (01:05): "The Trump administration ordered a pause, a freeze on a huge chunk of federal spending on federal assistance, grants and loans and subsidies, that kind of thing, saying basically, do not request your funds."

Although courts eventually blocked the freeze, reports indicated that certain government departments continued to experience disruptions in their funding, leading to widespread confusion and significant repercussions, including job losses and operational uncertainties for clinics, daycares, and retirees awaiting payments.

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Navigating Government Transparency

In the midst of this financial chaos, Erica emphasizes the importance of transparency in the U.S. governmental processes. She introduces the Daily Treasury Statement (DTS) as a vital tool for cutting through confusion and gaining clarity about federal spending.

Erica Barris (01:49): "But the United States is a country of transparency. And if you know where to look, there is a way to cut through all the confusion and peer deep into the giant money pipe for answers."

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The Daily Treasury Statement: A Hidden Gem

Lauren Bauer from the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution recognizes the value of the DTS during the spending freeze. The DTS, though not widely known, is a publicly accessible PDF document that provides a daily account of the Treasury's cash balance, detailing both deposits and withdrawals. Despite its obscurity—often overshadowed by more frequently searched governmental documents—the DTS offers a comprehensive ledger of daily federal financial activities.

Rachel Snyderman (03:17): "You can imagine when there's this empirical question, did the Trump administration stop the flow of funds that we had a resource here that nobody really knew about."

Lauren and her colleague Rachel utilize the DTS to track and analyze federal spending patterns, especially during periods of uncertainty. Their familiarity with the DTS from past experiences, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, positions them to navigate the complexities of federal financial flows effectively.

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Building the Money Pipe Tracker

To enhance the accessibility and utility of the DTS, Lauren Bauer and Rachel Snyderman develop the Money Pipe Tracker—a tool that converts the daily PDFs into an interactive, real-time graph. This tracker amalgamates three years' worth of DTS data, allowing users to visualize and monitor government spending across various departments seamlessly.

Rachel Snyderman (10:22): "We can build something that people can use. Because the treasury statement itself, it's like. It's a PDF. You only see one at a time."

The initial success of the tracker is evident when it accurately reflects the halt in funds to USAID, providing tangible evidence of the spending freeze's impact.

Rachel Snyderman (12:28): "We built, like, the roughest version of it, basically on day one. ... Oh, they actually defunded USAID."

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Use Cases of the Tracker

The Money Pipe Tracker serves multiple purposes, catering to diverse user needs:

1. Monitoring SNAP Program

   Lauren Bauer uses the tracker to oversee the funding flows to SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). By analyzing the financial "heartbeat" of SNAP, she can identify normal funding patterns and detect any irregularities that may signal administrative issues or funding problems.

   Rachel Snyderman (15:10): "It really is like looking at a kind of financial EKG for SNAP."

2. Ensuring Grant Payments

   Stephen Hellman, an assistant math professor at USC, relies on the tracker to verify the timely disbursement of his NSF (National Science Foundation) grant. The tool provides him with reassurance by showing the flow of funds to NSF, although it doesn't specify individual grants.

   Stephen Hellman (19:03): "Especially in an age when, yeah, there is a lot of misinformation around. You know, it's nice to have an actual source that shows you the numbers."

3. Safeguarding Treasury Payments

   Guy Loba, a fixed-income portfolio manager, utilizes the tracker to monitor interest payments on U.S. Treasuries—a cornerstone of global financial stability. By ensuring that these payments remain consistent, he guards against potential financial disruptions that could arise from mismanagement or system errors.

   Lauren Bauer (22:14): "They represent the quarterly big interest payments the Treasury Department makes, and they cover payment on trillions of dollars of outstanding securities that are used across the global financial system."

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The Importance of Transparency and Vigilance

The episode underscores the United States' commitment to transparency through tools like the DTS and Money Pipe Tracker. Rachel Snyderman emphasizes that public access to federal financial data empowers citizens to make informed decisions and hold the government accountable.

Rachel Snyderman (24:30): "I actually feel quite proud that we've pulled something that I dare you to remove the public's access to the federal government's balance sheet."

Lauren Bauer echoes this sentiment, advocating for continued public oversight to prevent potential financial mishaps.

Lauren Bauer (23:27): "I really do not expect the Treasury Department to miss a payment."

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Conclusion

Planet Money's exploration of the "Big Government Money Pipe Freeze" illuminates the delicate balance between governmental financial operations and public transparency. Through expert analysis and innovative tools like the Money Pipe Tracker, stakeholders—from government officials to individual researchers and portfolio managers—can navigate and monitor the vast flows of federal spending. The episode serves as a testament to the power of accessible data in fostering accountability and ensuring the smooth functioning of the nation's economic engine.

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Notable Quotes

• Mary Childs (00:06): "There is a gigantic money pipe, this unfathomably large hose through which hundreds of millions of dollars flow every single day."

• Erica Barris (01:05): "The Trump administration ordered a pause, a freeze on a huge chunk of federal spending on federal assistance, grants and loans and subsidies, that kind of thing, saying basically, do not request your funds."

• Rachel Snyderman (03:17): "You can imagine when there's this empirical question, did the Trump administration stop the flow of funds that we had a resource here that nobody really knew about."

• Rachel Snyderman (10:22): "We can build something that people can use. Because the treasury statement itself, it's like. It's a PDF. You only see one at a time."

• Stephen Hellman (19:03): "Especially in an age when, yeah, there is a lot of misinformation around. You know, it's nice to have an actual source that shows you the numbers."

• Rachel Snyderman (24:30): "I actually feel quite proud that we've pulled something that I dare you to remove the public's access to the federal government's balance sheet."

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Additional Information

For listeners interested in tracking the federal "money pipe" themselves, the Money Pipe Tracker is available on the Hamilton Project's website. Stay tuned for an upcoming Planet Money plot episode that delves deeper into this topic, available exclusively for subscribers.

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This episode was produced by Emma Peasley with assistance from James Snead, edited by Kenny Malone, and fact-checked by James Snead. Engineering support was provided by Jimmy Keeley with help from Neil T. Vault. Executive production was led by Alex Goldmark.

Transcript

[Erica Barris]

This is Planet Money from npr.

[Mary Childs]

There is a gigantic money pipe, this unfathomably large hose through which hundreds of millions of dollars flow every single day.

[Erica Barris]

At least that's how we think of it more officially at the Treasury. It's known as the secure payment system.

[Mary Childs]

The federal government basically runs through that money pipe. Almost 90% of all federal payments flow through it. Payments to Medicaid and Veterans affairs and Customs and Border Protection payments to the.

[Erica Barris]

Library of Congress, the sec, the fcc, the fcic, that's the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation.

[Mary Childs]

Congress allocates trillions of dollars to go to specific parts of the government. And when those parts of the government need a chunk of their allowance, they request it and treasury sends it through the old money pipe. And then a few weeks ago, the pipe. What's the way to put this? Got frozen, I guess partially frozen.

[Erica Barris]

The Trump administration ordered a pause, a freeze on a huge chunk of federal spending on federal assistance, grants and loans and subsidies, that kind of thing, saying basically, do not request your funds. All of those need to be reviewed.

[Mary Childs]

Then the courts blocked that freeze. But then reportedly some parts of the government were still not getting their money.

[Erica Barris]

Nobody seemed to know what was happening.

[Mary Childs]

And there have been enormous consequences. Amid all this confusion, hundreds and hundreds of people lost their jobs. Clinics and daycares across the country don't know if they will have money to operate. Retirees fretted about getting their payments.

[Erica Barris]

But the United States is a country of transparency. And if you know where to look, there is a way to cut through all the confusion and peer deep into the giant money pipe for answers. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Erica Barris.

[Mary Childs]

And I'm Mary Childs. Today on the show, we go where to look to that one place with the tiniest bit of information of facts. In this chaotic stretch of federal action and freezes and unfreezes, we get a strikingly clear look inside the big money pipe through which most federal spending runs and at some of the people and the programs on the other end of that pipe.

[Erica Barris]

Plus a tool you can use right now if you want to follow along at home as this gigantic federal spending story continues developing and developing.

[Lauren Bauer]

This message comes from Grammarly. The work week can be fast paced and it's hard to focus on getting everything done. Let Grammarly be your AI writing partner. It works where you do and can help you write and quickly edit with suggestions. 93% of professionals report that Grammarly helps them get more work done. Get more done with Grammarly. Download Grammarly for [e-mail] podcast. That's Grammarly.com podcast.

[Mary Childs]

When everybody was running around trying to figure out what was happening with federal government money, apparently folks at the Brookings Institution, well, they were kind of running around too.

[Rachel Snyderman]

Did they stop certain things? Did they restart things? It just, it got very confusing and we didn't know what the answer was.

[Erica Barris]

Lauren Bauer works for something called the Hamilton Project within Brookings. They're a nonpartisan group. They do policy research and, you know.

[Mary Childs]

Pretty tough to do policy research when you have no idea what is happening with federal spending.

[Erica Barris]

But Lauren remembered something, another chaotic moment when she'd also wanted to check government spending.

[Rachel Snyderman]

And so I had experience from COVID with something that's called the Daily Treasury Statement.

[Mary Childs]

The Daily Treasury Statement, the dts, if you want to sound really cool, is just one of a gazillion documents put.

[Erica Barris]

Out by the federal government in terms of popularity. It gets googled way less than the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, but maybe slightly more than the Short term Cash Investment Report. So, you know, not popular.

[Mary Childs]

But what the Daily Treasury Statement does is show how much money flows through the giant government money pipe every single business day. And Lauren thought the Daily Treasury Statement might be the key to everything, to understanding this present moment of spending freezes and unfreezes and confusion.

[Rachel Snyderman]

You can imagine when there's this empirical question, did the Trump administration stop the flow of funds that we had a resource here that nobody really knew about.

[Mary Childs]

Can we, can we look at the thing together and you, like, tell me about it? Sure.

[Rachel Snyderman]

Let me show you what the actual website is.

[Mary Childs]

To be clear, the Daily Treasury Statement is not a secret document. You don't need treasury clearance. You don't need to be a researcher requesting special access.

[Erica Barris]

Real treasury heads, they'll probably know about this PDF, but it is easily overlooked. It's like the digital equivalent of a piece of paper under a giant stack of papers on your desk.

[Rachel Snyderman]

Okay, great. So this is fiscaldata.treasury.gov Love it. Beautiful.

[Mary Childs]

And this is a homepage for you. Basically. This is like a commonly visited site.

[Rachel Snyderman]

Yeah, it is. So what you see here, so if you click opens. Look, I've already done it once today. You can get the Daily Treasury Statement.

[Erica Barris]

And that's it. You click it Download. It's a PDF. It's like 80 kilobytes, not even close to a full megabyte. There's a new one every business day at 4pm so we opened it up.

[Mary Childs]

Together and there's a very fancy official looking treasury insignia at the top and.

[Rachel Snyderman]

It shows the cash balance of the us. Like what is in the treasury general account, which is like the US's bank account.

[Erica Barris]

It basically looks like a balance sheet, classic layout, a two column ledger and.

[Rachel Snyderman]

On the left hand side is the deposits. So like when you pay taxes into the treasury, your taxes get totaled on that day into an incoming line item. But what is important for this moment is the withdrawals. And so it varies in level of detail but, but we have on the withdrawal side all of the outlays that treasury is making to departments, to the other branches of government, to programs.

[Erica Barris]

Imagine it like a daily Venmo feed for the government. $191 million to NASA rocket ship emoji.

[Mary Childs]

$249 million to the Department of Agriculture. I don't know, cow, pig, corn, corn, corn.

[Erica Barris]

Every dollar rounded to the millionth dollar that comes out of the government's checking account. Posted at 4:00pm in this daily treasury statement.

[Mary Childs]

Now it is not an accident that this document exists, this beautiful awkwardly hyperlinked daily treasury PDF. The United States government is of course a prodigious generator of paperwork. And decades ago lawmakers realized they'd need to decide how to drag all of that paper into the modern digital era.

[Erica Barris]

Rachel Snyderman is with the Bipartisan Policy center and she knows a bit about the US being a little extra in showing its paperwork. The premise of this is that the United States is the largest supplier of open data, open data information that's free, publicly accessible and that people can download and use for their own purposes.

[Mary Childs]

Rachel says the treasury publishes its bank statement because the US has kind of staked this ground of being super transparent. That goes back to some bipartisan laws. Starting in 2006, the Internet was still young. One of the bills Congress would pass, the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act. That's right, data required that all federal spending data be displayed publicly online in one place.

[Erica Barris]

The idea was the American people could see if, to quote a Republican congressman at the time, their taxpayer dollars were being wasted or if they were being spent, spent wisely. Before that time, there was really no single way to track government spending across agencies. And it made it really difficult to use data to inform evidence based policy decisions.

[Mary Childs]

Rachel says if the public doesn't know the facts, it can't make informed decisions. Transparency is crucial to a working democracy. And this is something we can take for granted here that of course our government publishes this data. They basically always have. But Rachel says this level of transparency was a choice.

[Erica Barris]

We're really asking the government to open.

[Mary Childs]

Its checkbook every day.

[Erica Barris]

And to show us what's coming in and what's coming out. That's extraordinary access the public has, and I think it demonstrates the values that our government does place on transparency and communication. While the government has chosen to have this access, not everybody knows about it or thinks about it, right?

[Mary Childs]

Like, not everyone knows that to find the daily treasury statement, you need to go to fiscaldata.treasury.gov and then click on one of, like, eight hyperlinks to dataset details, and then click a little download cloud icon to get the actual PDF. But you know who did know our girl Lauren Bauer at the Brookings Institution.

[Erica Barris]

So there was Lauren at Brookings a few weeks ago, after a lot of confusing headlines over the weekend about federal spending and freezes, when Lauren was like, oh, yeah, the daily treasury statement, you.

[Rachel Snyderman]

Can see if the Trump administration is funding the judiciary. You can see if they are funding Congress. So it will be able to show many things that I think now are, you know, worth monitoring. And so we were in a staff meeting, and we're just talking about this, and I was like, oh, there's an API.

[Mary Childs]

Like, the Treasury's website has an API, which is the computer way of saying, a way to turn those daily treasury statements into something bigger.

[Rachel Snyderman]

We can build something that people can use. Because the treasury statement itself, it's like. It's a PDF. You only see one at a time. It, like, replaces, you know, it's a website where that day's PDF at 4pm gets replaced with a different PDF, but there's an API under that. And if we could grab the information, then we could reproduce it in a form where people could see whether the Trump administration had actually stopped the flow of funds.

[Mary Childs]

You'd theoretically be able to see if parts of the government stopped requesting their allowances from the old money pipe.

[Erica Barris]

So the Brookings team gets to work. They pull hundreds and hundreds of old versions of that daily treasury statement, three years worth. And they build a way to automatically pull every new daily treasury statement as it is published.

[Mary Childs]

And then the idea was if they could stitch all of that together, they could get a big picture of how much money goes through that giant money pipe, how much goes to the Department of Agriculture or the Library of Congress on any given day, over a week, over three years, and they would be able to see if that money is still flowing.

[Rachel Snyderman]

Like, if I were writing a paper that were to accompany this, I would do a lot more stuff, you know.

[Mary Childs]

Like seasonal adjustments, rolling averages.

[Rachel Snyderman]

But we didn't, because we had to go fast, because there was this incredibly open, like, important, open, empirical question. Did money stop flowing? And the way to see that is the straightforward way.

[Erica Barris]

Just the basic numbers. How much money had been flowing through the money pipe, how much is still flowing, and to whom?

[Mary Childs]

So they build a basic program to turn all these daily treasury statements into an interactive graph. And in theory, because it's pulling new information once a day, it would allow them some clarity on federal spending in something approximating real time. Of course, that is all assuming that it works at all.

[Rachel Snyderman]

We built, like, the roughest version of it, basically on day one. And so in our. We do a Monday morning research staff meeting. And so everyone on that call can I swear.

[Mary Childs]

Oh, yeah, please.

[Rachel Snyderman]

Okay, great. So I'm. This is my whole staff, and I'm looking at the update while everyone's, like, giving their little reports, and I go, oh, they actually defunded usaid. And so everyone saw my face, like, go like, oh, my God. The thing we thought we could do, it did. And so that was when it became clear that this tool could, in fact, show that the money was not sent to USAID because they didn't request it.

[Mary Childs]

And so that was still an open question at the time.

[Rachel Snyderman]

Oh, yeah, it was an open question.

[Erica Barris]

Yeah. Their daily treasury statement tracker had shown that all of the money had suddenly stopped flowing to usaid. USAID had been functionally shuttered, and all of this, of course, would become an ongoing legal dispute.

[Mary Childs]

But for Lauren, in that moment, she had seen proof of concept. Watching the daily treasury statement every day was a way to get real answers about what was happening. And the widget they'd made, it worked. Lauren and her team published the widget and opened it up to the public.

[Erica Barris]

After the break, we take the money pipe tracker on the road for some use cases of who might be tracking the federal money pipe.

[Mary Childs]

We wanted to look at this money pipe monitor tool out in the real world to get a sense of the ways it might be useful and to whom.

[Erica Barris]

And we will begin with use case number one, which we will call the if you know, you know, use case.

[Mary Childs]

And for this if you know, you know, use case, we return to Lauren Bauer from Brookings, actually, who helped create the spending tracker tool in the first place.

[Rachel Snyderman]

Oh, it's broken again. It's gotten too much traffic.

[Mary Childs]

Oh, wow, that's great.

[Rachel Snyderman]

I mean, it is, but it's kind of annoying because, like, when I actually want to use it, you know. Yeah, I don't have special privileges.

[Erica Barris]

While Lauren deals with that, you should know that being obsessed with the daily treasury statement is not her normal job. She is an expert in nutrition assistance programs like snap, formerly known as food stamps.

[Mary Childs]

Lauren gets the money pipe monitor up and running again and we can see months and months worth of SNAP data, all these little spikes of payments from treasury to snap. The thing that this looks like to me is like a heartbeat beat monitor.

[Rachel Snyderman]

It is, right? So if you can see here, this.

[Mary Childs]

Is the one year chart, there are some very tall mountains that are very skinny.

[Rachel Snyderman]

They're very tall mountains.

[Mary Childs]

And it really is like looking at a kind of financial EKG for snap. You get this view of the economic heartbeat of a federal program. And what that heartbeat looks like is generally three big spikes of money every month.

[Erica Barris]

And because Lauren studies this program so closely, she knows that cadence is related to the way the program works first week of the month. That's when people typically get their benefits. So that's when states generally request the federal money they've been allotted. Later on, there are administrative costs. So more spikes.

[Mary Childs]

Now, in the early case we talked about with usaid, that was a dramatic example. Suddenly a total flatline in funding. Anyone could have noticed that change.

[Erica Barris]

But the use case we're talking about is a little different. Because Lauren knows SNAP so well, she's able to keep an eye out for more subtle changes. She zooms in on the most recent round of SNAP money payments.

[Rachel Snyderman]

You know, SNAP looks a little low maybe, but it bounced right back up, which is consistent with its thing with.

[Mary Childs]

Its normal over line.

[Rachel Snyderman]

But, you know, if a reporter who is you or any other reporter were to call me and say, did you see something in the SNAP line that is concerning to you? I would say, not yet, but I'm watching it.

[Erica Barris]

And this use case, experts who really know what to watch for. This is a big part of why Lauren wanted to make this in the first place. To basically hand these financial heart monitors over to other specialists who know what to look for in their areas of expertise.

[Mary Childs]

Okay, so that is use case one. Use case number two. We're gonna call the Am I gonna get my money or not Case.

[Erica Barris]

And in this specific case, it's more like, is Stephen Hellman gonna get his money or not?

[Mary Childs]

I notice you have literally nothing on your walls here. Can you and like maybe an equation, a real feudal equation on this whiteboard.

[Stephen Hellman]

What's that? Just some stuff I was scribbling. Computing some simple probabilities of some things.

[Mary Childs]

Steve is an assistant math professor at usc. He is supposed to be getting a grant from the national sc. That grant is for his research into Complexity theory.

[Stephen Hellman]

It's to study some problems in computer science using some math tools. I guess that's the short description. I tried to prove what computers can't do. I try to find the limits of computation using math tools.

[Erica Barris]

The Grant is for $199,006 over three years. It would pay for a student to work with him for travel, money to attend conferences, and for the summer when he doesn't get a salary. And the university takes some of the money into their budget as well.

[Mary Childs]

But will that money actually come through now? Steve is not sure. There's a lot of uncertainty. Theoretically, the money would start coming March 1st.

[Erica Barris]

We reached out to the NSF. They referred us to their webpage about executive orders, which does seem to say the NSF is still requesting its congressionally allotted funds and distributing them.

[Mary Childs]

But you know what might be useful? Look at the money pipe tracker.

[Erica Barris]

We pull up the graph of outgoing money to the National Science foundation to see if there are any signs. And looking at it, you can sort of see the story of the last couple weeks pretty clearly.

[Stephen Hellman]

Let's see a lot of volatility. Looks like a. I see a big. Well, it sort of levels out, drops down to zero, and then a big spike after that.

[Mary Childs]

Yeah, really big spike.

[Erica Barris]

Yep. Looks like a freeze in funds flowing and then presumably a big unfreeze when all the backed up funds flow out.

[Mary Childs]

So for Steve, that's promising.

[Stephen Hellman]

Yeah, it's nice to see it's. But you know, if you see zero, then that's. That would not be ideal.

[Mary Childs]

Now, of course, it's not like there's some line item saying Steve's grant. This is just showing when the money is flowing or not flowing out of nsf. It's the line going up or down or just laying there flat at zero. But yeah, Steve says if this is the best we got, more than nothing is better than nothing.

[Stephen Hellman]

Especially in an age when, yeah, there is a lot of misinformation around. You know, it's nice to have an actual source that shows you the numbers. Yeah.

[Erica Barris]

Even though the money seems to be flowing to nsf, Steve hasn't hired his summer student. He'll spend the money if and when it shows up.

[Mary Childs]

Okay. Our third and final use case is what we might call is there a reason to be worried about a gigantic mistake that might affect one of the most important financial instruments in the American and also global economy case?

[Erica Barris]

Yeah. So some background on this one. A concern that has developed over the last couple of weeks has to do with access to the giant money Pipe. Late last month, Elon Musk's Doge team was granted access to federal payment systems as part of what they say is an effort to suggest cuts to wasteful spending.

[Mary Childs]

There has been reporting that this team has a kind of access that would allow them to change computer code in the federal payment systems. Treasury initially denied this claim, but then they were like, oh, yes, whoops. That was true just for one person, but not anymore. But nonetheless, if someone makes the wrong changes to the giant money pipe, it might could cause seismic problems, notably to the famously reliable drip of interest paid on US Government debt Treasuries.

[Erica Barris]

And so, for our final stop, we called up someone who was expecting lots of these regular interest payments.

[Mary Childs]

His name is Guy Loba. He lives in Philadelphia. The Eagles had just won the Super Bowl. Go Birds. Guy volunteered that he did not climb any lampposts to celebrate.

[Lauren Bauer]

I didn't. I'm going to leave that to the 20 somethings.

[Mary Childs]

Okay, so you're doing that risk reward analysis and you're like, it's not for me.

[Lauren Bauer]

Yeah. I mean, I am a fixed income portfolio manager, so we're not usually the most exciting types in the world.

[Erica Barris]

Guy buys and owns bonds professionally for clients. And once a month on the 15th, he gets interest payments of millions of dollars on U.S. treasuries.

[Mary Childs]

How do you know when you've gotten an interest payment into your portfolio? Like, have you ever had to think about it arriving?

[Lauren Bauer]

Well, that's a really interesting question. You know, we do track interest payments for riskier bonds, but our systems are all built around assuming that payments just come in when it comes to Treasuries.

[Mary Childs]

And the line item on interest paid on treasury securities is my personal favorite thing to look at on the money pipe tracker. So we pull it up together.

[Lauren Bauer]

Here we go to dig around a little bit. But it seems like a cleverly programmed widget.

[Mary Childs]

What this graph looks like is just these massive, steadfast steady spikes.

[Lauren Bauer]

They represent the quarterly big interest payments the Treasury Department makes, and they cover payment on trillions of dollars of outstanding securities that are used across the global financial system.

[Erica Barris]

Treasuries are seen as the safest investment in the world. The US has never missed a payment in modern history.

[Mary Childs]

Well, except for the one time in 1979 when we were accidentally a little late. One study found that just that tiny bit of uncertainty wound up costing the US government like $12 billion just for that tiny risk premium.

[Erica Barris]

But other than that, so reliable. And Guy admits if the US Truly, truly, truly missed a payment, it would probably ruin his day that day would.

[Lauren Bauer]

Look like lighting my hair on fire and running around in circles. For the most part, yeah.

[Mary Childs]

Not ideal, not what we want, Frankie. But if you are worried about that, you can pull up the ol money pipe monitor widget tracker thing and look for that reassuring spike, spike, spike.

[Lauren Bauer]

So a very large problem would show up on the ckg. A very large problem meaning a missed interest payment on billions and billions and billions of securities. I find that scenario among the least likely and hopefully I still have that opinion three months from now.

[Mary Childs]

So that meaning you don't think that they will miss a payment?

[Lauren Bauer]

I really do not expect the Treasury Department to miss a payment.

[Mary Childs]

So third and final use case watching treasury interest payments, if that's what helps you sleep at night, does for me.

[Erica Barris]

Lauren Bauer from Brookings Institution has been frantically trying to keep track of who is using this and for what. It is still a work in progress and Lauren apparently is also open to ideas.

[Mary Childs]

Now do you have a mechanism for if a line item disappears?

[Rachel Snyderman]

That's a really good question. I'm going to write that down as a thing we should do. Good job.

[Mary Childs]

Thank you.

[Erica Barris]

It would be hard to find someone who loves the daily treasury statement more than Lauren Bauer. And she is delighted to be elevating the plucky little PDF, getting it more and more attention.

[Mary Childs]

But with some government websites flickering on and off and with some public information getting pulled down, we asked her, is it possible to draw too much attention to our precious daily treasury statement?

[Erica Barris]

Lauren says no. If that little PDF disappeared for some reason, she thinks that would attract even more attention to it.

[Rachel Snyderman]

I am not worried if someone pulls my access to this because if they do, then that is actually a paradigm shift of lights out into the public's insight into how much money the treasury has and where it's coming in and where it's going. And so I actually feel quite proud that we've pulled something that I dare you to remove the public's access to the federal government's balance sheet.

[Mary Childs]

Do you double dog dare?

[Rachel Snyderman]

Not really.

[Erica Barris]

If you would like to follow the giant money pipe for yourself, you can find that at the Hamilton Projects website.

[Mary Childs]

Foreign.

[Erica Barris]

This episode of Planet Money was produced by Emma Peasley with help from James Snead. It was edited by Kenny Malone. It was fact checked by the same James need and engineered by Jimmy Keeley with help from Neil T. Vault. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

[Mary Childs]

If you want to hear more about this story, you can keep an eye out for an upcoming Planet Money plot episode that's in our feed of bonus content for subscribers. And if there's anything in the headlines you are wondering about, you want to stick us on, let us know. You can email [e-mail] Special thanks to Christian Hoffman and Felix Liditsky. We will link to the Hamilton Project's website in the show notes. I'm Mary Childs.

[Erica Barris]

I'm Erica Barris. This is npr. Thanks for listening.