Open Data Reveals $791 Million Error in Newly Adopted NYC Budget
The headline in a recent NYC press release caught my eye: “MAYOR AND CITY COUNCIL LAUNCH SEARCHABLE OPEN BUDGET FOR NEW YORK CITY”. I was pretty excited. As mentioned in my talk on Ted, NYC has entombed this data in PDFs for years, making it basically impossible to analyze and understand what is going on. But for the first time, we can actually do things like look at the top spending for each agency. This is a big deal.
The bad news in all of this is that the City only put this year’s budget (FY2017) on the Open Data portal and left all prior years off. This makes it impossible to look for trends and year-to-year changes, which is exactly what is most interesting in a budget - so that was a real disappointment from a progressive administration. The omission is especially silly given that many years of prior budgets are in the exact same format as this year’s budget, making export to the Open Data portal equally easy.
Now to the data. After a quick look, it was clear that the most granular (and thus most interesting) open budget data available is the data associated with the Supporting Schedule. It categorizes expenses all the way down to the “Object Code” Name. Object Codes include everything from “Full Time Position” costs and “Overtime” to “Postage” and “Telephone Services.” Each Object Code is assigned to an Agency, so you can track the expenses from each agency. Not before the Open Data release, if you wanted to, for example, understand the NYPD’s biggest expenses, you would have to troll through hundreds of pages of PDFs. Now, one just has to know how to use Excel or program a bit. Major steps forward.
And it turns out that it was this exact question, “what are the NYPD’s biggest expenses,” that led me to a discovery in the very first place I looked in the FY2017 budget. Let’s have a look at the largest 20 Budget Codes for the NYPD:
Does anything stand out? Just a little? Protection of Foreign Missions leads the way here. And not just leads, but conquers. In fact, according to this year’s adopted budget, we are going to spend more on protecting foreign missions than School Safety, Transit, Housing and Narcotics combined! This amounts to about 1% of NYC’s entire budget and 15% of the NYPD’s entire budget.
Seems unreal, right? Might this be a data problem with the new Open Data release? Nope. The same thing is right there in the Budget’s Supporting Schedule PDF as well, split between pages 1125 and 1126.
So our city voted on and adopted this budget, putting that much money to protecting foreign missions? Yup. But before you get all upset about this crazy distribution of police funding, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this is, in fact, a $800 million typo that, for some reason, no one noticed in the budget.
In a 2012 statement, Ray Kelly pegged the amount budgeted for the protection of foreign missions at $27 million. A 30 times increase since then would seem nearly impossible.
More convincingly, last year’s budget did not even include the protection of foreign missions as a line item, but the same number of staff resources and a similarly large budget size was given to “Chief of Department” instead of “Protection of Foreign Missions”. (See pg. 624 here.)
So unless the Chief of Department staff is now exclusively doing protection of foreign missions, this is a typo. (If I am wrong, then I have much bigger questions!) What’s so troubling to me is that if anyone within government had used the data of the budget to even shallowly analyze NYPD spending at a high level, this would have been caught. After all, it was in the proposed Executive Budget in April and stayed in there throughout negotiations with the Council that ended in June. And then it was voted on and adopted.
The fact that this amount of money made it through the budget process presumably mislabeled makes the case for Open Data even stronger. Open Data is not just about “transparency”. Our government officials are only human and our agencies have limited resources. Budgets are far too large and complex to be understood end-to-end by our legislators. As more data gets out to the public, we’ll start to see that our citizens can help improve the way government operates - even if it’s sometimes proof reading!
Though I wish they put up more history, credit should be given to OMB for getting this data out at all. It is a NYC first. And with that, I’ll leave you with this last piece of data: Number of times “Open Data” appears in the NYC budget? 0.
New Open Budget Data is here.
Supporting Schedule Open Data is found here.
Supporting Schedule PDF is found here.
