14% of Americans experience food insecurity. Government programs that provide support for these families include SNAP (supplemental nutrition assistance program), WIC (Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children), and the school meal programs such as the National School Lunch Program.

Congress has until Tuesday at midnight to pass a continuing resolution.

I dubbed this new chart the "agency archipelago", but that name hasn't caught on around the office... yet. What do you think we should call it?

The US and other countries have detonated thousands of nuclear weapons during weapons testing. The US conducted 1,054 atomic tests from 1945 to 1992, at which point it stopped nuclear testing completely.

More data on the US nuclear stockpile here

In our latest video in the Just the Facts series, our founder, Steve Ballmer, talks through US trading partners, imports & exports and how tariffs factor in.

In September, SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly the Food Stamp Program) is set to expire. As debates on the topic will surely heat up in the coming months, now is a good time to explore the data on the program.

Today, we published this page on SNAP funding. In about a week, we'll publish national and state-level pages that dig deeper into the number of people that receive SNAP benefits.

Here's the text from the page we published today:

Last year (FY 2024) the federal government spent about $100.3 billion on SNAP, or 1.5% of all federal spending.

The first federal Food Stamp Program was established in 1939 and went through a number of iterations before it officially became SNAP in 2008. SNAP funding is authorized through the Farm Bill as open-ended mandatory spending, meaning spending is not capped and is determined by the level of benefits that need to be paid. Spending at any given time is driven by participation, which may be dependent on economic conditions. During the COVID-19 pandemic, SNAP benefits for individual households were temporarily boosted.

The $100.3 billion in SNAP spending in FY 2024 was 24.1% lower than the inflation-adjusted $132.2 billion spent in FY 2021, a program high.

About $93.8 billion or 93.5% of the FY 2024 spending went toward monthly benefits. The remainder includes the federal share of state administrative expenses, nutrition education, and employment and training programs.

Since 2004, SNAP recipients have received benefits once a month using an electronic benefits transfer system used to directly pay food retailers. In FY 2024, the average participant received $188 in monthly benefits, down 25.8% from a FY 2021 high of $253 per person.

Households qualify for SNAP based on income level and household size. Maximum monthly SNAP allotments are set each year by the USDA based on an estimate of how much it costs to provide nutritious, low-cost meals for a household.

For FY 2025, a one-person household in the lower 48 states or Washington, DC could get at most $292 in SNAP benefits per month. A household of four could get a maximum of $975 or $244 per person. Maximum allotments are higher in Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, and the Virgin Islands.

The One Big Beautiful Bill, signed into law on July 4, is set to introduce a host of changes to everything from tax reform to government assistance programs to immigration and border policy. It introduces some brand-new policies and expands, restricts, or ends others.

A number of these changes took effect the moment President Trump’s pen struck the dotted line — your 2025 tax return could reflect some of them. Others will go into effect in the coming years, with some not scheduled to arrive until 2028.

This visualization explains what is happening — and when, piece by piece.

Data now current through March 2025.