In the coming months, Subsidyscope.com will be spending less time tracking bailout-related subsidies and more time examining government assistance in the transportation sector.
Since the project launched in January, Subsidyscope has provided comprehensive and high-quality reports, visualizations and databases that raised public awareness and informed policymakers about the scale of the financial bailout.
Everything presented on our site can be freely reused with proper attribution, and in the six months that we have focused on the bailout, thousands of users from across the country have accessed our data.
The Christian Science Monitor's Patchwork Nation project, for example, took our map of Troubled Asset Relief Program money to each county, using bank branch data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and refined it to highlight the communities, mostly in the western United States, that received the bulk of TARP subsidies.
Patchwork Nation — which uses census and other data to identify trends in various types of communities — also overlaid our data with its 12 community types, showing that some types of communities recieved a far greater percentage of TARP money than other types of communities.
Subsidyscope was cited by journalists at mainstream media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, ProPublica and American Public Media. We also helped inform many bloggers, who have linked to our comprehensive database of government reports on the bailout and our latest findings.
Local newspapers such as The Triangle Business Journal of Raleigh, North Carolina, and The Journal of Martinsburg, West Virginia, used our TARP disbursements database to show which banks in their respective communities were receiving and not receiving TARP money.
One of Subsidyscope's biggest discoveries was a discrepancy in the way that Treasury calculated strike prices on warrants — one that could cost taxpayers billions. The discovery was featured in The Wall Street Journal, Slate and the Financial Times.
After reading the Journal article, Detroit Free Press columnist Brian Dickerson said Subsidyscope was providing a service that was "backstopping traditional media."
"[Subsidyscope is] engaged in ... the sort of thing newspaper reporters used to do all the time when there were a lot more of them," Dickerson wrote.
While we turn more of our attention to a new sector, we will continue to build out our bailout-related databases and address financial-sector subsidies as they arise. Keep coming back to Subsidyscope as we apply the same level of attention to transportation subsidies as we have to the financial bailout. Initial data and findings will be posted in the coming months.