Earlier this year, I manually typed in the Office of Management and Budget’s publicly-available FY2005 Historical Budget PDF into Excel, in order to analyze military spending over the past six decades. It struck me as pointless to provide data in PDF only form, and I felt like the government was unnecessarily obfuscating important data from public consumption.

Until today. I had just about given up on this, and was about to go find some PDF to Text conversion tools, then put up a public database of the data so that others could do analysis as well. Then, I stumbled upon the motherlode of government historical budget data, already provided in Excel format.

So, without further ado, here you go:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2005/hist.html

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2005/db.html

To all you aspiring data-crunchers out there: this should be enough to get you started with making simple excel graphs to compare budgetary data series over a long enough timespan to actually make some sense of what goes on in Washington.

However, if you were to be provided with a public database that was truly query-able, would you use it? What interface would you prefer? What would really make this data useful to you in your own policy research?

I’d be very willing to take on such a project to get my feet wet with this kind of thing. Please do leave a comment and i’ll take them into consideration whether I should go ahead with something like this.