Government Spending Requirements Specification

Voice to Congress — Draft v0.1
MIL-HDBK-520A-Style Requirements Specification
Issue Code: GOVERNMENT_SPENDING
Status: Initial Draft for Review
Date: 2026-04-27

Voice to Congress — Draft v0.1 MIL-HDBK-520A-Style Requirements Specification Issue Code: GOVERNMENT_SPENDING Status: Initial Draft for Review Date: 2026-04-27

Revision History

1. Scope

1.1 Purpose

This specification defines citizen-centered requirements for evaluating United States federal government spending, congressional fiscal performance, and member-level legislative activity. The purpose is to connect:

1. What citizens require from government spending.
2. What the federal spending system must do.
3. What objective metrics prove whether requirements are being met.
4. What legislation and votes support or oppose those requirements.
5. How congressional member activity should be scored against citizen requirements.

This document is intended to support the Voice to Congress Government Spending Metrics Dashboard and Government Spending Congressional Report Card.

1.2 Problem Statement

The current Government Spending Report Card can identify and score congressional activity. However, activity alone does not prove the country is moving toward citizen requirements. Members may sponsor, cosponsor, advance, or vote on many measures while the national spending system continues to fail on debt, deficits, waste, fiscal transparency, late budgets, poor program evaluation, and weak public value.

The requirements framework must prevent the system from rewarding motion in the wrong direction.

1.3 System Concept

The Government Spending evaluation system shall trace every score from citizen needs to measurable outcomes:

Citizen Requirement
    — Government Spending System Requirement
        — Metric Requirement
            — Data Source
                — Legislative Evaluation Rule
                    — Member Score Impact
                        — Public Report Card Display

1.4 Intended Users

2. Referenced and Applicable Documents

The following documents and sources inform this requirements framework:

1. Voice to Congress Government Spending Report Card notes and page drafts.
2. Congress.gov legislative data.
3. House and Senate roll-call vote records.
4. Congressional Budget Office budget projections, baselines, and cost estimates.
5. Government Accountability Office high-risk list, duplication reports, improper payment findings, and program audits.
6. Office of Management and Budget budget tables, agency performance data, and improper payment reporting.
7. Treasury Fiscal Data debt, receipts, outlays, and interest cost data.
8. USAspending.gov federal awards, grants, contracts, loans, and recipient data.
9. International Budget Partnership Open Budget Survey.
10. OECD Government at a Glance, performance budgeting, and spending review practices.
11. IMF Fiscal Transparency Code and fiscal risk management practices.
12. World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators.

3. Definitions

4. Operational Need

Citizens require government spending that is:

1. Responsible.
2. Transparent.
3. Measurable.
4. Sustainable.
5. Auditable.
6. Effective.
7. Fair to future generations.
8. Protective of essential services.
9. Resistant to waste, fraud, abuse, corruption, and political manipulation.
10. Connected to results, not merely appropriations.

The present problem is not only that government spends too much or too little. The deeper problem is that spending is often disconnected from clear citizen requirements, measurable outcomes, disciplined tradeoffs, long-term sustainability, and transparent accountability.

5. Countries with Strong Government Spending Practices

There is no single perfect international ranking for “best government spending.” Best practice must be inferred from multiple dimensions: budget transparency, public participation, legislative oversight, audit oversight, fiscal sustainability, government effectiveness, anti-corruption controls, spending reviews, and performance budgeting.

5.1 Benchmark Countries and Practices

5.2 Derived Best Practices

The United States Government Spending system should adopt or strengthen the following best practices:

1. Publish complete, timely, plain-English budget documents.
2. Use multi-year fiscal planning with realistic assumptions.
3. Require independent fiscal analysis of major legislation.
4. Tie appropriations to measurable outcomes.
5. Conduct annual spending reviews.
6. Maintain strong legislative and audit oversight.
7. Publish open, searchable, machine-readable spending data.
8. Track debt, interest costs, deficits, tax expenditures, and fiscal risks.
9. Report program performance and public value.
10. Use citizen participation and public consultation in budget priorities.
11. Protect essential services while reducing waste.
12. Avoid unfunded gimmicks that shift costs to future taxpayers.

6. Citizen-Level Requirements

6.1 Citizen Requirements Table

7. System-Level Requirements

7.1 Fiscal Sustainability Requirements

7.2 Budget Discipline Requirements

7.3 Spending Efficiency Requirements

7.4 Transparency and Auditability Requirements

7.5 Public Value and Performance Requirements

7.6 Essential Services Protection Requirements

7.7 Intergenerational Fairness Requirements

8. Functional Requirements

9. Metrics Requirements

9.1 Metrics Domain Model

9.2 Initial Metric Requirements

10. Legislative Evaluation Requirements

10.1 Legislative Classification

10.2 Alignment Categories

10.3 Bill Scoring Requirements

10.4 Vote Scoring Requirements

11. Member Activity Alignment Requirements

12. Verification and Validation Requirements

12.1 Verification Methods

12.2 Verification Matrix

13. Traceability Matrix

14. Scoring Methodology Requirements

14.1 System Metrics Grade

The Government Spending Metrics grade shall measure whether the national system is meeting citizen requirements. It shall not be based on member activity alone.

The system grade shall include:

1. Fiscal sustainability.
2. Budget discipline.
3. Spending efficiency.
4. Transparency and auditability.
5. Public value.
6. Citizen participation and accountability.

14.2 Member Activity / Alignment Score

The member score shall measure contribution toward requirements, not simply activity volume.

Proposed formula:

Member Requirement Score =
Activity × Alignment × Progress × Evidence Quality × Outcome Connection

Where:

14.3 Display Rule

The public website shall not use the same label for:

1. System Metrics Grade.
2. Member Activity Score.
3. Member Alignment Score.
4. Provisional vote score.

The website shall clearly distinguish these displays to prevent the false impression that highly active members prove the system is performing well.

15. Data Requirements

16. Assumptions and Constraints

16.1 Assumptions

1. Congress.gov remains the primary source for bill and sponsorship data.
2. House and Senate roll-call records remain the primary sources for vote data.
3. CBO, GAO, OMB, Treasury, USAspending.gov, and agency reports remain the primary federal fiscal data sources.
4. International comparison data will be used as benchmarks, not as direct U.S. requirements.
5. Some metrics will remain provisional until reliable data is automated.

16.2 Constraints

1. Some fiscal outcomes lag legislation by years.
2. Many bills do not receive votes.
3. Procedural votes can be difficult to interpret.
4. Spending quality is not always visible from bill title alone.
5. International comparisons may use different accounting standards.
6. Member scoring must not imply causation where only correlation or activity is observed.
7. Public display must be clear enough for citizens without oversimplifying methodology.

17. Open Issues

18. Initial Threshold Concepts

Final thresholds require calibration. Initial concepts:

19. Practical Next Steps

1. Review and revise citizen requirements.
2. Approve the domain model and weights.
3. Convert requirements into a database table.
4. Add requirement-domain classification to the bill classifier.
5. Add metric requirements to the Government Spending Metrics Dashboard.
6. Add bill-to-requirement alignment scoring.
7. Replace “member grade” with “member activity/alignment rating.”
8. Build a traceability report:

   Bill — Requirement — Metric — Member Action — Score Impact

1. Draft the public methodology page.
2. Calibrate the system grade against U.S. historical data and top-country benchmarks.

20. Draft Requirement Database Schema

CREATE TABLE requirement_master (
    requirement_id TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
    issue_code TEXT NOT NULL,
    requirement_type TEXT NOT NULL,
    domain TEXT NOT NULL,
    requirement_text TEXT NOT NULL,
    rationale TEXT,
    verification_method TEXT,
    data_source TEXT,
    desired_direction TEXT,
    status TEXT DEFAULT 'DRAFT'
);

CREATE TABLE bill_requirement_alignment (
    bill_id TEXT NOT NULL,
    requirement_id TEXT NOT NULL,
    alignment TEXT NOT NULL,
    confidence TEXT NOT NULL,
    score_weight REAL DEFAULT 1.0,
    rationale TEXT,
    reviewer TEXT,
    review_date TEXT,
    PRIMARY KEY (bill_id, requirement_id)
);

CREATE TABLE vote_requirement_alignment (
    chamber TEXT NOT NULL,
    congress INTEGER NOT NULL,
    roll_call_number TEXT NOT NULL,
    requirement_id TEXT NOT NULL,
    alignment TEXT NOT NULL,
    vote_weight REAL DEFAULT 0,
    rationale TEXT,
    reviewer TEXT,
    review_date TEXT,
    PRIMARY KEY (chamber, congress, roll_call_number, requirement_id)
);

21. Summary

This specification changes the Government Spending Report Card from an activity tracker into a requirements-driven accountability system.

The core principle is:

Do not reward effort unless the effort moves the system toward citizen requirements.

A member can be active and still move the system in the wrong direction. A spending bill can be fiscally responsible or fiscally harmful depending on transparency, offsets, long-term effects, public value, auditability, and service impacts. The final scoring model must therefore evaluate activity, alignment, progress, evidence quality, and outcomes together.