Where's the discretionary money going?

Each year the New York City Council designates hundreds of millions of dollars in discretionary funding — the "Schedule C" of the adopted budget — to community organizations, cultural institutions, senior centers, anti-violence programs, and more. In FY2027 that total is $655,764,999. This tool lets you explore it two ways: by category (what the money is for) and by administering agency (which City agency routes it), drilling down to the individual initiative.

Two lines are shown for each slice. Adopted is the discretionary total from the Council's adopted budget — the authoritative figure, reconciled to the dollar against the source document's printed totals. Itemized is the portion designated to a named recipient organization in the same document. The gap between them is money that flows through lump-sum or citywide initiatives (such as the Speaker's Initiative) with no organization-level breakout in the adopted schedule. Prototype note: the Itemized line depends on matching award records to initiative names and is materially complete only for recent years (roughly FY2023 onward); earlier years understate it. Always read the Adopted line as the reconciled truth.

⚟ Editorial note on names. The City spells the same category and initiative differently across years (an ALL-CAPS era vs Title Case, "&" vs "and", singular/plural, and renames such as Senior Services → Older Adult Services). So that a program's funding line stays continuous, BetaNYC made an editorial decision to consolidate these into canonical names, checked against the organizations funded under each name. The original source names are preserved in the underlying data; only the display is consolidated. Full mapping and rationale: DATA-ANOMALIES.md #17–#18.

On our use of AI. The code behind this project was written with the help of an AI coding assistant (Anthropic's Claude), directed and reviewed by BetaNYC staff. We tell you this because transparency is part of BetaNYC's AI policy: we explain when and how we use these tools.

What AI did and did not do here matters. AI helped us write the software that reads the Council's budget PDFs and builds this visualization. It did not read, interpret, or generate any of the dollar figures. Every number is extracted deterministically by that code and checked line by line against the source document's own printed totals, so any figure traces back to the page it came from. A person reviewed the result before it was published. The AI assisted the work; BetaNYC remains accountable for it.

Data: BetaNYC/New-York-City-Budget, extracted deterministically from NYC Council adopted-budget PDFs (© City of New York) and released under the MIT License. This visualization is built on look-at-cook by DataMade (Derek Eder, Nick Rougeux) and Open City, also MIT-licensed. Built by BetaNYC.