Was reminded that not everyone knows that there is a dedicated department in Congress, the CRS, that does nothing but create detailed, clear, informative reports on EVERYTHING for the benefit of congressfolk, and makes them publicly available. https://crsreports.congress.gov/ 

The content is a bit of a crapshoot, because they can only produce these things so fast, so it's always worth checking the creation date. But the sheer range of content is genuinely amazing.

Similar vein, it strikes me that there are folks who maybe don't realize just HOW MUCH STUFF the federal government publishes and makes freely available. The federal register - https://www.federalregister.gov/  - is a "magazine" the size of the players handbook that is published DAILY

For a certain stripe of nerd, this is teach-your-grandma-to-suck eggs stuff, but I was just thinking that I would never have actually encountered any of this if I hadn't worked in government.

Oh, third leg of this. The Library of congress maintains a system which has EVERYTHING about every bill and committee hearing and speech that passes through congress. Again, freely available and searchable https://www.congress.gov/ 

There is literally a book published every day that congress is in session, called (appropriately) "The Congressional Record". It includes *every word* said on the floor (and many that aren't). Again. Freely available and Searchable.

All this stuff has been in existence for ages, but it used to be you needed to physically go to Washington and know where to pick up a copy. Sending people to pick up the new Federal Register was a whole sub-industry alongside professional line-sitting.

But the folks behind it have embraced technology, and do everything they can to make this stuff publicly available, as it's intended to be. It's a genuinely amazing thing, at least in part because it's so easy to not know it's out there.

And I've just scratched the surface.

This is all *really* important information, but the sheer volume of it creates a certain amount of security through obscurity. There are people who get paid because they are experts at sifting through this stuff, because it's work. But it's genuinely work that you can do too.

And to make the subtext text, here's the takeaway:

When the government spends money, it goes into the Federal Register.

Is there a grant being offered? Some spending that needs bids? Anything like that? The Federal Register is the place of record for such things.

This is the nugget of truth behind the FREE! GOVERNMENT! MONEY! scams. There literally have been government funding and outreach programs that have been left on the table because no one knew to claim them (Though that's less common these days, thanks to tech).