Follow the money — and watch it go cold

California shows a lot at the top and very little at the bottom. This traces a dollar from the budget down to the last publicly-named payee — and labels, with sources, every point where the public trail stops. Traced payments: FY2025-26.

Headwaters — the plan

What the state budget appropriates. This is the plan, not actual payments — the recognizable General Fund figures, plus the wider fund totals.

$226.75B

General Fund revenue

eBudget · appropriation

$251.48B

General Fund spending

eBudget · appropriation

$24.72B

General Fund deficit

spending over revenue

$793.67B

All funds (gross)

GF + special + bond + federal

Where the plan sends it — top agencies

General Fund appropriation by agency (eBudget). Share is of appropriated General Fund spending.

#	Agency	Appropriated	Share
1	Health and Human Services	$93.68B	37.2%
2	K thru 12 Education	$91.09B	36.2%
3	Higher Education	$26.69B	10.6%
4	Corrections and Rehabilitation	$14.45B	5.7%
5	Legislative, Judicial, and Executive	$7.08B	2.8%
6	Government Operations	$5.15B	2.0%
7	Natural Resources	$4.95B	2.0%
8	General Government	$4.32B	1.7%
9	Housing and Homelessness	$1.69B	0.7%
10	Transportation	$1.07B	0.4%
	Everything else (3 agencies)	$1.31B	0.5%

The traced payments

Actual department→payee payments recorded in Open FI$Cal, flowing fund → agency → department → payee. Hover a block for its amount and share; tap one to follow its downstream flow. Frozen blocks are dead-ends.

Building the interactive trail… (it needs JavaScript). The numbers behind it, and every wall, are below.

FundAgencyDepartmentPayeeEverything else (capped)Dead-end / masked

Where the trail goes cold

Six documented dead-ends. Each says what we can and cannot prove, and links to its primary source or a State Auditor report.

❄Auditor 2024-039

Raw, unaudited — and only part of the picture

Open FI$Cal is published raw, unaudited and unconsolidated under Gov. Code §11862. It covers about 79% of state expenditures (153 departments) and will not reconcile to California's audited financial statements. The State Auditor's 2024-039 review notes the state's official “book of record” is still being migrated into FI$Cal, with completion targeted for July 1, 2026. Treat every figure here as a payment ledger, not an accounting total.

CA State Auditor 2024-039 — FI$Cal ↗

❄

Local assistance leaves as lump sums

Most of the state budget is “local assistance” — money handed to counties, cities, schools and districts. It leaves the state ledger as a lump sum here and only reappears later as self-reported local aggregates. The State Controller's ByTheNumbers portal republishes those filings, but only as each agency submits them — and not every agency files. Past the hand-off, the state cannot show what a given local dollar bought.

CA State Controller — ByTheNumbers (local financial data) ↗

❄Auditor 2020-102

Realignment money the state itself can't fully track

Public-safety realignment sent roughly $6 billion to counties in 2019–20 alone. The State Auditor found state and county oversight so weak — and county reporting so inconsistent and incomplete — that oversight bodies had monitored less than 20% of the funding. Once realignment dollars leave the state's books they become hard to follow.

CA State Auditor 2020-102 — Public Safety Realignment ↗

❄

Medi-Cal capitation severs the trail at the health plan

For most Medi-Cal enrollees the state pays a managed-care plan a fixed per-member-per-month “capitation” rate. What the plan then pays doctors, hospitals and clinics is set by separate private contracts that are not in this data — so the public trail stops at the health plan, not the provider who delivered the care.

CA Dept. of Health Care Services — capitation payments ↗

❄

Protected “CONFIDENTIAL” payees

$3.37B · 5.6% of traced payments

Employee and legally protected payees are masked as CONFIDENTIAL in the source — real payments, redacted names. We show the total rather than hide it, but it cannot be traced to a name. This is a legal redaction, not missing money.

Open FI$Cal (payee names legally redacted) ↗

❄

Subcontractors & end use — not published

Open FI$Cal records the payment to the prime vendor, but carries no subaward ledger and no contract IDs. Once the money reaches a vendor, payments onward to its subcontractors — and what the money actually bought — are not published here. This is where even a fully-traced payment goes cold.

Open FI$Cal (no subaward data published) ↗

The traced flow in numbers

Fund

#	Name	Amount	Share
1	General Fund	$23.69B	39.2%
2	Federal Trust Fund	$13.86B	22.9%
3	Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund	$2.78B	4.6%
4	California Beverage Container	$2.67B	4.4%
5	Gas Consumption Surcharge Fund	$1.53B	2.5%
6	Architecture Revolving Fund	$800.0M	1.3%
7	AIDS Drug Assistance Program R	$559.0M	0.9%
8	High-Speed Pass Train Bnd Fd	$538.5M	0.9%
	Everything else (457 funds)	$13.98B	23.1%

Agency

#	Name	Amount	Share
1	Education	$14.90B	24.7%
2	Health and Human Services	$11.00B	18.2%
3	Legislative, Judicial, & Exec	$9.18B	15.2%
4	Environmental Protection	$6.75B	11.2%
5	Bus., Consumer Srvcs & Housing	$4.47B	7.4%
6	Natural Resources	$4.09B	6.8%
7	General Government	$3.32B	5.5%
8	Government Operations	$2.76B	4.6%
	Everything else (3 agencies)	$3.94B	6.5%

Department

#	Name	Amount	Share
1	Department of Education	$13.62B	22.6%
2	Housing & Community Developmnt	$4.12B	6.8%
3	Office of Emergency Services	$3.93B	6.5%
4	Resources Recycling & Recovery	$3.50B	5.8%
5	Department of Social Services	$3.08B	5.1%
6	Department of Public Health	$2.68B	4.4%
7	Public Utilities Commission	$2.35B	3.9%
8	CAL FIRE	$1.80B	3.0%
9	State Dept Hlth Care Services	$1.63B	2.7%
10	State Air Resources Board	$1.62B	2.7%
	Everything else (140 departments)	$22.07B	36.5%

Vendor / payee

#	Name	Amount	Share
1	TREASURER OF LOS ANGELES CNTY	$2.24B	3.7%
2	FDN FOR CA COMMUNITY COLLEGES	$1.65B	2.7%
3	DEPT OF GENERAL SERVICES	$1.49B	2.5%
4	PACIFIC GAS & ELECTRIC CO	$1.00B	1.7%
5	CALSTART INC	$727.8M	1.2%
6	DEPT OF RESOURCES RECYCLING & RECOVERY	$702.1M	1.2%
7	SOCALGAS	$564.2M	0.9%
8	COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES	$517.0M	0.9%
9	CALIFORNIA DEPT OF TRANS	$510.9M	0.8%
10	TREASURER COUNTY OF SAN DIEGO	$510.4M	0.8%
11	ORANGE COUNTY TREASURER	$456.3M	0.8%
12	TUTOR PERINI ZACHRY PARSONS	$453.4M	0.8%
	Everything else (37892 vendors)	$46.22B	76.5%
	Protected / CONFIDENTIAL payees masked	$3.37B	5.6%

Traced payments as of 2026-10-04 · Source: Open FI$Cal (raw, unaudited). Plan figures: California eBudget.

Federal money flowing INTO California

The other direction: federal dollars obligated into California. Federal fiscal year: FY2026. Source: USAspending.gov (public domain).

This is money flowing IN — and why it can't be stitched to the flow above.

The state checkbook above is money flowing OUT (California → its vendors). This is money flowing IN (the federal government → California recipients). The two can't yet be stitched into one trail — the same organization appears under different identities in each dataset (a UEI here, a free-text vendor name there), and that entity-resolution is a later phase.
Amounts are the fiscal year's obligations (from USAspending category rollups), not award-lifetime totals — a multi-year contract's full ceiling would wildly overstate one year, so we deliberately use the FY-obligation figures that reconcile to each agency's total.
The lens is place of performance = California — money whose work or benefit lands in CA, even if the recipient is headquartered elsewhere.
The trail can follow one hop past a recipient — self-reported first-tier subawards — and then it goes cold. Deeper subcontracts are not reported anywhere.
One hop CAN be recovered the OTHER way: a recipient's own federal Single Audit reports who passed the money DOWN to it. Open an organization on Organizations to see its “passed through from” upstream entities (a separate, aggregate measure — see the note there).

$315.57B

Federal funds into CA (obligated)

across 15 awarding agencies · FY obligations

245

Named CA recipients

distinct prime recipients you can see

$5.99B · 58 edges

First-tier subawards (the last hop)

self-reported; the trail goes cold below this

FY2026 · federal→CA prime obligations (contracts+grants, place-of-performance) $91.46B across 51 agencies · top 12 agencies ($88.11B) drilled to 180 recipient edges (+12 remainder) · 8 first-tier subaward edges [WALL: tier-2+ unreported, FSRS] · amounts are FY obligations from spending_by_category (NOT award-lifetime totals) · top programs: National School Lunch Program ($2.95B), Title I Grants to Local Educational Agencies ($2.29B), Federal Transit Formula Grants ($2.00B), Highway Planning and Construction ($1.75B), Special Education Grants to States ($1.48B)

Building the interactive federal trail… (it needs JavaScript). The numbers behind it, and the subaward wall, are below.

Federal agencyCA recipientAggregate / everything else (capped)First-tier subaward (self-reported)Dead-end — deeper subawards unreported

Where the federal trail goes cold

❄

Federal subawards go dark below the first tier

USAspending shows each prime federal award and, from FSRS, the prime recipient's FIRST-tier subawards (self-reported, contracts/grants ≥$30k). Below that first hop there is no reporting anywhere — a sub-awardee's own subcontracts, and what the money ultimately bought, are simply not published. First-tier subaward data is also self-reported, lagged and known to undercount, so treat it as a floor, not a full accounting.

USAspending.gov — subaward (FSRS) data ↗

The federal flow in numbers

Federal agency

#	Name	Amount	Share
1	Department of Health and Human Services	$137.15B	43.5%
2	Department of Defense	$71.71B	22.7%
3	Department of Transportation	$22.24B	7.0%
4	Department of Agriculture	$16.63B	5.3%
5	Department of Energy	$15.43B	4.9%
6	Department of Homeland Security	$14.91B	4.7%
7	Department of Education	$11.24B	3.6%
8	National Aeronautics and Space Administration	$8.43B	2.7%
9	Department of Veterans Affairs	$7.12B	2.3%
10	Environmental Protection Agency	$3.29B	1.0%
	Everything else (5 agencies)	$7.43B	2.4%

California recipient

#	Name	Amount	Share
1	HEALTH CARE SERVICES, CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF	$114.03B	36.1%
2	DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION CALIFORNIA	$14.61B	4.6%
3	DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION CALIFORNIA	$12.76B	4.0%
4	DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SERVICES CALIFORNIA	$12.00B	3.8%
5	LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL SECURITY, LLC	$7.34B	2.3%
6	OFFICE OF EMERGENCY SERVICES	$5.90B	1.9%
7	CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY	$4.66B	1.5%
8	SPACE EXPLORATION TECHNOLOGIES CORP.	$4.24B	1.3%
9	THE BOEING COMPANY	$4.08B	1.3%
10	GENERAL ATOMICS AERONAUTICAL SYSTEMS, INC.	$3.91B	1.2%
11	NATIONAL STEEL AND SHIPBUILDING COMPANY	$3.34B	1.1%
12	QTC MEDICAL SERVICES INC	$3.19B	1.0%
13	FISHER SAND & GRAVEL CO	$3.04B	1.0%
14	PUBLIC HEALTH, CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF	$2.94B	0.9%
	Everything else (231 recipients)	$60.80B	19.3%
	Other CA recipients (below top 15)	$58.72B	18.6%

First-tier sub-awardee

#	Name	Amount	Share
1	COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES	$1.35B	22.6%
2	STATE OF CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF GENERAL SERVICES	$580.2M	9.7%
3	MADERA COUNTY	$513.9M	8.6%
4	FOUNDATION FOR CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY COLLEGES	$407.4M	6.8%
5	LOS ANGELES UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT	$405.5M	6.8%
6	CALIFORNIA STUDENT AID COMMISSION	$400.0M	6.7%
7	SAN BERNARDINO, COUNTY OF	$266.3M	4.4%
8	PUBLIC HEALTH, CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF	$242.3M	4.0%
9	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$193.6M	3.2%
10	COUNTY OF SAN JOAQUIN	$132.8M	2.2%
11	CITY OF SAN DIEGO	$127.2M	2.1%
12	KAISER FOUNDATION HOSPITALS	$122.8M	2.0%
	Everything else (30 sub-awardees)	$1.25B	20.8%

Federal obligations as of 2026-10-25 · Source: USAspending.gov (public domain). Amounts are FY obligations, not award-lifetime totals.