Editorial rules
A tool that ranks government transfers by how much they benefit narrow interests will be read as partisan unless its rules are written down and visibly followed. These are the rules.
Selection is by size, never by author
Entries qualify on annual cost. The list deliberately spans provisions enacted by both parties, including several that are politically identified with each. If the list ever reads as one-sided, that is a bug in the selection, not a finding.
Structural, never personal
Benefit channels are described by asset position, entity form and form of return. No individual is named as a beneficiary, and no page lists who claimed what. The claim under examination is that a statute is shaped in a particular way, not that a particular person is culpable.
Broadly-distributed transfers are included at full weight
Programs whose benefits spread widely appear on the same footing as concentrated ones, and rank at the top of the 'most good, least cost' view. A ranking that surfaced only transfers one already disliked would be measuring its own assumptions.
Every number carries a source and a date
Costs, concentration scores and lobbying figures each render with their source and publication date attached. Figures not yet reconciled against the primary document are marked unverified wherever they appear, rather than quietly presented as settled.
Concentration is labelled as a judgement
The score is constructed from distributional evidence and statutory structure, and it is shown as a marker on a track precisely so it is not mistaken for a measurement. The reasoning appears beside it every time.
Reform proposals are listed regardless of sponsor
Where a live bill would limit a preference, it appears on that transfer's page whichever party introduced it, including where the same proposal has been introduced by both over time.
The underlying claim
Concentrated benefits paired with diffuse costs are hard to dislodge, because the people receiving them are organised around that fact and the people paying are not organised at all. That asymmetry is a structural feature of legislatures, not a property of any party. The purpose of this site is to make the resulting transfers visible and comparable in one place, at their actual scale, with the enacting votes attached.