An interactive treemap that turns a notoriously complex national budget into something a member of the public can explore and understand in a few clicks.
National budgets run to trillions of dollars, spread across hundreds of agencies and thousands of individual programs. Historically, that information was published as long, dense tables that only specialists could realistically parse.
A treemap approach represents each agency or program as a rectangle, sized in proportion to its share of the budget and nested inside its parent department. The result is a single image where relative scale is immediately visible — which departments dominate spending, and which are comparatively small — and where clicking into any block reveals its own internal breakdown.
Publishing the federal budget this way was part of a broader open-government-data movement: turning a document that used to require a specialist to interpret into something a journalist, student or interested citizen could explore directly, without any statistical training.
The same treemap and drill-down pattern shows up regularly in Vis Lab’s own dashboard work — wherever a client needs to see the shape of a large, hierarchical dataset before diving into any one part of it.
Featured in Vis Lab's overview of landmark visualizations that shaped the field.
