Fiscal Footprint

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  Medicare

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  Takehome

While delving into politics recently to cast an informed vote for the presidential election, I quickly realized that I did not know where my tax money was going. Now that me and many of my colleagues are starting to pay taxes, it would be nice to know where a substantial portion of our hard earned cash was going. ...So why don't we build an app to tell me exactly where my tax money is being spent. People will tell you that we sent billions to Israel, but how much did that actually cost YOU? What about FEMA, and VA? Did you contribute hundreds maybe thousands to the inflation reduction act? With Fiscal Footprint, we aim to make it extremely clear how policies affect YOUR wallet.

The app takes the user's taxable income as an input and shows where each dollar gets spent fiscal spending data pulled monthly from every agency in the US (via USAspending.gov). With our app, the user can easily traverse to finer-grain government spending and the exact amount they contribute to the expense each year.

We built the app with a react frontend and connected to the opensource USAspending backend/database. We created the infrastructure to deploy the entire app using Terraform spinning up S3-buckets, CloudFront, and Route53 automatically in AWS. We also created a CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions, which seamlessly deployed the app every time we committed a change to the repository.

We faced many challenges in every aspect of the project: from setting up the infrastructure as code to centering a DIV... but hopefully we have convinced you that we were able to bounce back and deliver in the end.

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• github-actions
• react
• terraform
• typescript