About
We run the numbers so you don't have to take anyone's word for it.
The Numbers Project is independent data journalism built for people who are tired of being told the economy is fine while their grocery bill doubled and their gas tank costs $112 to fill. We take publicly available data — government filings, federal statistics, financial disclosures, program records — and turn it into investigations and interactive tools that show what's actually happening.
No spin. No party loyalty. No corporate sponsors. Just the numbers and what they mean for the people living under the systems that produce them.
What We Cover
We go where the data points. Our investigations span the issues that directly affect working Americans — the ones where the gap between what you're told and what's actually true is widest.
Government accountability. Congressional stock trading, presidential market influence, legislative voting patterns, and the enforcement mechanisms that are designed to look tough and do nothing. Our database of 95,501 congressional stock trades cross-referenced with legislative votes is the most comprehensive public tool of its kind.
Economic survival. The EIDL loan crisis trapping millions of small business owners. The cost of groceries, gas, rent, and healthcare versus what wages actually look like. The retirement savings gap. The systems that squeeze working people from every direction while the people running those systems get richer.
Public safety and policy. Gun violence data that cuts through the political noise. How the United States compares to every other developed nation — and what the data says about which policies actually work. Not opinions. Correlations. Evidence.
Corporate accountability. Where corporate profits go when prices rise. Who benefits from the systems that cost you more every year. The data behind the headlines that get forgotten after one news cycle.
How We Work
Data first. Every investigation starts with building or acquiring a dataset. We don't start with a conclusion and go looking for evidence. We start with the numbers and follow where they lead — even when the answer isn't the one we expected.
Show the work. Every claim is sourced. Every dataset is searchable. We build interactive dashboards so you can verify the numbers yourself. We're not asking you to trust us. We're giving you the tools to check.
Plain language. Data journalism has a habit of being written for people who already understand the subject. We write for people who are living the consequences. If you need a finance degree to understand the story, we haven't done our job.
No party, no side. The data doesn't have a political affiliation and neither do we. When Republicans are wrong, we say it. When Democrats are wrong, we say it. The problems we investigate are system problems, not party problems. The people at the top benefit regardless of which color tie they wear.
Current Investigations
- The $174,000 Fiction — A 4-part series exposing congressional stock trading, presidential market manipulation, and the gap between what elected officials earn and what they actually make.
- The EIDL Trap — How COVID disaster relief loans became personal financial prisons for 3.9 million small business owners, with a live crisis dashboard and first-person borrower stories.
- The Exception — America's gun violence crisis examined through international comparisons, state-by-state regulation data, and the correlation between policy and outcomes.
Interactive Data Tools
- Congressional Stock Tracker — 95,501 trades, searchable by member, party, state, sector, and amount. Cross-referenced with 1,179 congressional votes.
- EIDL Crisis Dashboard — Public SBA data combined with first-person borrower reports. Charge-offs, default rates, state breakdowns, and anonymous stories.
- EIDL Payment Calculator — Calculate your real monthly payment, total interest, payment shock from the hardship program ending, and default consequences.
- Gun Violence Dashboard — International comparisons, state regulation scores, school shooting timeline, and the data on what actually reduces gun deaths.
- Trump Post → Market Tracker — 30,000+ Truth Social posts mapped against the S&P 500 with 25+ annotated market events.
- Who Gets What — Congressional salary, health benefits, pension, stock trading, and days off — compared side by side with the average American worker.
Data Sources
We use exclusively public data. No anonymous sources. No leaked documents. No non-public information. Everything we report comes from records that are publicly available — we just make them findable, searchable, and understandable.
Sources include: SBA and SBA Office of Inspector General, Congressional Research Service, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Federal Reserve Small Business Credit Survey, USDA Economic Research Service, Quiver Quantitative, Congress.gov API, GovTrack API, House Clerk roll call records, Yahoo Finance, Centers for Disease Control, Gun Violence Archive, Giffords Law Center, and various state and federal agency datasets.
Contact
Have a tip, a correction, data you think we should investigate, or a story you want to share? We're listening. If you're a journalist and want access to our datasets or methodology, reach out — we built these tools to be used.
