Bloomberg Government
Federal Funding Flow
Designing the first end-to-end tool that connects federal budget proposals to agency spending — built for government affairs professionals, lobbyists, and business development teams.
What is this project?
The federal budget process is notoriously opaque. Each year, thousands of pages of appropriations bills, committee reports, and OMB spreadsheets move through Congress — and the professionals who need to track that money are left piecing it together manually from fragmented government sources.
Federal Funding Flow was BGOV's answer to that. It's the platform's first product to connect discretionary budget proposals all the way through to contract-level spending, giving users a single, structured view of how public money moves from Congress to agency to vendor.
No tool in the market had connected appropriated dollars to contract spending. This was a genuine first — a market differentiator built for a highly specialized audience who had never had a purpose-built tool before.
The product launched in three phases, each expanding the data scope and user value:
Budget vs. spend for IT programs across 24 CFO Act civilian agencies. Introduced the Sankey flow visualization.
Full appropriations tracker redesign — bills, committee reports, line items, people, and news unified in one place.
DoD RDT&E and FYDP program-level data, expanding the product to defense-focused customers.
What I did — and why
As Lead Designer, I owned the end-to-end design process across all three phases: from generative research through production-ready specs. The core challenge wasn't just visual — it was making a dense, multi-layered government data system legible and actionable for users who weren't data analysts.
I started with generative research across government affairs professionals, lobbyists, and BD teams to understand how they currently tracked the budget — mostly through manual document hunting across congress.gov, OMB spreadsheets, and agency websites. That research directly shaped every design decision that followed.
- Sankey / Flow Visualization: Designed a Sankey diagram to make the budget-to-spend relationship immediately visual and scannable — the kind of artifact users could screenshot and drop into a client deck.
- Appropriations Tracker Redesign: Redesigned BGOV's existing tracker from the ground up, adding bill summaries, OnPoint links, committee reports, and congressional contact data into a single cohesive view.
- Information Architecture: Built a hierarchy (Subcommittee → Agency → Bureau → Account) that matched how users mentally model the federal budget — not how the raw data was structured in the source files.
- User Research & Usability Testing: Ran 20+ research interviews and 10 rounds of usability tests on design mocks, iterating the IA and navigation model based on each round before launch.
- Figma Prototypes & Design Specs: Delivered annotated, developer-ready specs across all three phases with component documentation to support the engineering team's build.
A significant part of my work was finding the right abstraction level — so that a policy analyst with no data background could navigate the same product as a power user running competitive BD analysis.
Trade-offs & constraints
This project had a genuinely hard constraint set: a first-of-its-kind product, a specialized non-technical audience, data sourced from 1,000-page government documents, and a phased release schedule that required the design system to scale gracefully across all three data types.
Budget line items were extracted from appropriations bills using ML with human-in-the-loop review — data accuracy wasn't guaranteed at launch, and the UI needed to handle that gracefully.
Designed for source transparency: attributing each data point directly to its source document with deep links, so users could verify against the original bill rather than trusting the system blindly.
Users ranged from power analysts who needed account-level granularity to executives who needed a quick summary — a tension that was hard to resolve in a single interface without overwhelming either.
Designed a progressive disclosure model: the Sankey visualization as a scannable entry point, with drill-down to bureau and account levels — keeping the top-level view clean without sacrificing depth.
The product needed to scale across three successive phases of data without requiring a full redesign — each phase added new data types, new user needs, and new workflows.
Built a flexible design system from Phase 1 that established the core layout, filtering paradigm, and data hierarchy — so Phases 2 and 3 became extensions of the system, not rebuilds.
Outcome
The product launched to beta in June 2024 and reached general availability in October 2024. Adoption targets were set at 1,000–1,500 users by year-end — the only BGOV product to set adoption benchmarks of this scale at launch.
More importantly, it created a new category for BGOV: a product with no direct competitor that changed how government professionals tracked the federal budget cycle. The clearest measure of design success was that users immediately grasped the product's value proposition without needing a walkthrough.
This would be a real feather in your cap to separate you from the field in terms of your products — this would be something that would be a real differentiator.
This is exactly the table and the view I need to create to present my analysis.
I try finding information on congress.gov but it's very difficult to track all the documents and bills from different committees. Having all the data in one place stacked together is just PERFECT.
What stood out in feedback wasn't just usability — users immediately understood why the product existed and what it unlocked for them. That's a design outcome: when the interface makes the value proposition legible without explanation, the design is doing its job.