What is new-york-city-budget?

This project takes New York City's official budget documents and turns them into clean, usable data. City budgets are published as long PDF files that are hard to search or analyze, so this repository extracts the numbers into spreadsheet-style CSV files that anyone can open, sort, or join with other data. The project is built by BetaNYC, a civic organization focused on open data and government transparency in New York. It covers the city's discretionary funding schedule, reporting requirements, and capital project changes for fiscal years 2025 through 2027, plus older records going back to 2009. Every dollar amount was pulled out using Python scripts that read the text inside the PDFs with pattern matching, not by hand and not by an AI reading the numbers, and each total is checked against the printed total in the original document. There is also a live web page, built with GitHub Pages, where anyone can explore the discretionary funding data without installing anything. The repository is organized into folders for the original source PDFs, the extracted CSV data by year, the parser code, a small prototype server that lets AI tools query the data directly, and the visualization behind the live web page. The source budget documents themselves stay the property of the City of New York, since they are official government publications reproduced here for public reference. The parser code, the extracted data files, and the written analysis are released under the MIT license, meaning they can be reused freely as long as BetaNYC is credited. The code that extracts and checks the data was built with the AI assistant Claude. Because everything is checked against the government's own printed totals, this dataset is meant to be something journalists, researchers, community groups, and everyday residents can trust and use to ask real questions about how the city spends public money.