This is the account Congress created in 1956 to pay settlements and judgments against the federal government. The underlying data has been public via the Bureau of the Fiscal Service's payment search, but I don't think anyone has systematically aggregated it before.

Key finding: fiscal year 2020 saw $14.2B in payments, roughly 10x the typical year. 89% of that came from one citation category. The write-up has the breakdown and an interactive table of the top 20 agencies.

Data is released as an open dataset (CC BY 4.0, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19495955) in case anyone wants to verify or dig deeper.

A few things that surprised me while working on this:

CMS and DOE each account for $13B+. CMS I expected (Medicare billing disputes), but the DOE number is almost entirely a handful of nuclear-cleanup contract disputes with scale I wasn't expecting.

Federal medical malpractice under the FTCA accounts for 10,170 cases totaling $3.2B. The VA is the single largest federal healthcare payer — 13,194 claims at $3.3B. Negotiated settlements average $577K vs. administrative settlements at $145K.

The largest single payment in the dataset was $1.9 billion.

If anyone wants the processed CSVs, they're linked from the "Cite this research" section on the page or directly on Zenodo.