Mission:
The National Priorities Project offers citizen and community groups tools and resources to shape federal budget and policy priorities that promote social and economic justice.

Background:
For the last twenty years, NPP has translated policy information and analysis into everyday language to help bridge the gap between policy organizations and grassroots groups. NPP helps community organizations and citizens understand how legislation affects them and encourages people to express their views to elected officials and the media.

Outstanding Feature:
Launched in 2002, the NPP database provides state data on socioeconomic needs and federal expenditures in the issue areas of health, education, labor, poverty, hunger, housing, and the military. Web users can customize the information to create tables, graphs, and reports to illustrate how federal spending policies relate to individual state needs. NPP also recently added an inflation feature that allows users to compare spending in different years in constant dollars. And in the site's new Federal Budget Trade-Offs section, users can access estimates of what residents of individual states pay for military programs and find out how that money could be used to cover various social needs.

To mark the April 15 deadline for filing tax returns, NPP has posted links to tax information such as Tax Day Factsheets, which reveal how the federal government spends the typical household's income tax dollar in each state and in selected cities and counties. In addition, the Tax Chart shows how the government spent an individual's 2002 tax payment.