The figures that matter most, each traceable to one entry and one named source.
Standing rule: no scores. Color marks whether something is in force, reversed, contested, concluded, or permanent, not good or bad.
Unscored · 97 entries · last change 2026-08-16
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Color is a legal fact, not an opinion. It shows (whether something is still in force, was reversed, or is contested in court), never whether it was good or bad.
Every number links to its source and to how strongly it can be tied to the action (). Click any figure to see the full evidence.
Nothing here is scored, graded, or ranked. When two credible sources disagree, this archive shows both numbers instead of picking one.
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Public approval37% approve · 57% disapproveNet approval of roughly −21 is the lowest of either term, below his post-January-6 floor of −19. Independent approval near 34%.Polling averages, early August 2026
Next scheduled testMidterm elections, November 2026Three months out. Independent approval below the level that preceded the 2018 wave; the entire House and a third of the Senate are on the ballot.Election calendar
Figures of record
▲ and ▼ are direction. Color is measured : who paid, who gained, not whether that was right. Click a figure that has an entry. Not every figure here is a cost. Filter to just .
▲$2.8T
added to the national debt so far this term
18 months in; the JEC reported $2.77T year-over-year in April 2026
Net cost
Added since January 2025 — from $36.22T to roughly $39T. Borne by future taxpayers through debt service; sources put the range at $2.2T–$2.8T depending on cut-off.
Gross national debt · Treasury / Federal Reserve
▲54
more federal judges confirmed this term
On top of 234 in the first term
Transfer
9 appellate, 45 district. Ahead of the 2018 confirmation pace but with a far thinner pipeline — 60 nominees submitted against 137 by this date in 2018.
Lifetime judgeships filled this term · Senate confirmation record
▲369K
total jobs added, Jan 2025 – Mar 2026
vs. 1,565,000 in the final 14 months prior
Transfer
Positive but roughly a quarter the pace of the preceding 14 months. Private sector +609K, offset by federal cuts.
Total nonfarm employment · BLS via FactCheck.org
What this archive is made of
97 entries, 203 effect claims, 520 sourced estimates, 230 linked documents. Zero scores, grades, or rankings.
Where every entry stands today
Color here is a legal and operational fact, not an opinion: whether the action is still in force, was reversed or never fulfilled, is contested in court, has concluded, or is irreversible.
Coverage by domain
Bar segments show the standing mix inside each domain. Click any row to open it in the ledger.
The honesty check on the whole archive. If nearly everything claimed Direct, the archive would be overreaching. Amber marks claims where credible sources reach incompatible conclusions.
Direct138
Contributory28
Contextual20
Disputed17
What the evidence is made of
Every estimate in the archive, grouped by the kind of institution that produced it. Advocacy sources are admissible but never appear alone.
Primary document157
Government data79
Party to the action67
Academic / peer-reviewed52
Nonpartisan scorekeeper41
Advocacy — labeled31
Journalistic verification26
Named / interested parties24
Archive reasoning — not a source17
Cross-ideological convergence13
Mixed / other11
Polling aggregate2
The disagreement, charted
These are the numbers people argue with. Each bar is one published estimate at its own value, never averaged into a single figure, because the width of the gap is itself the finding.
10-year deficit effect — OBBBA
$ trillions, 2025–2034
CBO, excl. interest3.4
CBO, incl. interest4.1
CBO, dynamic (thru 2035)4.7
CRFB, if made permanent5.5
10-year deficit effect — TCJA
$ trillions
JCT, dynamic1.07
JCT, conventional1.46
CBO, incl. interest1.9
Project 2025 implementation — competing trackers
% of that tracker’s own agenda list
CPR / GFI — 532 proposals, method published53
Crowdsourced tracker — 317 objectives, no method48
Employment effect — steel & aluminum tariffs
jobs
Steel production jobs added1000
Steel-consuming mfg. jobs lost-75000
2020-03-27 · Economy & trade · initiative
Paycheck Protection Program (CARES Act)
34 of 97
Layer 1 — Action
Paycheck Protection Program authorized in Public Law 116-136 (CARES Act), signed March 27, 2020; administered by the Small Business Administration with Treasury; lending authority later extended and then closed in 2021.
Created a temporary program of forgivable loans to small businesses, conditioned largely on maintaining payroll, as the principal firm-side employment subsidy in the first pandemic relief package.
Layer 2 —
Concluded — new lending ended 2021
PPP loan origination has ended. Nearly all 2020 loans were forgiven under program rules. Academic evaluations of employment effects remain the main measured record; SBA borrower self-reports of jobs retained are far larger than causal estimates.
Verified as of August 2026
Whether PPP was worth the cost is a valuation question this archive does not settle. On measurement, independent threshold-design studies converge on modest employment effects and high cost per job retained; SBA self-reported jobs-retained tallies are larger by an order of magnitude and are not causal.
Layer 3 — Measured effects
PPP raised employment at eligible firms relative to ineligible firms, but by far less than borrower self-reports implied, and at a high fiscal cost per job-year retained.
Using ADP payroll microdata and firm-size eligibility cutoffs, Autor et al. estimate PPP boosted eligible-firm employment by about 2% to 5% at the mid-2020 peak, implying roughly 3.6 million additional jobs retained in mid-May 2020 and 1.4 million by end-2020, at about $169,000 to $258,000 per year of employment retained.
Autor et al., NBER w29972 / Journal of Public Economics
Academic / peer-reviewed
Using private-sector payroll series and the same eligibility threshold design, Chetty et al. estimate employment at firms with fewer than 500 employees rose only about 2 percentage points relative to larger ineligible firms after PPP began, implying roughly $377,000 per job saved ($119,000 at the lower bound of the 95% confidence interval).
SBA and congressional materials cited borrower self-reports that PPP kept on the order of 50 million workers connected to jobs — an administrative claim, not a causal estimate.
SBA / House Small Business Committee materials as quoted in Chetty et al. NBER w27431
Implementing agency — party to the action
Across the full program, only a minority of PPP dollars accrued as paychecks to workers who would otherwise have lost jobs; measured incidence was concentrated toward higher-income households.
Autor et al. (JEP) estimate PPP preserved about 2 to 3 million job-years over 14 months at roughly $170,000 to $257,000 per job-year, implying only about 23% to 34% of PPP dollars went directly to workers who would otherwise have lost jobs, with about three-quarters of benefits accruing to the top income quintile.
Autor et al., NBER w29669 / Journal of Economic Perspectives
Academic / peer-reviewed
Treasury Office of Economic Policy review of early high-frequency studies reports Autor-range job preservation of about 1.4 to 3.2 million jobs, Chetty et al. finding no statistically significant employment impact in their then-current estimates, and Hubbard & Strain finding statistically significant but small employment effects — a range far below program self-reports.
U.S. Treasury, Job-Preservation Effects of PPP Loans