About Instead of Bombs
Instead of Bombs shows how public money could have been spent: what a day of war, a year of the military budget or a tax cut for the richest households would build in your own community.
Why
This isn't an argument for no military, no defense spending or no tax cuts. It's about priorities. How we spend public money shows what we value, and the choices made by the people we elect, at every level of government and on both sides of the aisle, too often leave out the things that affect us day to day.
How it works
Choose a spending figure and an amount. The map funds the projects nearest your town first, one after another, until the money runs out, and shows what it would pay for.
The choice of comparisons is ours. The numbers are not: every spending figure and every project comes from a public source, linked so you can check it. Tap or hover the name of the spending in the sentence under the map to see where its figure comes from.
The projects
The map holds more than 200,000 local public projects from about 400 official sources: city and county capital plans, state transportation and water lists, federal grant applications and congressional funding requests. To our knowledge it is the largest public collection of local infrastructure projects without confirmed funding, and it combines more sources than any other public collection we have found.
A project is included when its source lists it as needing money and we have not found a public record of it being funded. We remove projects when we find that funding. Funding can change after a source is published, so some projects may since have been paid for; each one links to its source.
Privacy
No accounts, no cookies, no analytics. The map loads its base map from OpenFreeMap, terrain from Mapterhorn and fonts from Google Fonts, and the site is hosted by Netlify; like any website, those services see your IP address. If you use the location button, your position stays on your device.
Contact
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, OpenMapTiles, served by OpenFreeMap. Terrain: Mapterhorn. Land cover: ESA WorldCover 2021 (CC BY 4.0) and USGS NLCD. Boundaries: Natural Earth and the US Census Bureau.