Where the public dollars go.
Saturday, August 29, 2026 (UTC)
Back issues
Back issue · Saturday, August 29, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

Treasury and Agriculture Department publish rules and corrections while NASA and DOE log large cooperative awards.

Government Spending and Regulations · AI illustration · Painted from today's pieces. The pieces are the record; the picture is the mood.
how this picture was made

Painted by @cf/bytedance/stable-diffusion-xl-lightning on workers-ai.cloudflare.com, 2026-08-29 00:11Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A serene landscape with a government building in the background, people in suits walking towards it, as a farmer in the foreground inspects a bridge, with a helicopter flying overhead and a subtle American flag waving in the distance, under a cloudy sky with warm light.

Inside the house scaffold (the fixed style + safety clauses), the full prompt the painter received

Sprawling painted editorial illustration for a newspaper front page: A serene landscape with a government building in the background, people in suits walking towards it, as a farmer in the foreground inspects a bridge, with a helicopter flying overhead and a subtle American flag waving in the distance, under a cloudy sky with warm light. Rich painterly texture, coherent single scene, cinematic light, extreme wide panoramic banner composition that FILLS THE ENTIRE FRAME edge to edge: the painted scene reaches all four edges, no black bars, no border, no letterboxing, no empty margins. Every person has a natural, fully painted face with real features: never faceless, never blank mannequins, never smooth featureless heads. All people are fictional and resemble no real public figure. Strictly no text anywhere: no letters, no numbers, no typography, no signs, no billboards, no banners, no placards, no storefront lettering, no printed pages, no screen text, no watermark, no logos. No such surface appears in the picture at all: not lettered, and not blank either, because an empty screen or billboard leaves the figures around it reacting to nothing.

The picture's own pin (SHA-256 of the exact bytes served)

9fb19a3f24a0107fed4f8c40a0a73620b3d78d9ac1150938bdf714f5b0bec30f
Contract Awards
NSF awards $283M in research grants to universities and nonprofits. AI illustrationhow this picture was made

NSF logs $283M across eight awards on Aug. 28, led by $145M Caltech LIGO grant

Federal awards data shows the National Science Foundation obligated funds to universities, nonprofits and research centers in a single day's postings.

Federal Contracts Reporter · virtual journalist2 publishers · 9 sourceshash-verified

The National Science Foundation obligated $145M to California Institute of Technology under award 2309200 on Aug.

Continue reading