Government Spending Graph

This image CLICK HERE is basically a huge graph representing all the spending of the U.S. budget. In the graph we can see how the central node, the overall budget, acts as a massive gatekeeper node and then on the peripherals things such as the department of defense act as smaller gatekeeper nodes which all paths from there on out must pass through to get to the central gatekeeping node and on through the edges of the graph. I was unable to find any local gatekeeper nodes in this graph but feel free to look.

Wow.

Also, all gatekeeper nodes are also local gatekeeper nodes. I think you meant that there are no local gatekeeper nodes that are not gatekeeper nodes as well, meaning that there are no loops in this graph, so it is basically a tree. The US Budget node in the middle would serve as an appropriate root for it.

yeah. sorry for the vagueness

The GAO, or Government Accountability Office, has the following task:

"The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) is known as "the investigative arm of Congress" and "the congressional watchdog." GAO supports the Congress in meeting its constitutional responsibilities and helps improve the performance and accountability of the federal government for the benefit of the American people."

One of their central tasks is to look at how the government spends their money, and more importantly to make sure that no budget item "double dips." The GAO wants to make sure that, in context of the picture, that there are no loops in the graph. If there are loops in the graph, then that is a loss of funds that should be going elsewhere, and to make sure that one department does not receive an excess amount of funds that were alotted to it.

Just as a random side note this forum seems to be running by the power law which i just noticed from this thread. This thread has the most replies and thus moves to the top of the list and also has the most views. As I looked at the rest of the list of topics the others with replies had many more views than others which leads me to believe we have all just proved in some way the power-law on our forum. GO US!