Ever wonder how much money the Department of Defense spends every day? On most days, hundreds of millions, easy, in defense contracts alone.

The world’s largest military is in constant need of new equipment, airplanes, missiles, maintenance, and all sorts of materials and services provided by all sorts of firms, from giant defense contractors to relative mom-and-pop outfits that land multi-million-dollar deals.

But remember this is all taxpayer money, and it can be hard to keep track, even if the Defense Department dutifully reports their contracts in a public database HERE, and provides summaries of those over $7.5 million daily HERE. So Code and Dagger decided to make a robot that could help keep an eye on where all that taxpayer money is going.

May I introduce the Pentagon Spending Bot — @BotPentagon on Twitter, follow it HERE.

The Pentagon Spending Bot is a Twitter bot that is designed to read the Pentagon’s announcement for contracts worth over $7.5 million from its public website, usually posted around 5 p.m. ET every business day. The bot will then tweet out a portion of each announcement, whether its the Army buying new helicopters for $26 million or the Air Force awarding a $113 million contract for radar services. Right now that’s all the bot is designed to do (it’s not the smartest robot), but I’ll look into adding functionality later.

Defense contracting can be a complicated subject, so if you’d like to learn more about it, as well as the limitations of drawing conclusions based on data alone, read this Congressional Research Report (PDF).

The Pentagon Spending Bot was a small coding project inspired by USA Today’s more sophisticated (and fun) Big Cases Bot (@big_cases) created by Brad Heath (@BradHeath), which keeps track of, you guessed it, big court cases.

“But doesn’t Twitter have a rule against bots?” you might ask. Well, kind of. It has stringent rules against “inauthentic behavior” in which accounts are deceptively created to appear human and, I understand, are not disclosed to be bots to Twitter. These are the bots that came to national attention ahead of the 2016 presidential election and continue to be something of a scourge.

You can also make good-guy bots above board, however, by applying for a Twitter Developer account and telling Twitter what you’ll be up to — in which case the automation of information sharing for the greater good is all good.

The Pentagon Spending Bot will not be a high-volume tweeter. Generally the number of contract announcements is anywhere from 5 to 15 in any given day, and the bot will space its tweets by about 15 minutes. So follow along if you’re interested in defense spending, government oversight or just to watch the deluge of taxpayer dollars as it flows through the defense industry.

- Lee

[And, lastly, a reminder that Code and Dagger is on Patreon, where you can support the site with just a few dollars to help keep the lights on.]

[UPDATE -- Feb. 12, 2021: The Pentagon Spending Bot (@BotPentagon) has been updated to include a daily estimation of the total taxpayer money spent on contract awards. But like with anything in government, it's not quite that simple. Sometimes the announcement is for the “maximum” the government will pay for a service that hasn’t been calculated yet. Sometimes single contracts are awarded to multiple winners for varying amounts of money. Sometimes contracts are awarded in pieces, with more money to follow upon completion of various stages. Often the announcements are modifications to previous contracts. And on the technical side, Pentagon Spending Bot is a simple bot and might, from time to time, miscalculate the figures involved depending on how they're reported on Defense.gov. Still, I think it's a helpful estimation to understand the scale of the daily spending. If something doesn't make sense, follow the link in the tweet to the contract announcement. And please don't hesitate to point out any errors the bot has made, which hopefully I can rectify in further updates: codeanddagger@protonmail.com.]