Monthly report
The month in the debt
Once a month, a written account of what the debt did, what it cost to carry, and what the next month will be argued about. Every figure is dated and comes from an official source. These are records of closed periods, so they are not updated as later data arrives.
How these are made
One person writes each report after the month closes, using the Treasury’s daily debt record, the Monthly Treasury Statement and the debt-limit data. Nothing in it is generated: the numbers are read from the datasets, and the judgement about which of them matter is made by hand. That is the difference between a report and a feed, and it is the reason a short month gets a short report rather than a padded one.
The day-by-day figures behind each report are in the data releases. The yearly record is on debt by year, and what the interest costs is on interest on the debt.