What’s a Salt Box?

In Baltimore, bright yellow wooden boxes sit on residential street corners, stamped with the words “SALT BOX.” They are a staple of our civic infrastructure: citizen-forward and open for public use. The concept is simple — community members use what’s inside to keep their neighborhood streets and sidewalks safe and navigable for everyone.

Project Salt Box applies the same philosophy to federal transparency at the local level. Government procurement and infrastructure development are often confusing and opaque, and we gather these public documents, research them, and tell their story so that Marylanders can understand federal developments before they become permanent fixtures of the local landscape.

What we do

We believe that an informed public is essential to a healthy civic life. Our current focus is the Department of Homeland Security and its sub-agencies, a sector we follow because of the unprecedented increase in funding through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and related federal appropriations. When federal spending reaches historic levels, the case for public oversight, fiscal accountability, and local reporting grows with it.

We provide factual, evidence-based reporting in three areas. We monitor fiscal accountability by tracking how these appropriations are allocated to private vendors and local projects. We follow infrastructure and facilities by identifying the new construction, real estate purchases, leases, and facility modifications that result from surge funding. And we track technological trends by documenting the acquisition of new tools and systems funded by these expanded budgets.

How we work

We are public records enthusiasts. Our work relies entirely on publicly available information and the federal government’s own reporting requirements. We follow the paper trails through federal procurement databases, primary-source requests, and local land and permit records, with the aim of giving the public accurate, digestible insight into federal projects that too often go unreported.

Learn more about our process here:

Using Data for Good: A Crash Course

Em Knepp

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Feb 10

This is a bit different than our regular posts, but a lot of people have been reaching out to our team asking what many of us are asking ourselves: “What can I do?” The whole purpose behind Project Salt Box is to find data from publicly available sources (e.g. government contracts, FOIA libraries, lo…

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You can reach us via email at projectsaltbox@proton.me.