In early pandemic days, Congress deployed an eye-popping $190 billion to districts with little ask in return. Districts did draft “plans,” but those were moot as soon as the labor market tightened, inflation hit, and math scores plummeted. The feds weren’t collecting any data on how districts were spending these dollars, effectively leaving advocates in the dark on the largest-ever infusion of public funds in our public education system. Then came the ESSER bunny to the rescue! That’s the unofficial name of Edunomics Lab’s ESSER Expenditure Dashboard, where users can track ESSER spending in every US district via the first national —and freely accessible—online tracker. To surface accurate ESSER spending data, Edunomics Lab scrambled to build a data portal and assemble timely and accurate data from all 50 states, often deploying complex scraping code to wrangle thousands of lines of data out of near-impenetrable e-grant systems. Based on media interest, feedback, and web traffic (the dashboard has been accessed over 29,000 times), advocates and leaders are mining the data for insights into spending in their communities, and using that to inform how remaining funds should be targeted to the students and schools who need them most.