The Year Delaware Overspent Is the Year the Credit Card Receipts Went Missing

In FY2025, Delaware's checkbook outflows topped its all-funds revenue for the first time in the published record — a $365.5 million gap. It is also the only year since 2018 for which the state has not published its employee credit-card transactions. Based on every surrounding year, that's roughly $85 million in spending with no public itemization — in exactly the year the money got tight.

Eight years of card spending — and one hole

Source: State Employee Credit Card Transactions dataset, data.delaware.gov. FY2025 has never been published.

First, the red year

We covered the headline in The Year Delaware Spent More Than It Took In: in FY2025, checkbook outflows of $16.93 billion exceeded all-funds revenue of $16.56 billion. That comparison is directional, not an audited deficit — the checkbook includes federal pass-through dollars, and fund accounting is messier than one subtraction. But it was the first year in the published record where the state's own two datasets crossed.

Now, the missing receipts

Delaware publishes every state employee credit-card transaction — the merchant, the department, the amount. It's how we know about the casinos, country clubs, and Qatar Airways. The dataset runs from FY2018 through FY2026, year after year of $68–86 million in swipes at hundreds of thousands of merchants.

Except FY2025. That year simply isn't there. Not delayed alongside its neighbors — FY2026 is published. Just absent.

The part that makes it matter

Here's what we checked before writing this: does card spending show up inside the checkbook anyway? If the state settles its card bills the way you'd expect, the checkbook would show large monthly payments to a card issuer — roughly $85 million a year to somebody.

It doesn't. There is no card-program vendor in the checkbook. The largest bank vendor in the entire eight-year record — PNC — averages about $27 million a year across all purposes. JP Morgan Chase totals $10.9 million since 2018. Nothing anywhere near the size of the card program.

Which means the credit-card dataset isn't a duplicate view of checkbook spending — it is, as far as the published record shows, a separate channel. For every year but one, the public can at least see where that channel went. For FY2025 — the red year — it's dark.

What ~$85 million looks like

For scale, based on the published years: tens of thousands of transactions a month across roughly 300,000 merchants — hardware stores and conference hotels, software subscriptions and airline tickets. It's the most human-readable spending the state does, which is exactly why it's the dataset people read. One year of it is missing, and it happens to be the year the topline went negative.

To be fair

There may be a mundane explanation — a procurement transition, a vendor change in the card program, a publishing backlog nobody noticed. We've seen no announcement either way. The fix is simple: publish FY2025. Until then, the most scrutinized year in Delaware's published finances is also its least itemized.