# Treasury Warrant The bookkeeping bridge between an appropriations law and a spendable account — Step 3 of [[How Federal Money Moves]]. When an appropriation is enacted, no money "arrives" at an agency; instead the [[Bureau of the Fiscal Service]] issues an **appropriation warrant** (31 U.S.C. 3323), the official document that records the amounts Congress appropriated on the books of the [[Department of the Treasury]] and authorizes the agency to draw on the General Fund. The warrant is the evidence-of-law entry: statute in, ledger line out. ## Treasury Account Symbols Every appropriation account lives under a **Treasury Account Symbol (TAS)** — an identifier established by Fiscal Service in consultation with the [[Office of Management and Budget]] encoding the owning agency, the fund, and the **period of availability** (annual, multi-year, or no-year — the time leg of purpose-time-amount). An account with budget authority is a Treasury Appropriation Fund Symbol (TAFS). The full catalog is published in Fiscal Service's *FAST Book*; every transaction in federal spending data — USAspending.gov rows, apportionment files, [[Obligation]] reports — keys back to a TAS, which is what makes cross-ledger follow-the-money work at all (see [[The Spending Gap]]). ## Why it matters Mostly the warrant step is pure plumbing — mechanical, non-discretionary, fast. Its significance is diagnostic: it marks the exact point where control of the money passes from Congress's text to the executive's books. Everything upstream (authorization, appropriation) is law; everything downstream ([[Apportionment]], allotment, [[Obligation]], outlay) is executive administration of law — which is why the constitutional fights over [[Rescission and Impoundment]] all live downstream of the warrant. ## Related - [[How Federal Money Moves]] · [[Bureau of the Fiscal Service]] · [[Department of the Treasury]] - [[Apportionment]] · [[Obligation]] · [[Outlays vs Budget Authority]]