Federal Workforce Cuts Would Affect More Trump-Voting Communities
The Trump Administration has made reducing the number of people working for the federal government a prominent goal for its first few months. Already, the administration has sought to close USAID (which provides services to developing countries), offer early retirement buyouts to all federal workers, and assess the effectiveness of employees at certain agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Maybe in the next newsletter, I’ll write more on my personal feelings on the attack on federal workers (as you may know, I worked for the Congressional Budget Office for nine years). But, as of now, I’m exploring as much data as I can to better understand how the federal workforce supports people and communities, and how firing large swaths of that workforce will affect people across the country.
So, as an extension of my previous work—which combined counts of federal civilian workers across Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas (together, called Core Based Statistical Areas or CBSAs) and matched employment and labor force data—and I matched county-level results from the 2024 presidential election. This enables me to look at the relationship between the the share of federal workers in local labor forces and the Trump vote share.
The basic story is that more CBSAs voted for President Trump in the election but more federal civilian workers live in CBSAs that voted for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
The other cool thing I did with these data is to create my first “scrollytelling” structure and post it to my website. I’ve never done this kind of thing before, but the “scrolly” feature in Flourish enabled me to do some cool things with these data. In the scrolly, I basically zoom in and out to various parts of the scatterplot. I think it turned out pretty cool, so let me know what you think!
Substack Notes
Just wanted to share with you that I’m using Substack Notes more and more. I’m pretty much off of Twitter/X, I don’t enjoy posting to Instagram, LinkedIn is kinda awkward, and I’m not really excited about using Bluesky. And because you’re already reading this newsletter, you might want to check out some of the shorter things I’m posting in notes.
Podcast: Mapping Inequality: Braden Crooks on Redlining and Urban Transformation
In this week’s episode of the PolicyViz Podcast, which will post tomorrow, I speak with Braden Crooks, co-founder of Designing the We, about their project Undesign the Redline, an interactive exhibit that explores the history and lasting impact of redlining in the U.S. Braden shares how his background in landscape architecture and urban design led him to develop this project, which combines research, storytelling, and community engagement.
Things I’m Reading
Books
Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
Yeah, I haven’t started this one yet, but the movie was just nominated for an Academy Award, so that’s good.
Community Data: Creative Approaches to Empowering People with Information by Rahul Bhargava
Woohoo! Congrats, Rahul! (I don’t know if he reads this newsletter). I’m excited to read the final product (Rahul asked me to review and earlier draft). If you want the short version, just listen to the podcast episode I did with him a while back. But, you should also get the book.
Articles
“Good Old Days” Bias Following Mild Traumatic Brain Injury by Iverson et al.
Blame my wife for this one. She asked me to get the paper via one of my university affiliations and I started reading it.
Dynamic Scoring: A Progress Report on Why, When, and How, by Elmendorf et al.
So, when I was at CBO, dynamic scoring was a big debate. Basically, dynamic scoring expands the population or economy with some policy proposal (say, increase the number of immigrants in the country). But it gets complicated (technically and politically) real quickly.
TV & Movies
Severance, Season 2, Apple TV
Uhhhh, goat people?!?!?! WTAF.
American Primeval, Netflix
Done! Okay, this was awesome—but super violent, so beware. Also, who knew Taylor Kitsch (yay, Friday Night Lights) could act!?
Interior Chinatow, Hulu
I have two episodes left, love the show, but have no idea what is going on! Super confusing but really good
Paradise, Hulu
A couple of episodes in and I’m digging it. The twist at the end of episode 1 has kept me in for at least a few more episodes.
