The Following Sources Informed our April 2022 Op-Ed Piece
For a variety of reasons, print journalism has not embraced the academic notion of citing one's sources, nor the Web's fundamental virtue of hyperlinking. We believe the most valuable result of any written work is the excitement of curiosity in the audience, and a desire to understand the subject more deeply. With that in mind, we provide the following links to sources of information referenced in our recent Op-Ed.
Specific Numbers
In this Op-Ed piece, we're primarily concerned with quantitative observations. It's not so important that there are cases in which money is being spent by offices that have no confirmed leadership: It's important that most of the $414 billion allocated to climate projects will be spent by offices that have no confirmed leadership. With that emphasis on quantitative analysis, we're providing a key to all the numbers used in the Op-Ed showing how they were calculated and where they came from.
The majority of these numbers come from the White House's Building a Better America guidebook and its accompanying spreadsheet. This spreadsheet represents the White House's...
[C]ommit[ment] to maximizing transparency so communities across America know what to apply for, who to contact, and how to get ready to rebuild. That’s why we’ve created a guidebook for state, local, tribal, and territorial leaders. This guidebook is a roadmap to the funding available under the law, as well as an explanatory document that shows, in as much detail as currently available, program-by-program information.
We invite you to examine both the spreadsheet as it's provided by the White house, and as we've annotated and analyzed it. Our version shows the original, unmodified data in the "GuideBookDataset" tab in black and white, as it appears in the original. To that, we've added several different kinds of data, including:
The majority of these numbers come from the White House's Building a Better America guidebook and its accompanying spreadsheet. This spreadsheet represents the White House's...
[C]ommit[ment] to maximizing transparency so communities across America know what to apply for, who to contact, and how to get ready to rebuild. That’s why we’ve created a guidebook for state, local, tribal, and territorial leaders. This guidebook is a roadmap to the funding available under the law, as well as an explanatory document that shows, in as much detail as currently available, program-by-program information.
We invite you to examine both the spreadsheet as it's provided by the White house, and as we've annotated and analyzed it. Our version shows the original, unmodified data in the "GuideBookDataset" tab in black and white, as it appears in the original. To that, we've added several different kinds of data, including:
- Our own categorizations, which are shown as highlighted in yellow
- Calculations based solely on data in the original guidebook data set, which are shown in light blue
- Calculations based on external data, such as the "Plum Book" - the federal government's official list of presidentially appointed positions, which are shown in darker blue.
