Weaponizing Federal Spending: Agency Ideology and Budget Data

Ishaan Barrett's replication repository provides data and R scripts examining the relationship between agency ideology, independence, and federal spending. Hosted on Harvard Dataverse, the collection includes statistical diagnostic materials such as Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) values and residual plots from the second Trump administration.

Use Cases

• Testing the impact of agency ideology on budget allocations using the provided R scripts
• Validating econometric models of federal spending through the included VIF and residual diagnostic plots
• Analyzing the role of agency independence in national budget shifts during the Trump administration

Strengths

• Includes full R replication scripts for transparency
• Provides specific statistical diagnostics like Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) values
• Contains diagnostic plots with residuals for model verification

Limitations

• Metadata does not specify the exact number of records or column headers
• Geographically restricted to the United States federal government
• Temporal scope is limited to the specific political era of the Trump administration

Provenance

Source

Ishaan Barrett via Harvard Dataverse

Time Range

Second Trump Administration

Freshness

Last updated March 2026.

Geography

United States