Documentation
This project, made possible by generous support from New York State (“NYS”) and the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo (“CFGB”), seeks to provide NYS residents, government leaders and staff, businesses, nonprofits, and other stakeholders with data-driven insights on how federal actions in pursuit of government efficiency and domestic economic growth are affecting the State and its diverse geographic areas. Whereas the project will grow over time as new data and indicators become available and are built into the interactive tools, the October 2025, “Phase 1” launch of this site is intended to establish a baseline. Specifically, in the Phase 1 release, the interactive map compiles NYS-specific data in two major topical areas: jobs and federal spending. This page documents the data included in the Phase 1 dashboard and describes how they were compiled into the maps and visualizations currently available on the website. Revisions, including updates, additions, and deletions, to the collection of tools on this website are documented in a running change log.
Jobs
The premier source for timely information on the number of jobs present in a state or county economy is the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (“QCEW”) conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (“BLS”). The QCEW “program publishes a quarterly count of employment and wages reported by employers covering more than 95 percent of U.S. jobs, available at the county, MSA, state and national levels by industry.”[1] At the county level of analysis, the QCEW provides employment counts by ownership (public or private) and industry on a quarterly basis. These figures are raw totals that are not seasonally adjusted and are subject to suppression for breakouts (e.g., county by industry) that would compromise the anonymity of the respondents (e.g., in cases of single-employer industries and related circumstances where records can be attached to specific entities). For these and related reasons, QCEW data do not constitute a time series per se; nonetheless, they are frequently still used to chart trends in employment by economic analysts and agencies like the NYS Department of Labor. Following this practice, the Phase 1 dashboard presents a ten-year history of quarterly QCEW month three employment counts for the 62 counties in NYS. Note that because these unadjusted county-level data are summed to produce statewide totals, the statewide quarterly counts on this website may differ negligibly from corresponding counts published by the BLS at the aggregated state level of analysis.
With the preceding precautions in mind, the ten years’ worth of QCEW snapshots for NYS in the dashboard allow users to explore recent trends in employment throughout the State. Because one of the objectives of this project is to document ways that changes to federal policy priorities might leave their mark on NYS, the main dashboard interface plots absolute changes in employment – and employment by selected industry – relative to the end of 2024, prior to the shift toward a targeted government efficiency and domestic economic growth agenda. At present, the current QCEW release is for the first quarter of 2025 (“2025.Q1”). New QCEW will be integrated into the dashboard as they become available, though the monitors will continue to quantify changes relative to 2024.Q4. In this way, the monitors function somewhat like early detection system for identifying growth, contraction, and/or stability in jobs as the new federal economic agenda continues to take shape.
Federal Spending
The other theme covered in Phase 1 of this project is federal spending. Federal spending comes in two main varieties: (1) grants and financial assistance, and (2) contract spending. Grants and financial assistance are transfers of money or in-kind resources to non-federal entities that serve a public purpose. Contract spending refers to the purchase of goods and services by federal agencies in order to fulfill their public duties and obligations.
Federal spending is closely tracked and monitored. Data on all grants and assistance and contract records are publicly available through USASpending.gov, the official [open] source of federal spending data. The USASpending.gov database is publicly accessible. Full fiscal year datasets are prepackaged and downloadable for the past ten years (2016-2025) as .csv files. Each tabular record, which corresponds to a federal action, includes data on the dollar amount obligated for that specific action as well as the total amount outlayed for the grant, award, or contract associated with the action. Outlays represent actual spending, whereas obligations are commitments to spend. Until recently, federal agencies were not required to report all outlays in their submissions to the U.S. Treasury Department systems whose data power USASpending.gov. As such, historical data on outlays are not consistently available over time. Obligations, however, have been consistently tracked since 2001. To remain consistent with the Jobs Data interface, which focused on the past ten years, this project obtained federal spending obligation records for the same time horizon of Fiscal Year (“FY”) 2016 through FY2025, which just ended on 30 September 2025.
Once spending data for FY2026 become fully available on USASpending.gov in October of next year, all tools will be updated to incorporate these – and subsequent FY – records into the dashboard. Insofar as FY2026 will mark the first full FY under the current administration’s government efficiency agenda, experts anticipate that next year’s spending will contain substantially more evidence of spending cuts, especially in key social services, health, and research categories. Along those lines, Phase 1 of this project, which only covers spending through FY2025, is best used as a trend tracker and potential early detection system for types of spending that are likely to experience higher magnitude decreases next year and plausibly beyond.
Grants and Assistance
After obtaining grants and assistance spending records for FY2016 through FY2025 for all entities either located or doing work in NYS, the project team filtered out only those records for which the “Place of Performance State” was explicitly listed as NYS – in other words, the focus is on only those dollars that were awarded to entities for a public purpose in the jurisdiction of the State of New York. Next, all obligation dollar amounts were adjusted for inflation by converting them into 2025$ using the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis’s inflation calculator. Finally, following the model of the Jobs Data interface, monitors were developed to track changes in spending relative to FY2024, the last full FY preceding the implementation of the federal administration’s government efficiency and domestic economic growth agenda for the U.S. At the aggregate level, relative to FY2024, grants and assistance obligations for public purposes performed in NYS dropped by nearly -$7.6 billion year over year. The types of assistance associated with the largest decreases were project grants (-$3.6 billion), direct payments with unrestricted use (-$3.0 billion), insurance (-$2.9 billion), and formula grants (-$1.1 billion). Meanwhile, spending commitments to direct payments for specified uses increased by roughly $3.7 billion from FY2024 to FY2025. With respect to recipient type, obligations to individuals dropped by more than -$3.1 billion. Nonprofit organizations with 501(c)(3) status saw a drop of nearly -$2.3 billion in obligations compared to last FY, while obligations to institutions of higher education dropped by approximately $535 million.
Contract Spending
Following the same protocol used above for grants and assistance, contract spending records were obtained for FY2016 through FY2025 for all recipients either located or doing work in NYS. Next, the project team filtered out only those records for which the “Place of Performance State” was explicitly listed as NYS. Next, all obligation dollar amounts were adjusted for inflation by converting them into 2025$ using the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis’s inflation calculator. Finally, analogous to the Jobs and Grants and Assistance interfaces, monitors were developed to track changes in contract spending relative to FY2024. At the aggregate level, contract obligations for work performed in NYS dropped by $8.2 billion year over year. Heavy decreases were observed for all types of Minority Owned Business Enterprises (“MBEs”) as well as Minority and Women Owned Business Enterprises (“MWBEs”). Further, contract spending obligations for construction projects that adopt labor standards, including prevailing wage requirements, fell by more than $2 billion from FY2024 to FY2025. As the dashboard reveals, millions of dollars in contract obligations were also moved away from what have often been key NYS policy issue areas, such as alternative energy power generation, apprenticeship training, and nursing care facilities.
Summary
Collectively, the Phase 1 tools developed for this project allow users to explore recent trends in job (de)growth and federal spending across NYS, and to monitor changes in these trends that might take shape following recent shifts in federal policy priorities. In the first quarter of 2025, the raw number of jobs in NYS fell by more than -120,000 relative to the end of 2024. Moreover, compared to FY2024, federal spending commitments for public purposes and work performed in NYS decreased by approximately -$15.8 billion ($7.6 billion in grants and assistance and -$8.2 billion in contract spending). If these recent changes offer early signals of what is to come from the federal government efficiency and domestic economic growth agenda, then New Yorkers – residents, businesses, state and local governments, nonprofits, and communities – are likely to face meaningful adjustment costs as federal austerity measures permeate throughout the State.
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