Visualization of the Week: Sequester cuts by state

Data journalist Ryan Murphy dug into the White House sequester cut data to create a visualization of the economic impact of the sequester.

The sequester went into effect in the U.S. on Friday, and media outlets are busy fleshing out practical consequences and looking for solutions. Ryan Murphy at The Texas Tribune dug into the state-level data released by the White House (in PDF files, no less), converted it into a more user-friendly format and created an interactive visualization detailing the economic effect of the sequester cuts on each state in nine categories.

The screenshot above shows the top state cuts in teachers and schools, in millions of dollars. Users can choose from nine categories in the drop down box: teachers and schools (amount cut, in millions); protections for clean air and clean water (amount cut, in millions); military readiness (number of civilian employees); Army base operations funding (amount cut, in millions); Air Force operations funding (amount cut, in millions); children vaccine funding (total amount cut); public health response funding (total amount cut); STOP Violence Against Women program funding (total amount cut); and nutrition assistance for seniors (total amount cut).

The Data Blog team at The Guardian took Murphy’s cleaned up data and created a visualization of the cuts in teachers and schools in dollars per person in each state, showing a bit of a different perspective on the geographic impact:


Click for the original visualization

The team also visualized the U.S. Army cuts per person, showing disproportionate cuts in Alaska and Hawaii, and provided the data for cuts per person and the raw data from the overall budget cuts — all of which can be downloaded from links in the blog post. Ryan Murphy’s data can be accessed in this Google Docs link.

More visualizations:

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