Making the California State Budget More Transparent
Sam Trachtman, Senior Researcher
The Matrix / Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative
Applications for Spring 2025 are closed for this project.
In the 2024-2025 fiscal year, the California state government collected and spent around 300 billion dollars. It also spent around 150 billion in transfer funds from the federal government. Spending has risen dramatically since the 2008 recession slowdown, even with minimal population growth. Despite these major changes, academics and policymakers do not have a strong understanding of the drivers of spending increases.
Now, we are entering a period of fiscal austerity in Sacramento. Budget experts project shortfalls in the next 5 to 10 years, and there is little appetite to raise new revenues. In this environment, it is critically important to facilitate a broad and accurate understanding of the current state of revenue and spending, and how we got here. Greater budget transparency and understanding will allow for reasoned debate over government priorities and options for stabilizing the budget. It may also reduce the power of organized interests that benefit from existing spending arrangements.
The broad aim of this project is to produce a resource that facilitates greater transparency and understanding of the California state budget. Detailed budget information is available to the public, but it is not well-organized or accessible. We will attempt to organize publicly available information into highly legible, machine-readable data. We will then visualize those data with Sankey diagrams and other types of visualizations. All of the data we collect and organize will be made publicly available for others to analyze.
Role: The undergraduate will play a critical role in pushing this project forward, with lots of direction from the supervisor. They will work with the supervisor to understand the landscape of public budget information provided by the state government. They will then work with the supervisor to turn that public budget information into machine-readable data. Finally, they will work with the supervisor on analysis and data visualization. The final product will be a detailed Sankey diagram demonstrating both the inputs (revenues) and outputs (spending) for the state budget.
Qualifications: The most important thing is a curiosity and desire to learn about the state budget. Other important factors are organization, attention to detail, ability to self-start, and ability to problem-solve. Familiarity with quantitative data, spreadsheets, and perhaps some R programming is a plus, but not required.
Hours: 6-8 hrs
Related website: https://besi.berkeley.edu/person/samuel-trachtman/
Related website: https://samtrachtman.com