ABSTRACT
U.S. federal laws figure importantly in many research projects in political science, law, sociology, economics, and other disciplines. Despite their prominence, there is no authoritative, current, and comprehensive dataset of U.S. federal laws. In part, this is because such laws have been enacted over hundreds of years, resulting in a complicated patchwork of documents published in numerous and inconsistent formats. As a simplification, many scholars have relied upon selective lists of major legislative enactments or complete lists of relatively recent enactments. Here, I report on an effort to transparently and reproducibly assemble a complete database of US laws and their revision histories by combining data from HeinOnline, the Governmental Printing Office, and the National Archives and Records Administration. The result is a database of 49,746 laws spanning 1789 to 2022.
ABSTRACT
Presidents and executive branch agencies often have adversarial relationships. Early accounts suggest that these antagonisms may have been deeper and broader under President Trump than under any recent President. Yet careful appraisals have sometimes shown that claims about what President Trump has done to government and politics are over-stated, require greater nuance, or are just plain wrong. In this article, we use federal employment records from the Office of Personnel Management to examine rates of entry and exit at agencies across the executive branch during President Trump's term. A key challenge in this endeavor is that agencies vary in size dramatically, and this variability makes direct comparisons of rates of entry and exit across agencies problematic. Small agencies are overrepresented among agencies with large and small rates. Yet small agencies do important work and cannot simply be ignored. To address such small-area issues, we use a Bayesian hierarchical model to generate size-adjusted rates that better reflect the fundamental uncertainty about what is happening in small agencies as well as the substantial likelihood that these entities are less unusual than raw statistics imply. Our analysis of these adjusted rates leads to three key findings. First, total employment at the end of the Trump administration was largely unchanged from where it began in January of 2017. Second, this aggregate stability masks significant variation across departments, with immigration-focused bureaus and veterans-affairs bureaus growing significantly and certain civil-rights focused bureaus exhibiting signs of stress. Finally, compared to the first terms of Presidents Bush and Obama, separation rates under President Trump were markedly higher for most agencies.
