Cornell University researchers recently released a mapping tool that looks at how reduced federal funding is impacting jobs and budgets across New York. WAMC’s Sajina Shrestha sat down with Russell Weaver, the director of research at Cornell’s Buffalo Co-lab, to talk about how this tool maps the impact of federal decisions on New York State.
Sajina Shrestha: This week, you launched your interactive mapping tool that you and a team of researchers developed at Cornell University. This tool is a federal impact interactive map of New York State, specifically by county. Can you give me a general summary of what your map is?
Russell Weaver: Sure, so our unit was approached by a local philanthropic organization called the Community Foundation for a Greater Buffalo, and they had been in conversations with other members of the philanthropic community throughout upstate New York, and there was some interest in looking at federal spending data and seeing if we would be able to track changes in the amounts of federal dollars coming into New York State and its different counties. And those data are publicly available. All federal spending records are tracked at a website called USA spending.gov through Treasury Department programs, and generally, the data are put out monthly, so it's updated quite frequently, but entire fiscal year data comes out in October of every year, because the fiscal year ends in on September 30, and so when the 2025 fiscal year data published for published, most recently just this month, in the middle of October, we grabbed all of the data that we could that were readily accessible for the past 10 fiscal years, just to begin establishing a baseline. The major shifts that we're going to see in American economic policy that we've already been seeing for a few months now won't really take shape until the fiscal year 2026, budget and beyond. And so, what we're trying to do is just establish that baseline and maybe set up, sort of like an early progress monitor system so we can see how the agenda is playing out in New York State
Shrestha: And looking at the jobs number, even though it is only for the first quarter, January to March of 2025 we're already seeing a lot of massive impacts, specifically in the accommodations sector. And I wanted to know, what do you think this preliminary data tells us of what is yet to come?
Weaver: So, I think there have been a lot of experts out there conducting analyzes of jobs data, not just from this series, but from a lot of other reports, the ADP report that comes out, which is more of a private sector type of a program as well. And there's been a lot of speculation that perhaps things like the sweeping tariff program that we've seen being implemented, and some of the other efforts that are being made to bring manufacturing or to bring jobs back to the US, which are causing some disruption to the global economic system right now and potentially creating some, at least short-term losses in jobs, especially in highly tariff exposed industries like wholesale trade, transportation and warehousing. I think I saw it's both UPS and Amazon have announced pretty, pretty heavy layoffs coming up. And so those are industries that are generally affected by trade policy, like tariff policy. And so, some of the patterns of job losses while they are again, these raw, unadjusted numbers that the BLS publishes on a quarterly basis. And so, there's always going to be some fluctuation in them. The fluctuation that we did see in the first quarter is a bit concerning, because it does match with what a lot of economists were saying when the whole tariff paradigm was initially explored, that it could result in job losses and some economic contraction in some industries. And so, we are seeing some things consistent with that. And so, if we continue along the same approach, we might see those numbers dip even further. That's one implication or one takeaway that we might have from this preliminary data,
Shrestha: Right, and you mentioned that you pulled data from federal entities like USspending.gov and Bureau of Labor Statistics, but with everything that's happening on the federal level recently, with the firing of Commissioner Erica McEntarfer, who was the Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner, how confident are you in this data, and do you foresee any changes in the future regarding how you collect the data?
Weaver: There is a conversation happening right now that potentially is looking at ways to make BLS data products even more reliable, to improve the validity of them. There were maybe some concerns that did lead to the firing of the chief statistician a couple of months back. But since then, data have continued to flow out, including the 2025 benchmark data, which results in revising some of the numbers that had already been released, creating some adjustments. And those adjustments didn't raise any alarms, as if somebody is coming in there and changing protocols. The BLS is full of wonderful economists and statisticians that are experts in what they do, and so the algorithms and the systems that have been in place for years are still in place, and so the numbers are still coming out, except for potentially, in this era that we're in of a shutdown right now, if that doesn't get resolved by the next time, we're supposed to see BLS data come out, we won't. For example, last month, we didn't see the national. Will the national scale jobs report come out on schedule like we were supposed to, and so that is for projects like this that are wholly dependence on, again, wonderful open access public data sets that are a great public service and a real public good. If we're not getting that then, then we can't continue to monitor what we're hoping to monitor with these tools.
Shrestha: You had mentioned that first, the map is a preliminary look into the future, but that it's also in phase 1. What do you hope to bring into the phase 2 of this project, specifically looking into quarter two data, if that is released on schedule?
Weaver: So, we are, we are hoping to continue to monitor the pieces of information that are already there, so jobs, jobs by industry and then federal spending. However, in partnership with our collaborators and supporters on this project, we're hoping that phase two also expands the topical themes that we can feature and makes the dashboard a little bit more expansive. In particular, we're looking at things like sales tax revenue at the local level, to monitor changes, again, for potential impacts of changes in tourism to different counties and spending. In that regard, we are a border state with another nation, with Canada, and so we're hopefully going to implement border crossing data as well to see if there have been changes as an again, a result of changes in federal priorities. And then beyond that, some of the data sets that would allow us to dig deeper into the who of job hirings, or job creation and job destruction. So, who is being most impacted by the creation of new jobs under this agenda and potentially the destruction of others? And so, we're trying to add that component to it as those data become available, but those are more lagged, and so that's probably maybe even a third phase of development where we can look at disparities by race or gender or place or ethnicity or things of that sort, to understand how economic policies are affecting New Yorkers of different varieties.
Shrestha: Thank you so much for joining me today. Dr Weaver,
Weaver: Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.
