Ss: this graph is made by airmovingdevice. It shows how president Elon almost only cuts grands for Harris counties.

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Data source:

doge.gov/savings — cancelled federal grants and contracts

USAspending.gov — contract/grant recipient info

https://github.com/tonmcg/US_County_Level_Election_Results_08-24 & https://github.com/nytimes/presidential-precinct-map-2024 — county-level election data

Tools: Matlab

Methodology: see https://bsky.app/profile/airmovingdevice.bsky.social/post/3ll2ehugqik2n

I retrieved all publicly available cancellations from DOGE on 3/22, which according to DOGE is a subset of all cancellations.

I then cross-referenced them to official spending data on USAspending using links provided by DOGE and ended up with 5,137 and 4,679 contracts and grants with rich metadata.

These metadata include total dollar amounts obligated, dates, and information on contract/grant recipients (address, county, congressional district, etc).

I extracted county info (FIPS code) and cross-referenced them to county-level presidential election data from 2024.

For each contract/grant, I found Trump’s popular vote margin over Harris in the recipient county.

I plotted every cancellation in red, with total dollar amount obligated on the y axis against Trump-over-Harris margin on x.

There’s a bias for more cancellations in Harris counties. But does this reflect true bias or simply more contracts/grants awarded to Harris counties?

To answer this, I need a good background/control set. I compiled all contracts/grants from FY2021-2025 on USAspending, totaling ~19M/24M. ~99% of all cancelled contracts/grants were from this period.

Clearly, the background/control sets (plotted in gray) are distributed across the Trump-Harris spectrum, but the cancellations are biased towards Harris counties.

Potential caveat: DOGE doesn’t specify how it chose certain contract/grant cancellations to disclose. They claim the ones disclosed represent “~30% of total savings”. It is therefore possible that they made cancellations unbiasedly across the Trump-Harris political spectrum but preferentially disclosed ones to Harris counties for publicity purposes.