The Census Bureau is back releasing data that was delayed during the government shutdown. Click the tracker link for the latest additions. 👇

From now on I'll name my files using a short video of me screaming into oblivion. Search them based on trying to match the scream audio using microphone input. Perfect.

Always read everything by @laurenweberhp.bsky.social

10 YEARS later DC's rent control database is launched...partly. Still no public data access. Read for the maddening details of literal years of bureaucratic delays. streetsensemedia.org/article/d-c-...

🎉 camel case and snake case conversion functions!! 🎉

An Ohio panel adopted new U.S. House districts today and almost all — 13 out of 15 districts — got new borders. Check out the side by side maps. Peep the reshaped District 1 snakey appendage taking it from blue to likely red. apnews.com/article/virg...

Federal funding for food assistance programs is expected to lapse this weekend, and the Trump administration has refused to use a contingency fund. D.C. will cover the cost of residents' November SNAP and WIC benefits, Mayor Muriel Bowser announced last night. More from @maustermuhle.bsky.social:

hello to my fellow Winter People who like cold and darkness, our time is nigh

“An artificial intelligence system apparently mistook a high school student’s bag of Doritos for a firearm and called local police to tell them the pupil was armed.”

from 2020-2022, I put about a dozen open source projects on the web and every year since, I suffer for it with my time/money/energy long-term maintenance on this kind of thing is just impossible when it's not a full time job

NEW: AP investigation finds over 420 anti-science bills attacking longstanding public health protections have been introduced in statehouses across the US this year, part of an organized, politically savvy campaign to enshrine a conspiracy theory-driven agenda into law. w/ @lauraungar.bsky.social

This weekend I looked around DC Healthlink's 2026 prices at a few different incomes. The cheapest subsidized plan for 50-year-old earning $40,000 is $138 a month with $6,350 deductible ($8,958 a year) or $400 a month with lower deductible ($8,451 a year.) Who can afford 20% of income on insurance?

Interesting: Earlier this year, Congress prohibited D.C. from spending roughly $1.1 billion of its budgeted money. There's been lots of questions about the exact impact that had, and now there's an interesting answer: it actually cost the city more money not having that money.

These large national cohorts provided data that supported healthcare policymaking across the public and private sectors. They were some of the most important works that only CDC was able to perform - and execute well - as a nationally representative survey. www.statnews.com/2025/10/14/c...

BREAKING: Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Doznes of "disease detectives," high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed and received the following notice:

all the GIS in R all the GIS in R ALL THE GIS IN R arcGIS who???

If not for the government shutdown we'd be getting the September Current Population Survey data release in the next few days. Now: 🤷‍♀️

Shutdown day 1: The Census website and data.census.gov are offline. The APIs do appear to be working for now but not all data lives there. Vital that we have alternate data hosters like IPUMS.

A news tidbit: This week the D.C. Council will vote on an emergency bill from @cmchenderson.bsky.social that will allow pharmacies to administer the COVID-19 vaccine without a doctor's prescription. Because of changes at the federal level, local pharmacies have been requiring a prescription.

It's here: 2024 American Community Survey 1-year summary data! AND the 2025 CPS-ASEC supplement microdata plus the monthly August 2025 CPS release. Big day for data nerds.

It's alive! 🎉 My Census data tracker captured its first real (not test) minor data update yesterday: time frame update to the historical poverty dataset. 2024 is now available. There have been a couple major data updates (data endpoints added) but this is the first minor! github.com/hrecht/censu...

Can't wait to FOIA the HHS ChatGPT logs.

Crucially: how is CVS communicating all these constant changes to its pharmacy staff on the ground? A few days ago CVS staff at a pharmacy in DC were saying that the covid vaccines weren't in yet, seemingly not aware that they wouldn't be able to give them without a prescription.

"We need a government-wide changelog." - yes. strong cosign and thanks @flowingdata.com for the shoutout to my lil Census tracker flowingdata.com/2025/08/20/t...

the world may be full of swirling chaos but I have finally started really using Svelte, so at least my front-end code is peaceful and calm

Good thing no one uses Microsoft Excel for anything related to legal, regulatory or compliance business functions www.theverge.com/news/761338/...

new protest art spotted in DC

What happens when government disinvests from public transit? Commutes get longer & more frustrating. A NJ Transit case study from me, @suryamattu.com and @mariepastora.bsky.social : www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

ICYMI I built a Census tracker + Bluesky bot that posts when they add 👀 or remove 👀 datasets

We try to clarify what happened in D.C. this week, what we can expect in the future, and what this all means for the residents who call D.C. home. There's a lot we don't know, but we'll continue following this story in the days and weeks to come. 51st.news/trump-dc-mpd...

Neat resource from @hannahrecht.bsky.social - tracking changes to U.S. Census Bureau datasets www.hrecht.com/census-api-d...

onion font!!! onion font!!!!!!!! pudding.cool/2025/08/onio...

Does anyone know of an #rstats package that sends objects out to the Github Env for use in Github Actions? @posit.co? I don't want to reinvent the wheel if it exists but I can't keep writing code like this, it hurts.

an amazing resource!!

🚀 I made a tracker that shows when the Census Bureau adds or removes datasets from their APIs. Dashboard at www.hrecht.com/census-api-d... and follow @censusapitracker.bsky.social for major updates. I've been wanting to build this for years but now seemed an especially important time to keep track.

Always follow @maustermuhle.bsky.social for some of the absolute best DC government reporting out there

good day to support your local nonprofit newsroom givebutter.com/SsQ8CG

🚀 I made a tracker that shows when the Census Bureau adds or removes datasets from their APIs. Dashboard at www.hrecht.com/census-api-d... and follow @censusapitracker.bsky.social for major updates. I've been wanting to build this for years but now seemed an especially important time to keep track.

i have a new lil project to launch and also terrible news timing 🫠

Trump on a long rambling tangent about other cities that wash their sidewalks weekly. In reality walking around commercial areas in DC on weekday mornings is already an exercise in dodging workers power washing the sidewalk. This is a thing that businesses....already do.

The irony is not lost on many in Washington that Trump says spitting on a DC cop is justification for hitting/punching back "hard" when he pardoned hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters who assaulted those same cops — and said attacks on them that day were "minor."

D.C.'s falling violent crime stats, as seen in a new @washingtonpost.com graphic. There's no denying the city had a spike in violent crime in 2023, as President Trump was campaigning for president. There's also no denying that it already has receded.

My goto is to ask LLMs how many states have R in their name. They always fail. GPT 5 included Indiana, Illinois, and Texas in its list. It then asked me if I wanted an alphabetical highlighted map. Sure, why not.

Excuse me ChatGPT, what are the AP abbreviations for the great states of Phemopohamp and Corol Soavguo?

tools that still exist that don't hallucinate or use massive amounts of water and power: human brains physical calculators the calculator app on your phone programming google searches without ai books librarians

Senators Ron Wyden & Elizabeth Warren are asking UnitedHealth to hand over company records about its attempts to reduce hospitalizations for nursing home residents—following our investigation: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Jay Bhattacharya says that Program Officers made up banned words lists at NIH. This is a real email I got at NIH. (Granted, before Jay started.) But nothing has changed since he joined. I refused to censor the summary, so it remains unposted. And I have tried since Jay arrived.

Project Runway really said you can have Heidi Klum back but must also accept a new set of chaos twins, going full 2017

TurfJS in R! Turf in R!!! 🚀 To think right around this time 13 years ago I made my first ever map in *SAS* and oh boy the agony.