Method

Govargus shows official US data over presidential terms. It does not grade presidents. Here is why, and how the numbers are computed.

Why there are no scores

A president is one input among many. Congress writes budgets and laws. The Federal Reserve sets interest rates. Oil prices, pandemics, wars and other countries' economies hit everyone. And most policy works with a lag: a tax law or a health reform can take years to show up in the data, by which time someone else may be in office.

So instead of a verdict, each president page gives context:

• The inherited trend. Every term is shown next to the four years before it. A falling unemployment rate means something different if it was already falling at the same speed.
• Recessions (as dated by the NBER) are hatched on every chart, because almost every big move lines up with one.
• Policy events and shocks are marked on the indicators they plausibly affected, so you can see what happened around a change and how long the effect took to appear.

How term figures are computed

• Levels (unemployment, income, debt, and similar): the value for the last full period before inauguration, compared with the last full period before the term ended, or the latest data for a current term. The change is shown per year so 4- and 8-year terms are comparable.
• Rates (GDP growth, inflation, deficit): the average of every period that falls entirely within the term, next to the average over the four years before.
• Annual series are reported late. Median household income for a year is published the following September, for example, so a current term often shows data only partway through.
• Crime figures from 2021 on come from the FBI's incident-based system (NIBRS), which replaced the older summary system, so the jump between 2020 and 2021 partly reflects the method.
• The federal deficit is by fiscal year (October to September), so a president's first fiscal year was mostly budgeted by their predecessor.

Data

Every series comes from a US government agency or the World Bank. Economic and budget data (BLS, BEA, Census, OMB) is retrieved through the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis's FRED service; crime estimates from the FBI's Crime Data Explorer; firearm and overdose deaths from CDC death-certificate data; health insurance from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey. Executive orders come from the Federal Register and laws from Congress.gov. A scheduled job re-fetches everything weekly. Each indicator page links to its exact source series. The policy timeline is curated by hand and lives in src/data/events.json. Corrections and additions are welcome as pull requests.

Who makes this

Govargus is a personal project built and maintained by Lusitaniae. The code, the data and the full history of changes are public in the GitHub repository.

Corrections

Found a wrong number, a missing event or a broken source link? Open an issue on GitHub. Every figure on the site is generated from the source data in the public repository, so a fix there corrects every page that uses it.