About

Policy Playground is a side project. It came out of a frustration that public conversation about the federal budget tends to fragment along three lines: alarming top-line numbers without any model of what to do about them, single-issue advocacy that ignores the rest of the ledger, and Treasury-grade modeling that is inaccessible to anyone outside Washington.

The Policy Playground tries to sit in the middle. The user gets a real model with real CBO numbers, a default state that reflects a coherent policy framework, and the freedom to deviate. It is not the New York Times' 2010 "You Fix the Budget" interactive, but it is the descendant of that idea sixteen years later, with more data and a wider menu.

The framework underlying the defaults is the work of a single author. AI tools were used extensively in drafting, scoring synthesis, and frontend implementation. The opinions are the author's; the math is checkable.

Contact

Feedback, bug reports, and disagreements welcome. Contact email: coming soon.

Source

The code is open source. See the link in the footer.