Federal Shutdown and State of the States 2025: Public Finance Overview
A revisualization of Truth in Accounting's Annual Report
Before getting into Truth in Accounting’s latest update of the state of the states’ debt, you may have heard about a federal shutdown (and some stupid videos involving kitties and sombreros):
Look, don’t shoot me, I’m just the messenger.
SERIOUSLY DON’T SHOOT ME.
(Maybe somebody needs to make some shirts or hats to that effect.)
Federal website messages
For both STUMP and my day job, I use data from federal government sources.
CDC WONDER features prominently:
For convenience, this is what it says at the top of the page:
The Trump Administration is working to reopen the government for the American people. Mission-critical activities of CDC will continue during the Democrat-led government shutdown.
I decided to hit a bunch of the .gov pages I usually visit and see what they currently say with respect to the federal government shutdown.
Some are more generic than others.
One of the specific database pages on CDC WONDER gave me this warning: [this was on the Multiple Cause of Death database page on Oct 2, 2025]
The Trump Administration is working to reopen the government for the American people. Mission-critical activities of CDC will continue during the Democrat-led government shutdown. Certain federal government activities have ceased due to a lack of appropriated funding. During the government shutdown, only web sites supporting excepted functions will be updated. As a result, the information on this website may not be up to date and the agency may not be able to respond to inquiries.
Contrast this to the message I got from the Bureau of Economic Analysis:
In general, none of the databases are getting updated. I can deal with that.
On the other hand:
4 Oct 2025, Daily Voice: Federal Union Sues Trump-Vance Admin For Forcing Workers’ Emails To Blame Dems For Shutdown
The nation’s largest federal worker union is suing the Trump-Vance administration, accusing it of forcing government employees to send partisan political messages during the ongoing shutdown.
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents roughly 800,000 federal workers, filed the lawsuit Friday against the US Department of Education and Education Secretary Linda McMahon, alleging that the agency violated employees’ First Amendment rights by changing their automatic out-of-office email responses to blame Democrats for the shutdown.
The modified messages were written in the first person, making it appear as if individual employees were personally criticizing one political party.
The press release, 3 Oct 2025: Trump-Vance Administration’s Use of Employees’ Emails to Send Partisan Political Messages Challenged by Largest Federal Worker Union
The largest federal worker union in the nation today sued the Trump-Vance administration for forcing civil servants at the U.S. Department of Education to engage in partisan political rhetoric during the current federal shutdown. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) sent a cease and desist letter and filed a lawsuit today in District Court for the District of Columbia. AFGE is represented by Democracy Forward and Public Citizen Litigation Group in the matter.
“Federal employees already are suffering financially by going without a salary due to this politically motivated government shutdown. Now the administration has directly and deliberately violated the First Amendment rights of furloughed workers at the Department of Education by replacing their out-of-office email messages with partisan political language without the employees’ consent,” said AFGE National President Everett Kelley. “Our union will not stand silent while President Trump and his political puppets blatantly violate the law in yet-another assault on federal workers’ rights.”
Due to the government shutdown, furloughed public employees unable to respond to emails set up “out-of-office” replies to automatically respond to incoming messages. Earlier this week, the Department of Education replaced employees’ out-of-office email messages with partisan political language placing blame for the government shutdown. The changes were made without giving notice to the employees and without obtaining consent. The Trump-Vance administration’s use of official government resources to push partisan messaging is both unprecedented and in violation of the First Amendment.
The complaint is here: https://democracyforward.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/AFGE-v-DOE-complaint-1.pdf
It shows some further screenshots of the website declarations as you see above. Pretty sure the people in charge of the departments have the power to change the text on those websites, so….
I’m looking for the emails…. [please give us a copy of one, thx.]
Truth in Accounting 2025 Financial State of the States
The federal government may be shut down, but Truth in Accounting is not.
Their 2025 Financial State of the States report is out.
I want to contrast this to last year’s result:
So there was a little bit of improvement, from a discrete point of view.
But when we look at the top- and bottom-ranked… and what years these results are based on… we’ll start to see the problems.
2025 Report: Top and Bottom States
Note that CALIFORNIA AND ILLINOIS results were based on data that was TWO YEARS OLD.
The others were all based on data… that’s ONE YEAR OLD.
Oh right. There’s a big lag between things happening, and then when you get audited financials… and things have moved on since then.
The argument can be that public finance moves slowly, and it takes a long time for these bad debt situations to accumulate and to turn into serious problems (ha ha ha ha), so what’s one or two years between friends? (-cough-)
This is what the results looked like for last year’s report, so you can see how much changes in one year:
The California number moved quite a bit, I’d say.
Tardy Financial Reporting
I noted this in last year’s report as well.
Nevada did finally get the FY2023 ACFR out, though the FY2024 one is not yet released.
So congrats on being the longest for releasing the 2023 ACFR, Nevada!
Note: the increasing time to release the ACFR is NOT A GOOD SIGN.
During a February budget hearing, Matthews said the pandemic was responsible for some of the delays, but he acknowledged “a sort of complacency set in” at the controller’s office and in state agencies that send information to his office.
“A mentality was created among many state agencies where financial reporting had been late the last couple of years, so ‘what is the big deal if we continue to be late?,’” Matthews told lawmakers. “The state controller’s office was not as assertive as it needed to be in terms of working with those state agencies to get that information.”
As a finance person, seeing the above graph, I am not happy with this sort of response.
I would be going over the accounts VERY CAREFULLY.
Revisualizing the 2025 State of the States
Redoing the visualizations of the TIA report, so you can see the individual states in a Tile Grid Map (so each state gets the same visual weight).
Remember, in accounting, black = good, red = BAD.
When people go on about “Blah blah, blue states bailout, blah blah”, well, several “red states” are deep in the accounting red, too.
It still won’t make a federal bailout popular.
Ten Best States: 2021-2025 reports
Because of the lag of financial reporting, the 2021 State of the States report shows some of the pandemic impact, but before the big pandemic federal bailout bill… and the 2025 report definitely shows some of the results.
Ten Worst States: 2021-2025 reports
You can see the worst indebted states have been climbing out of their debt holes…well, except for California…. but that federal money is going dry now.
Yeah, that’s drying up.
What now?
Spreadsheet
Related Posts
October 2024: Revisualizing the Financial State of the States: 2024 Edition
June 2023: Public Finance Spotlight: Truth in Accounting
Sept 2021: Revisualizing the Financial State of the States: 2021 edition
May 2020: Classic STUMP: Visualizing the Financial State of the States
Love that Daily Show clip! And I am terribly disappointed in my own state of MA - our constitution requires a balanced budget - how did we ever accumulate so much debt? I suspect it is growing on a per capita basis due to emigration. Democrats can't blame Republicans in this state. Dems are 90% of the legislators (and the governor).