Since coming into office for his second term, President Donald Trump has issued more than 124 executive orders—with nearly as many lawsuits filed in response. Much like the early days of Covid, the data viz community is being asked to make sense of this tidal wave of new information. Data viz practitioners are responding to the challenge in different ways.
The Impact Project and similar organizations are focused on mapping the regional impacts of federal employee firings and science funding cuts. The Washington Post put out an innovative choose-your-own-adventure flowchart and a calendar-based tracker of executive orders.
As the months have dragged on, most news agencies have defaulted to standardized and easily-editable tables and drop-down menus by topic. Each news outlet is faced with the same dilemma: What information do you provide and how much of it? Every graphics editor has had to dust off their notes on cognitive load and come up with their own solutions.
Most data viz practitioners will agree that less is more here. Give people the topic, a short description, and a simple status update. This is a tracker, not a full story, after all. Simple data viz designs ensure the tracker is easy to use and update—but is it actually easier to understand than a full story?
For executive orders that have been blocked by a preliminary injunction or temporary restraining order, do you opt for concrete legal language or go with something more relatable like “blocked for now?” For lawsuits that have been filed, but no action has yet been taken by the courts, do you go with the literal “lawsuit filed,” or the more descriptive “awaiting decision/in progress.” And in the multiple cases where the Trump administration appears to be defying court orders, do you note that in some way? What about threats against judges?
These are hard calls to make and I genuinely appreciated seeing AP be honest about this with a category on their tracker called, “It’s complicated.” In some respects, that uncertainty should be reflected in our data visualizations, lest we normalize what is an incredibly abnormal time in the United States.
In my own work at KUOW, NPR’s Seattle station, I sought to answer two simple questions for our audience: (1) How are Trump’s orders impacting people in Washington state and (2) What is the state doing about it? I made a conscious choice not to build this tracker for lawyers. They don’t need it. That means everything in my tracker had to come back to my top two questions without relying on legalese. I landed on three status options. At any point in time, a Trump executive order could be: In effect, partially in effect, or not in effect.
By limiting myself to the actual outcome of these orders, I was able to highlight how executive actions benefit from the slow pace of the court system. As cases wait in limbo, the laws that fueled them are in effect and impacting Americans. The “partially in effect” status allowed me to capture the messiness of these court battles. In the case of fired federal employees, two similar cases were being heard simultaneously. In one case, the court required fired employees in 19 states to be reinstated. In another case, the court required fired employees within 6 agencies to be reinstated. For Washington state, that meant some employees would be reinstated while others would not.
Our newsroom also made the choice to add the tag, “Trump is possibly defying the courts” to our list of options. This was after significant discussion about the importance of presenting the news as it stands, uncertainty and all. Turmoil and all.
My Trump tracker has gone through a few iterations—and will no doubt continue to evolve—but for now, it serves as a landing post for our Washington state audience to understand how they intersect with these big national stories. The tracker consists of two graphics: (1) A quick filterable status list and (2) A detailed table with background information and links to our original reporting on these issues at home. You can visit KUOW’s Trump tracker here.
Teo Popescu is the creative manager at KUOW, one of the Seattle branches of National Public Radio. She manages all data visualizations, graphics, interactive pieces, illustrations, and video projects across the station. She also serves on the board of the Society of Professional Journalists of Western Washington. In her spare time, she runs data visualization workshops for young journalists. She is the content editor of Nightingale.
