Collection: Public employees
Description: Federal employees data was obtained in two Freedom of Information Act requests submitted to the United States Office of Personnel Management. The first request was obtained by BuzzFeed News in 2017 and the second by the Investigative Reporting Workshop in 2021. Data from 1982-2014, 2015-2016, and 2017-2021 were combined into a single format with shared columns.
Each record is a single accession or separation, essentially a change in employment status of a single federal employee (e.g., hired, fired, retired, promoted). Department of Defense employees and others in sensitive fields had their names redacted and were not included in this collection. Data processing was done using open-source software and is documented on the Accountability Project GitHub repository