PolicyEngine’s 2021 year in review
By: Max Ghenis
Tags: US Politics, UK Politics, Policy, Public Policy, Open Source

PolicyEngine’s inaugural year was a substantial one for public policy: with variants continuing the lethal disruption of the coronavirus, tax and welfare responses remained prominent in discussion and policymaking across the world. When we launched in October, we did so with the mission to Make Everyone a Policymaker, aiming to arm the public with professional-grade tools for modelling tax and benefit reforms. PolicyEngine UK became the world’s first product allowing anyone to design policy reforms and see both the effects on specific households, and on UK-wide outcomes like poverty, inequality and the budget.

In the past two months, we’ve learned tremendously from our users: what policies they value, how they want to interact with the tool, and more. As a result, we’ve improved PolicyEngine UK in a number of ways, from modelling Scottish rates, Stamp Duty Land Tax (and its devolved equivalents), and business rates, to adding new policies like carbon taxes and land value taxes, to allowing users to select a policy snapshot date. We’ve also simplified the interface and validated the results with a range of automated tests; we’re confident that PolicyEngine is not only the most user-friendly product in its class, but also the most accurate.

PolicyEngine UK’s current interface

The public policy community has already leveraged PolicyEngine to analyse reforms. The UBI Lab Network embedded PolicyEngine in their Resilience UBI proposal, and the UBI Center (which originally incubated PolicyEngine) integrated PolicyEngine to its report on the proposal. As the national conversation turned to new ideas for policy change, PolicyEngine’s quick interactivity shone: we analysed the Autumn Budget changes to Universal Credit and, within a day, produced the only poverty estimates of Income Tax changes reportedly discussed within the Treasury. When we presented PolicyEngine at the Cross-Party Parliamentary and Local Government Group on Universal Basic Income, policymakers experimented with policies in real time. We’ve also had the chance to share our 100% open source technology at the PyData Conference and the Policy Simulation Library, ensuring we continue to learn from other experts in the field.

The PolicyEngine team presenting at the UK Cross-Party Parliamentary and Local Government Group on Universal Basic Income in November 2021

In 2022, we’ll continue to improve PolicyEngine’s technology and usability, and work with the policy community to further democratise the policymaking process. Ultimately, we want to make it as easy to create, explore, and engage with policy reforms as it is to connect on top media apps. Users will be able to sign in to save their policy reforms and household information, and scroll through a feed of reforms from policymakers, think tanks, and other organizations and citizens, revealing their impacts in the rigorous, quantitative terms we show today.

Wireframe mocks for a potential future PolicyEngine app

As we’ve developed PolicyEngine US, we’ve come to see another opportunity as well: the same open source policy simulation models that power our reform analysis can also show people their tax liability and benefit entitlement under current law. Some programs in some states offer calculators to estimate eligibility, but low-income Americans don’t currently have a way to see their full package of benefits and taxes to help them budget and plan for earnings changes. We’ll provide this information in a new PolicyEngine page, and also serve an API for developers looking to integrate benefit eligibility into other apps (get in touch if you’re interested!). We’ve broadened our mission to encompass these use cases, now striving to Help People Understand and Change Public Policy.

To all of you who’ve used PolicyEngine, we extend our gratitude. We’re especially grateful to End Poverty Make Trillions, whose grant jump-started our US development. We have a funding gap going into 2022, so appreciate any contributions through our fiscal sponsor, the PSL Foundation (tax-deductible in the US), and connections to funders looking to support transparency into tax and benefit policy. We can’t wait to build more to share in our 2022 year-in-review blog post!

Max and Nikhil, PolicyEngine co-founders