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At the House Fiscal Agency, I support the Michigan House of Representatives and its members by providing confidential and nonpartisan expertise throughout the budgeting and policymaking processes.

Specifically, I engage in fiscal analysis work to facilitate budget deliberations in the House Committee on Appropriations and subcommittees that are responsible for the Michigan State Police (MSP) and the Department of Military and Veterans Affairs (DMVA) budgets, as well as coordinate budgeting activities between legislators, policy offices, the State Budget Office, executive branch departments, and stakeholders from across the state.

In addition to my budget responsibilities, I also provide legislative analysis for bills before the House Committee on Judiciary, the standing committee responsible for Michigan courts, criminal justice, law enforcement, and general public safety policy.

Recent Updates

Research & “Side Quests”

Outside of my day job, I often find myself revisiting research projects from my time in academia, many of which center on the use of various quantitative methods and computer programming to compile, clean, and analyze data on political phenomena. Others are simply “for fun” and frequently begin as experiments in how programming can make life even just a little bit easier. This website, for example, was created using Jekyll (a static website generator) and GitHub Pages (for hosting files from the site repo). My GitHub is aaronameek.

My first stab at an R package is called {mileg}, which extracts (“scrapes”) public data from the Michigan Legislature’s public website and compiles it in a way that facilitates statistical analysis (for research) or more personalized use of the data (say, in a custom database or parameterized report). Now that I’ve nailed down the data gathering side of the project, I’m working on the analysis functions that can create things like network visualizations for cosponsorship, which I think are pretty neat.

Some other projects I’ve worked on in the past, and occasionally dabble with nowadays, are listed below:

  • Administrative agency compliance at the U.S. Courts of Appeals (my dissertation prospectus draft, actually)
  • Influence of U.S. Supreme Court concurrences and dissents on lower courts
  • State supreme courts and the “reverse Erie” problem
  • Legal development in administrative agency adjudications
  • State judicial selection and opinion clarity
  • The decision to author separate opinions in the face of court curbing at the U.S. Supreme Court
  • U.S. Supreme Court decision-making and subsequent legal mobilization in lower courts
  • Domestic elite cues and public support for the European Court of Human Rights