Surfacing prominent narratives in the EPA budget conversation

President Trump's plans to trade record-high budget cuts at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for increases in defense spending made headlines after the release of his proposed budget in early March 2017. At the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), our marketing and communications teams wanted to see how the EPA budget cuts were being covered in the media to study which messages were most engaging to constituents. Preliminary survey results that we collected suggested that the general public was more receptive to health-related messaging; however, we wanted to better understand the entire media landscape around the topic. To explore the health angle and other prominent themes around cuts to the EPA's budget, EDF used Quid to analyze relevant articles within a four-month period following Trump's 2017 announcement. Quid leverages natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to read thousands of news articles and blog posts and group them based on common language and keywords.