GovSim

Live in production

Play a fictional American president across two terms and see how budget choices change everyday family budgets.

GovSim showing the Oval Office command desk with approval ratings national indicators and economic trade-offs

Current status

Live open-source presidential and federal budget simulation at gsim.ngi.video with instant browser play, embeddable demo mode, and optional itch.io or patron support.

Overview

Nonpartisan U.S. Presidential and macroeconomic simulation where you govern across 32 quarterly turns—balancing the federal budget, building congressional coalitions, and seeing how fiscal and tariff choices affect everyday family budgets.

Why it was built

Most political games treat governing as simple partisan sliders instead of showing how tax rates, spending bills, and interest rates actually play out for real households.

Why it helps

Lets players test real federal budget tradeoffs against a sourced economic baseline, inspect monthly household dollar impacts, share compressed replay links, and play directly in the browser or via itch.io.

What you can do

Oval Office command desk tracking approval, congressional coalitions, inflation, jobs, and national debt
32-quarter campaign spanning two full presidential terms, midterms, and legislative Whip Solver
Kitchen-Table Impact calculator showing how policy choices change monthly household budgets
Instant browser play at gsim.ngi.video with embeddable demo mode, itch.io release, and civic patron support

GovSim • Core Technology & Feature Architecture

32-Quarter U.S. Presidency Engine, 119th Congress Whip Solver & Kitchen-Table Impact

Governs across two full presidential terms on sourced 2026 macroeconomic data, benchmarking your 8-axis Prosperity Index against a same-seed Autopilot baseline and translating macro levers into monthly household cashflow.

Prosperity vs. Autopilot

8-Axis Prosperity Index & Same-Seed Autopilot Comparator

Scores real median income (25%), employment (15%), debt/GDP (15%), inflation distance from 2% (10%), life expectancy (10%), Gini (10%), security (10%), and social trust (5%) against a zero-intervention run on the exact same crisis seed.

119th Congress Whip Solver

Dynamic Programming Coalition Optimizer & Statutory Thresholds

Models ideological voting blocs across House (218 majority) and Senate (60 filibuster, 51 budget reconciliation, 2/3 veto override), computing minimum Political Capital coalitions via findCheapestCoalition.

Kitchen-Table Cashflow

Monthly Household Dollar Deltas & Myth Lever Debunkers

Translates tariffs, tax brackets, ACA subsidies, and independent Taylor-rule Fed rates into monthly grocery, utility, healthcare, and tax deltas for real family personas while debunking decoy 'Myth Levers'.

Evil Mode + Civic Patron

Satirical Offshore Loot Mode, ?embed=1 & itch.io PWYW

Includes an unlockable satirical Evil Mode (balancing Offshore Loot Stash against Inspector General Heat and impeachment), instant ?embed=1 browser boot, and itch.io + Stripe Civic Patron support.

Interactive Oval Office simulation & itch.io / civic patron showcase

Play a 32-quarter U.S. presidency directly in your browser (`?embed=1` instant-boot mode), download via itch.io, or back open-source civic economic modeling via Stripe.

Open full screen (`gsim.ngi.video`)

Whip Solver & 32 turns

Dynamic programming coalition optimizer (`findCheapestCoalition`) across 5 congressional factions and 15 macroeconomic drift equations.

Kitchen-Table household impact

Translates federal tax, tariff, healthcare, and interest-rate policy into monthly dollar changes for 5 household personas.

itch.io PWYW & civic donations

Supports pay-what-you-want itch.io desktop/web keys (`$0` / `$5` / `$15`) plus Stripe Civic Patron donations without paywalling the MIT simulator.

GovSim • Kitchen-Table Household Impact & Civics Myth-Lever Debunker

Test how federal tariff & budget levers change monthly family budgets vs. same-seed Autopilot

Household persona (`src/engine/household.ts`)

Universal baseline tariff adjustment:+10%

Groceries & retail pass-through: -123 $/mo · Healthcare: -24 $/mo

Utilities: -18 $/mo · Tax bracket credit: +45 $/mo

Net Kitchen-Table household impact: -120 $/mo

Interactive "Myth Levers" (20-second sourced civics debunkers)

Why the President has no direct gas-price dial

Crude oil trades on a global market; Strategic Petroleum Reserve releases shift pump prices by only ~10–25 cents temporarily, while refinery capacity and OPEC+ supply dominate.

Before & After Engineering AuditMacroeconomic & Legislative Simulation32 turns vs. same-seed Autopilot · 5 household cashflow personas

32-quarter macro engine, Autopilot baseline & Kitchen-Table dollars vs. partisan sliders

Comparison focus

Before: Instant partisan slider boost & end-of-term deficit cheese

Simple political games let players max out debt in turn 31 for a fake GDP spike and never show what policy does to a family's grocery or healthcare bill.

// Naive slider game
onTaxSliderChange(delta) {
  gdp += delta * 2.5; // instant magic boost, no inflation or Fed response
  score = gdp;        // ignores post-term debt cliff
}

After: 119th Congress Whip Solver, Kitchen-Table $/mo & same-seed Autopilot

GovSim benchmarks your 8-axis Prosperity Index + 10-year legacy projection against a same-seed Autopilot run, solves House (218) & Senate (60/51) coalitions, and computes monthly household cashflow deltas.

// GovSim Macro + Whip Solver + Kitchen-Table Impact
headline = 0.5 * termEndIndex + 0.5 * legacy10Yr - sameSeedAutopilot;
coalition = findCheapestCoalition(senateBlocs, threshold = 60);
ohioFamilyDelta = { groceries: -$64, healthcare: -$48, netMonthly: -$142 };

CV & VLM rubric shift: 0.7795 → 0.9585 (+0.179 · Sharpness +48.4% · PSNR 44.81 dB)

Grounding gate: Negation parity & evidence verified

Interactive walkthrough

Step through how GovSim works without creating an account or installing local dependencies.

Entry & problem context

Maturity: Live in production

Most political games treat governing as simple partisan sliders instead of showing how tax rates, spending bills, and interest rates actually play out for real households.

Shared platform architecture sandbox

Test the live cross-language single source of truth shared across TypeScript, Python, and Rust.

Evidence grounding & negation parity check

Source evidence passageAssistant claim snippet to verify

Grounding tier: RejectedPolarityFlip (grounded: false, overlap: 1)

Socrates epistemic decision: clarify (confidence: 0.425)

Dual-gate write receipt verifier (DAWRI) & FTT math healer

Assistant response draftSimulate committed database write receipt (committedWrites.length > 0)

Unbacked claim stripped: true

Sanitized output: No profile changes were committed in this turn.

FTT verbatim math healer: EV 142, σ 133.5515, gist positive_ev_with_downside

Hick-Hyman EIG chips: Remote or hybrid? · Target salary floor? · Company stage? (lockout: false)

Semiotic Brand Identity & Federated SoC Governance

Peircean Brand Mark, Multi-Size Squint Test & 3-Tier SoC Boundary

SoC tier: oss_public16px rubric: 96.7% (PASS)

16px · 32px · 48px squint test

Motif: capitol_balance

Iconic sign: Classical civic dome columns supporting a bicameral policy equilibrium beam

Indexical cue: Multi-agent legislative coalition voting and macroeconomic budget flow

Symbolic archetype: Civic cobalt statecraft and constitutional simulation seal

SoC Boundary & Epistemic Retrieval Guardrails

Visibility & ceiling: public_oss (max tier: oss_public)

Boundary policy: Public open-source macro-fiscal simulator (`brbrainerd/govSim`) — receives oss_public model/search/harness primitives only.

4-gram shingle novelty: 100.0% (non-redundant >15%) · Retired symbol trap: Clear (0 retired symbols)

GitHub Profile & Source Activity

Engineering Velocity & Open-Source Hygiene

Synced from @brbrainerd and @vox-foundation via the GitHub GraphQL API (GET /api/github/stats).

GitHub Profile vox-foundation/vox

Annual GitHub activity

13,842+

3,229 public · 10,136 private revisions

Curated portfolio history

19,523+

Revisions across 32 curated projects

Pull requests & reviews

463 PRs

Merged across 70 first-party codebases

GovSim historyTypeScript

435 revisions

785 tracked source files · Updated 2026-10-18

Language distribution across curated projectsWeighted by revision history & source volume

TypeScript38.9% (12 projects)

Rust36.9% (1 project)

Python11.3% (8 projects)

JavaScript4.7% (2 projects)

Lua4.1% (1 project)

Public open-source codebases on GitHub

vox-foundation/voxRust · 7,200 rev

Single-file full-stack programming language and Rust compiler that generates database schemas, server routes, and typed clients from one declaration.

#programming-language#rust#compiler#full-stack#lsp

brbrainerd/govSimTypeScript · 435 rev

Interactive political economy simulator with ECS civic rights, institutional modeling, policy levers, and multi-regime scenarios.

#simulation#political-economy#typescript#ecs#strategy-game

brbrainerd/neurogeckoHTML · 6 rev

Interactive 3D macaque brain atlas and stereo surgical view planner rendered in browser WebGL.

#neuroscience#webgl#threejs#brain-atlas#3d-visualization

brbrainerd/brFrameTypeScript · 23 rev

Single-binary Rust and React kiosk shell for Raspberry Pi digital photo frames with remote mobile upload.

#rust#raspberry-pi#kiosk#embedded#react

Verified code citation for GovSim:32 turns across two terms

Inspect source line on GitHub →

32 turns across two terms · See the source (opens in a new tab)

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