A field study of Texans' privacy rights
Sixteen trained participants tested how data brokers answer requests under Texas privacy law. The preliminary findings became invited testimony before a Texas House committee.
Kyle Trojahn
I study how Texas works, analyze the data that describes it, and build the systems that keep that data trustworthy.
Data and Systems Analyst on the Data & Research team at Texas 2036, a nonpartisan policy organization in Austin.
My work across Texas
All work
My statewide work covers all 254 counties. Highlighted are the places where I have done regionally focused research. Pick a chapter to follow it.
Places
- Statewide, all 254 counties
- Dallas-Fort Worth
- Greater Houston
- Central Texas
- Galveston
- Brownsville and Harlingen
Census
Political
Education
Regional
State agencies
Infrastructure
Policy, analysis, and the infrastructure underneath
These usually get treated as separate jobs. I do all three, and each makes the others better: the policy question shapes how the data gets built, and well-built data changes what policy can ask.
Policy research
Turning evidence into something legislators, agencies, and local officials can act on.
- Invited testimony on data privacy before a Texas House committee
- Lead author of a five-organization public comment on new state lending rules
- District-specific briefs and committee testimony during the 2025 session
- Data and equity analysis for a local policy memo on toll debt
Data analysis
Statistical and geospatial analysis of large administrative datasets.
- Debt-collection lawsuits across all 254 Texas counties, 2019 to 2025
- Analysis of data covering every public-school student in Texas
- A 600,000+ observation Census block dataset on what city limits change
- A field study of how data brokers answer Texans' privacy requests
Data infrastructure
The pipelines, governance, and tools that make data trustworthy and reusable.
- A vetted catalog of statewide metrics, each traced to its source
- A resumable collector for seven years of statewide court records
- A tested de-identification tool for sensitive survey data
- A multi-geography Texas map built on vector tiles
The issues I keep coming back to
Across seven research and policy organizations, the same questions recur: how Texans learn and work, what things cost them, and how the state's places and infrastructure hold together.
Affordability and consumer protection
Debt-collection lawsuits, small-business lending, court fines and fees, and data privacy at Texas Appleseed.
Water, energy, and utilities
Water and wastewater vulnerabilities at RAND, utility and emergency-management fieldwork at Princeton.
Transportation
Equitable decision-making across 32 state and regional transportation agencies, toll-debt policy in Harris County, and a survey experiment on support for transit.
Regional economic development
An economic development plan for the Brownsville metro, a site selection memo for the St. Louis region, and an economic baseline on regional divergence.
Public education and workforce
Analysis of every Texas public-school student, from classroom to career, at E3 Alliance and Texas 2036.
Cities and boundaries
How annexation, city limits, and extraterritorial jurisdictions shape civic participation and services across Texas.
Selected work
Four projects that show the range. See all projects, or browse the data I've worked with.
Debt-collection lawsuits in all 254 counties
A statewide pipeline joining court, Census, Federal Reserve, and Urban Institute data to track debt lawsuits and default judgments from 2019 to 2025.
A vetted catalog of statewide metrics
Statewide metrics, each traced to its source, so a policy organization's teams cite the same numbers.
Changing city limits
A 600,000-block dataset on how annexation reshapes who lives inside Texas cities and who votes, with field interviews in Brownsville and Harlingen.