Connecticut Among Dozen Least Federally-Dependent States, Analysis Finds

States receive federal aid for many reasons, from providing relief during natural disasters and health crises to funding improvements in education, transportation, infrastructure, healthcare and more.

As we’re all learning on a daily basis, federal funds have a tremendous impact on states nationwide, with the reverberations when those funds are abruptly discontinued being felt far and wide.

An analysis by the financial website WalletHub, released in recent weeks, found that some states receive much larger aid packages than others, but it’s not just the dollar amount that matters. They point out that it is important to contextualize the money flowing in by comparing it to things like what percentage of the state’s revenue it makes up and how much the federal government gets back through its taxes on the state’s residents.

In order to find out exactly how big the difference in federal dependence is from state to state, WalletHub compared the 50 states in terms of three key metrics: the return on taxes paid to the federal government, the share of federal jobs, and federal funding as a share of state revenue.

Connecticut ranked with the dozen states that are least federally dependent, according to the WalletHub analysis. 

The least federally dependent state is New Jersey, followed by California, Delaware, Massachusetts, Utah, Kansas, Washington, Illinois, Colorado, Iowa, Connecticut and Georgia. At the other end of the spectrum, the most federally dependent are Alaska, Kentucky, West Virginia, Mississippi, South Carolina, New Mexico and Louisiana.

Connecticut’s overall dependency ranking was 40th in the nation, and the state ranked 17th in the dependency of state residents and 45th in the state government’s dependency, a wide disparity.

Data used to create the ranking were collected earlier this year from the Internal Revenue Service, U.S. Census Bureau, USAspending.gov and Bureau of Labor Statistics.