The budget proposal addresses core priorities from the Biden campaign and earlier policy announcements from the Administration, including for economic recovery, climate change, and equity.
As the volume of cross-border transactions continues to increase, the risk of fraud and criminal activity rises in unison. To combat this, organizations must be able to establish a stakeholder’s legal identity in order to facilitate trust and transparency in transactions worldwide.
The Data Foundation’s Open Data Standards Task Force has issued recommendations that highlight areas where the federal government can take steps in 2021 to immediately institute improvements to financial regulatory data.
The response to COVID-19 using data around the globe suggests that, if societies want to combat future pandemics effectively, it is necessary, to employ new approaches to data governance. This will mean using evidence (data) to lead behavioral change.
One way to tame a mess, whether it is a child’s room, a woodshop or a swamp of data, is to have a place to put everything. Data standards do this for data. More importantly, they can do this for generative AI systems, allowing us human beings to address many of the legitimate concerns that have arisen since the widespread release of large language models (LLMs) and their host generative AI (Gen AI) systems like OpenAI ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot™, and Google Bard™.
March 20, 2024: Written Statement from Nicholas (Nick) Hart, Ph.D., President & CEO of the Data Foundation For the Committee on House Administration, Subcommittee on Modernization. Hearing on Legislative Proposals to Support Modernizing the Congressional Research Service and the Use of Federal Data.
The dream of purely objective, data-driven decisions may be alluring, but the reality is more nuanced. Vast amounts of data in federal databases, whether from surveys, records, or health reports, stem from someone's lived experience. These experiences are translated into ones and zeros, and skillful analysis can transform them back into meaningful evidence.
Stakeholder engagement improves the quality and responsiveness of government processes and resources, including activities like formulating and fulfilling federal evaluation plans and learning agendas. The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) emphasizes the role of engagement with key stakeholders in evidence-building activities (see Circular A-11, M-19-23, M-21-27), yet engagement is still limited in practice for many agencies.
During a joint virtual event hosted by the Data Foundation and Results for America, participants learned about discrete examples which highlighted the importance of effective engagement from practitioners and resources available to improve engagement moving forward.
Congress passed the Financial Data Transparency Act (FDTA) in late 2022, a long-standing policy priority for the Data Foundation. When enacted, “covered agencies” in the financial regulatory community initiated a rapid implementation process, including reports to Congress from the Securities and Exchange Commission (e.g. Regarding Public and Internal Use of Machine-Readable Data for Corporate Disclosures).
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Dec. 19, 2023 – The Data Foundation, in collaboration with Deloitte, unveiled the 2023 Federal Chief Data Officer (CDO) Survey, which found that federal CDOs made much progress advancing data culture, governance, and analytics goals, but still experience consistent challenges accessing adequate resources, staff skills, and authorities.
The Senate HELP Committee's draft legislation, the Advancing Research and Education Act (AREA), aims to revamp the ESRA and improve the research and data infrastructure of the US education system. The bill aligns with recommendations from the Data Foundation, including measures for faster surveys on new educational topics and enhancing the SLDS grant program. The Data Foundation is working with stakeholders to improve the national data ecosystem and urges the Senate to promptly consider this bill.
Shortly after enactment of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act (Evidence Act) in 2019, the Data Foundation launched an ambitious initiative we named govDATAx. This summit aimed to bring the data and evidence communities together for a comprehensive discussion, fostering collaboration among the data science, statistics, privacy, evaluation, and analysis communities. The govDATAx summit embodies one of our organization’s core values – radical collaboration.
On September 26, the Data Foundation held an important public forum focused on efforts to strengthen public trust in federal statistics. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has proposed a new regulation to codify principles of integrity for federal statistical agencies.
COMMENTARY: A proposed regulation known as the “Public Trust Rule” may have sweeping implications if implemented well, garnering trust from the American public that their data will be protected by the government and potentially resulting in greater trust in government itself. Of course this is ambitious, but when it comes to improving public trust in the United States, it is time for ambition and action.
