| What: | The Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act |
| When: | Passed by Congress and signed into law in January 2019 |
| Why it matters: | The Evidence Act required agencies to name chief data officers focused on improving data quality, data management, data governance and data stewardship. |
Politics
How the Evidence Act pushed agencies to make data a strategic asset
The Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act set agencies down a path of using an enormous volume of government data to carry out their missions in new and better ways.
Under the Evidence Act, passed by Congress in January 2019, agencies are to treat data as a strategic asset to improve how they carry out mission-critical decisions. And the departments are to hire people to lead these efforts, chief data officers and chief evaluation officers.
Nick Hart, president and CEO of the Data Foundation, said each administration has taken its own approach to implementing the Evidence Act and implementing policies that further the legislation’s goals.
“When it was passed, I think there were these really ambitious goals of what would be accomplished,” Hart said. “Perhaps not surprisingly, there have been a lot of changes in implementation, including across the administrations of the executive branch, but there have been incredible moments of progress also in achieving steps toward that vision.”
The legislation also codified many recommendations from the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking, a bipartisan advisory group created by Congress.
Robert Shea, a former associate director of the Office of Management and Budget under the George W. Bush administration, now co-founder of GovNavigators, said the Evidence Act pushed agencies to make better use of their data — but he said more progress is needed to meet the legislation’s goals.
“It’s changed a lot, but not enough,” Shea said. “The Evidence Act accelerated the governance and infrastructure around the collection of that evidence. We’ve got evidence officers; we’ve got chief data officers; we’ve got chief statistical officials. Of course, we’ve got learning agendas and evaluation plans. Those are all great, but what we don’t yet have is the body of evidence that we really need to make decisions.”
Making data a strategic asset
The Federal Data Strategy launched by the first Trump administration focused agencies on making their data a “strategic asset.”
“Making data a strategic asset means that we’re recognizing the value of the information and then actually using that information over time to inform decisions,” Hart said.
The Evidence Act also required agencies to name chief data officers focused on improving data quality, data management, data governance and data stewardship.
“Ultimately, that goal was to make better use of the data that we’re already collecting,” Hart said. “By and large, chief data officers have made phenomenal progress in the years since the Evidence Act was passed, and that’s a large credit to the Trump administration’s Federal Data Strategy, providing some guidance and support that came directly from the White House.”
These data management steps were a crucial step to understanding what agencies could do with their data.
“Sometimes you need gold-standard, highest quality information, for example, to count the population and understand the economy in the United States. But there are other cases where we might just need basic details about individuals’ benefits in order to make administrative decisions, like are you eligible to receive this particular benefit from government, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or the Women, Infants and Children (WIC)?” Hart said.
Under the Biden administration, agencies developed learning agendas for the first time. These documents, Hart said, are “intended to be a roadmap to identifying what data you need and what data you have, and then also being able to generate evidence that’s useful for decision-makers.”
“The fact that those even exist, and agencies went through the exercise — which was very difficult to do the first time — is an incredible success story,” he added.
The Biden administration expected agencies to back up future budget requests with evidence and program performance metrics — or at least provide a plan to gather these insights.
Former OMB Director Shalanda Young, in June 2021 guidance to agencies, said the learning agendas required by the Evidence Act should address a few key questions:“What is it that our agency needs to do, what do we need to know to do it best, and what do we wish we knew?”
“The intent of the learning agendas was to publicize the big questions agencies want answers to, so that, to the extent they’re not answering themselves, stakeholders, evaluators, researchers, could conduct their own independent research that contributes to answering those questions,” Shea said. “The intent, really, was to enlist the community in answering those questions.”
Making data open by default
The Evidence Act also required agencies to take steps to make data sets open by default, except for cases where doing so is prohibited by law.
Under the Biden administration, OMB issued guidance on agencies granting “tiered” access to their data to researchers and other stakeholders, based on the sensitivity of that information.
Former U.S. Chief Statistician Nancy Potok said OMB’s guidance encouraged agencies to share more of their data in situations where permission to do so has been unclear.
“In the past, it’s been kind of binary — it’s either open or it’s protected — and now we’re asking agencies to make a lot more of their data open. Well, this isn’t like an on/off switch,” Potok said in November 2019.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order in his second term, ordering agencies to stop fraud, waste and abuse through inter-agency data-sharing and “eliminating information silos.”
Following that executive order, unions and nonprofit groups have filed many lawsuits challenging the Department of Government Efficiency’s access to a wide array of sensitive government data sets.
Hart said it remains an ongoing challenge for agencies to determine which high-value data assets should be shared.
“We have not established clear vehicles for identifying high-value data in the United States. I think this will be a really important question as we go forward —how we better identify those data assets that should be open,” he said.
OMB was years delayed in issuing guidance for the Open Government Data Act, a portion of the Evidence Act. That guidance — meant to make government data “open by default” — was only published in February 2025, years after the law’s enactment. Shea said OMB’s delayed guidance hindered implementation.
“That delays things. It also signals some significant disagreement about governance. I think there were some unproductive debates about where certain functions or positions should reside,” he said.
The full impact of OMB’s guidance hasn’t been felt just yet. Implementation began this summer.
“It’s a great credit to the chief data officers and the data ecosystem for really moving forward in recent years in the absence of that guidance. But we needed that guidance to have consistency in some of the activities across the federal infrastructure,” Hart said. “People are now talking in a way that we have never seen before, about how to make data useful to generate evidence, and that manifested in some cultural changes in agencies that requires people to be there, it requires some capacity to do the work. But at the end of the day, I think it’s been a really big step forward.”
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