USAFacts’ new campaign is showing voters that data rules everything around them

More than a year into President Donald Trump’s second term, the landscape of the country’s robust public data collection and publishing infrastructure has deteriorated. Federal reports on everything from billion-dollar climate disasters to food insecurity have been scrapped; thousands of workers involved in government data collection have lost their jobs. USAFacts, the not-for-profit focused on making government data more accessible and understandable, has been reacting in real time. And now, its new president Lauren Woodman, who took the helm on April 20, is looking to empower voters ahead of the midterms to call for better data infrastructure to inform genuinely impactful legislation It’s not only Trump putting all this information at risk. There’s also rise of AI, which highlights concerns about accuracy and data quality, and how people across the country access information. If federal data sets are difficult to access or not frequently updated, that means those AI systems aren’t surfacing the best information. It can feel like a daunting moment. USAFacts, a nonpartisan organization founded by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, sees it as a unique opportunity—one that could shape how involved Americans are in civic life. [Image: USAFacts] USAFacts is launching a campaign, called The Data We Depend On, to highlight the role data plays in everyday Americans’ lives and to call on Congress to invest in better public data infrastructure—and actually use that data in policymaking decisions. “This is one of those moments [that] is really going to be transformational,” Woodman says. If USAFacts can help update that public data infrastructure so that “every citizen has access to information about the way their community works,” she says, “that gives us the opportunity to shape what the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years looks like.” ‘Government data affects everything we do’ Before joining USAFacts, Woodman was the CEO of Datakind,