The Integrity of Public Access to Federal Data: Evaluating Disruptions to Open Government Data, 2025-2026

The Integrity of Public Access to Federal Data

Open government data is a cornerstone of transparency, productivity, accountability, and evidence-based policymaking in the United States (US) and abroad. Open government data enables researchers, journalists, policymakers, and the public to monitor government performance, accelerate discovery, evaluate programs, and safeguard democratic institutions. These data represent an important, non-excludable and non-rivalrous, public good. Yet over the past decade, open government data has faced growing threats, including program disruption from funding shortfalls, political interference, and an erosion of trust government.

In the last year alone political interference led to the manipulation, suppression, or outright removal of federal data assets on topics ranging from climate change, to economics, to LGBTQ+ issues, to public health. This interference threatens to undermine public trust in federal data by limiting the ability of civil society to hold government accountable, eroding the trust businesses hold in federal statistical data, and revoking access to one-of-a-kind data resources to researchers for innovation and discovery.

This report provides an analysis of the integrity of public access to federal open government data assets during the disruptions to the federal data ecosystem during 2025 and early 2026. Here, data integrity is defined as the “maintenance of, and the assurance of, data accuracy and consistency over its entire life-cycle”, of which public access to open government data assets is assumed to be essential. The report clarifies the scale and mechanisms of data disruptions, discusses specific threats to data integrity, highlights exemplar cases of data disruption from federal agencies, and delivers a transparent methodology for reproducing auditing routines used in this assessment. The evidence used in this report was derived from multiple sources, including news reports, academic literature, materials from civic society and government oversight organizations, interviews with experts, archives, and government sources.