During the pandemic, the public needed actional public data — but couldn’t find it. The urgent need for granular, real-time metrics for decision-making demonstrated major pain points in government data. In a time of crisis, private actors including USAFacts had to step in to collect metrics where the federal government couldn’t, aggregating data for local public health authorities to guide public policy.
Local data should easily flow up to the federal agencies to be provided to Congress in a timely manner to inform policymaking. Unfortunately, this was not the case.
