Government increasingly faces challenges—and is expectedto achieve results—that reach across agency and programboundaries. These challenges include issues such as climatechange, food safety, disaster response, and cyber security.The traditional approach has been to use agencies and programsto address the nation’s challenges. While this approachhelps ensure accountability, more frequently it tends not toproduce results.  

By making data more widely available—even if only within the federal government—it will empower a wide range of users to more routinely make fact-based decisions. This has the effect of pushing analysis and decision making down to the front line instead of to staff offices. This could be the beginning of a new performance agenda, which author W. David Stephenson calls “democratizing data.” Support for making such data available more broadly to the public is being pushed by advocacy groups such as the Sunlight Foundation.