Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Congress recently approved funding for the Census Bureau to fortify its platform aligning the appropriate data, tools and researchers to facilitate evidence-building. Relevant program data are held in a variety of federal and state agencies.   A federated infrastructure permits data from many sources to be curated, integrated and provisioned in ways that foster credible and transparent evidence building and adheres to the rules and policies of the relevant data owners.  The platform being expanded at the Census Bureau addresses the key barriers to research access while permitting information providers to retain control of their data.

This paper describes the development of the infrastructure, together with the proposed approach to improve access to administrative records and technology to link and analyze big data. These efforts are designed not only to improve data for evidence building and policy analysis, but strengthen the data infrastructure that underlie federal statistics