The Resilience Imperative: Building Evidence-Based Infrastructure Through Community Trust

In June 2025, Rutgers University, alongside the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, facilitated a 2-day forum on effective design and implementation of data dashboards. Alongside experts from across the country, participants from the Data Foundation and other nonprofit, academic, and governmental entities discussed how to build and sustain data dashboards that are not just functional, but truly useful and used by communities and decisionmakers. The incredible insights will influence the Data Foundation's work in coming months.

Part of the discussion focused on data infrastructure—specifically, how to build systems that are both resilient and trustworthy in a rapidly changing national landscape. Rather than viewing current changes as obstacles, another lens is to see them as opportunities to build something better.

The Reality of Change

Based on the Data Foundation's Evidence Capacity Pulse Reports, we can also be honest about what we're seeing that affects changing data infrastructure: 10-20% workforce reductions across federal statistical agencies, structural changes to how administrative records are managed, and real impacts on data availability for certain assets. Just this week, we learned about the administration's announcement regarding the consolidation of the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Bureau of Economic Analysis—an idea that's actually been years in the making. As an aside, it's worth noting that Puerto Rico is often excluded from models and statistics at these agencies, despite representing a significant portion of the U.S. population.

But here's where a child's perspective on the world becomes instructive: children see disruption and immediately ask "what can we build now?"

Innovation Through Necessity

The federal statistical system has struggled with innovation for decades. Now innovation is becoming a forced function. Many administrative data systems that are being consolidated from existing programs needed modernization anyway. This moment is pushing us to ask better questions: What data do we actually need? Who should be collecting it? How can we make it more relevant and responsive to communities? Can we reduce the volume of data collected to focus limited resources on the highest priorities?

In real-time, communities are stepping up to tell their own data stories, new collaborations are forming led by departing federal employees bringing their expertise to new settings, and academic-nonprofit partnerships are proving more agile than traditional models.

Three Key Opportunities

Here are three potential improvements for the data ecosystem:

• Resilience through diversity: Instead of single points of failure, establish more and new distributed networks where multiple organizations share responsibility for data stewardship. This establishes an antifragile design that can sustain access and quality across time and change for the most critical infrastructure components.
   
• Trust through transparency and participation: An old-fashioned data model said "trust us because we're official" or "trust us because we are government." But there will always be segments of the population that are unconvinced, rightfully so. New models for enhancing trusted data systems emphasize an approach that says "trust us because you can see our methods and participate in quality assurance." Community-driven validation with participatory processes from users may build stronger credibility than top-down authority ever could.
   
• Adaptive capacity: Systems being built now use modern APIs, open standards, and modular architecture that can evolve rather than break when needs change. Enabling integration of data assets that can not only support AI but be improved by AI to emphasize strategic areas for quality improvements offers a path for more efficient data practice.

Community Investment is Key

During the forum, participants discussed the need for community investment in data infrastructure, including federated models where multiple stakeholders share costs and benefits. The data dashboard community is uniquely positioned to support this strategy—and many data experts are already integrating multiple data sources, enabling openness of data, devising strategies for improving quality, serving diverse users, and solving real problems for communities across the country.

Addressing the inefficiencies of the current data ecosystem can lead to improvements without restarting everything. The question isn't whether the country can "replace" aspects of the capacity and ecosystem that are changing, the real question is can our systems be bold and innovative enough to build a better ecosystem.

By designing data systems for resilience, transparency, and community ownership or engagement, systems can survive change and thrive because of it.

NICK HART, PH.D. is the President and CEO of the Data Foundation.