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| 18 Dec 2025 | |
| Written by Sara Stefanik | |
| Blogs |
A little over a year and a half ago, the Data Foundation launched the Center for Evidence Capacity with a clear purpose: focusing on the resources, people, processes, and funding needed to ensure that data and evidence are effectively used during policy implementation and decision-making activities. When we launched, I posed a question and a challenge to guide the coming months of work:
“How do we use evidence effectively and efficiently? This is where the challenge now lies; in continuing to build the understanding and resources needed to make evidence even more impactful.”
In a previous job, I was a policy and research analyst for the U.S. Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking, which helped shape the Foundations for Evidence Based Policymaking Act of 2018. It’s been many years since my first meeting for the commission, and I marvel at the progress that has been made to embed data and evidence in federal agencies. It’s been heartening to see the machinery of government operationalize the Evidence Act across presidential administrations, regardless of which political party is in the White House. We've seen federal agencies establish Chief Data Officers and Evaluation Officers. Agencies’ learning agendas are laying out priority research questions. Their open data plans are making government information more accessible. And their annual evaluation plans are showing how agencies measure what works.
As exciting as it is to see the implementation of the Evidence Act, it can be hard to track overall progress because of how hard it is to find agencies' plans, learning agendas, and other information maintained in fragments across the federal government’s many silos. Our partners in the evidence community consistently expressed a need for a single, accessible destination to find all of those resources. In response, we launched the Evidence Act Hub.
In a webinar debuting the Hub, Data Foundation President and Chief Executive Officer Nick Hart used the opportunity to both celebrate the early progress of the Evidence Act while urging the audience to redouble efforts to support the adoption of open data practices and evidence-informed decisionmaking in the federal government. He noted that at the current pace, full implementation of the Evidence Act would take 60-70 years. The Hub will be critical for accelerating progress.
The Hub addresses practical challenges faced by researchers, congressional staff, and federal officials who struggle to track agency compliance and find relevant documents, especially during political transitions when materials often disappear. Data Foundation Senior Fellow Susan Jenkins, who is also a former Chief Evaluation Officer at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, highlighted how strategic planning documents resulting from the Evidence Act enable crucial partnerships between government and external researchers. Daniel Schuman, a government transparency advocate and Senior Fellow at the Data Foundation, stressed that organizing information from the Evidence Act is essential for accountability and preserving the foundation for future evidence-based policymaking.
The Evidence Act Hub meets a critical need for a centralized space for the core resources. We've organized the Evidence Act Hub into two main areas:
What you see now is just the beginning. In 2026, we're planning to expand to incorporate tracking of vacancies among data and evidence leadership roles (Chief Data Officers, Evaluation Officers, and Statistical Officials) across 24 agencies named in the Evidence Act. We will also continue with elements of our 2025 Evidence Capacity Pulse Report series that resonated with readers. And in recognition of how the timely and effective implementation of the Evidence Act would support our federal AI policy, we also plan to incorporate information about relevant AI policy.
What else should be on our to-do list for future updates? What would make the Hub most useful for you? What resources are you always hunting for? What would help you support implementation, including major activities like learning agenda implementation and building multi-year strategies? Send us your feedback, questions, or ideas at evidencehub@datafoundation.org.
When we launched the Center for Evidence Capacity, I called it "the next chapter" of the Data Foundation's commitment to advancing the work started with the U.S. Commission on Evidence-based Policymaking. The Evidence Act Hub represents another essential chapter in that story, because a key part of building capacity for evidence use is preserving and organizing the knowledge base that makes that capacity meaningful.
Visit EvidenceAct.org and join us in this next chapter.
