Every day, millions of Americans rely on federal data—often without realizing it. From checking the weather forecast to planning retirement, from tracking disease outbreaks to measuring economic growth, government datasets power decisions that shape our daily lives and drive billions in economic activity.
Data for the People! is a new podcast from the Data Foundation that shines a light on this essential but often overlooked infrastructure. Hosted by J.B. Wogan, each episode features conversations with leaders from the public and private sectors about the national datasets that belong to the American people and the policy changes in Washington that could enable—or limit—their use.
David Hayes on Making Climate and Environmental Data More Useful for Decisionmakers
Host [Host Name] interviews David Hayes, an attorney and legal scholar, about making climate and environmental data more useful for decisionmakers.
27 Aug 2026TRANSCRIPT
Building Government That Works Together: Natalie Evans Harris on Data, AI, and Putting People First
Host Emily M. Drake interviews Natalie Evans Harris, Chief Data Officer for Maryland, about building collaborative government through data infrastructure and AI.
30 Jul 2026TRANSCRIPT
Better Data, Stronger Communities: Using Data to Build Resilience in a Changing Climate
Leanne Spaulding interviews Emily Dhingra, Kathie Dello, and Paula Pagniez on leveraging data to build community resilience against climate change.
9 Jul 2026
Funding the Future of Public Data
Send us Fan Mail This episode of Data for the People! shares highlights from the Data Foundation’s 2026 Data Summit, focusing on philanthropy’s role in supporting a stronger shared data ecosystem. Data Foundation President and CEO Nick Hart moderates a conversation with Daniella Lowenberg of the Data Funders Collaborative and Rachel Snyderman of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Lowenberg describes the Collaborative’s priorities, including modernizing state and local data infrastructure, ...
19 May 2026
Taka Ariga on Using AI to Combat Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in Public Programs
Send us Fan Mail In the latest episode of Data for the People!, Data Foundation Senior Fellow Taka Ariga discusses the prospect of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance government efforts to prevent fraud and other types of improper payments in public benefit programs. Ariga was the first Chief Data Scientist at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) where he also directed GAO’s Innovation Lab. He later served as the Chief Data Officer (CDO) and Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer at ...
20 Apr 2026
The Case for Standardizing the Way We Report Climate and Environmental Data
Send us Fan Mail This episode of Data for the People! explores a problem with climate and environmental data that burdens public agencies and the private sector: Currently, federal and state regulators have a host of different reporting requirements for climate and environmental data, such as data on greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, the data get reported in multiple ways to multiple regulatory entities, which hampers the public's ability to use the data while making it hard to monitor t...
1 Apr 2026
Brett Loper on Using Data Tools to Prevent Improper Payments
Send us Fan Mail On the latest episode of Data for the People!, Brett Loper discusses policy options for using data tools to prevent improper payments in federal benefit programs. The options appear in a new report produced by the Data Foundation and our Fiscal Intelligence Initiative, with support from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Loper is currently the Executive Vice President for Policy at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation after serving in a number of senior roles in the White H...
13 Mar 2026
Claire McKay Bowen on the Role Federal Statistics Play in our Daily Lives
Send us Fan Mail On the latest episode of Data for the People!, Claire McKay Bowen discusses the role federal statistics play in our daily lives, strategies for communicating the value of government data, and her vision for the future of data sharing and data privacy. Bowen is a data privacy expert who is currently a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, an adjunct professor at Stonehill College, and a board member with the Association of Public Data Users (APDU). Last year, she co-auth...
25 Feb 2026
NORC's David Dutwin on How Americans Use and Think about Federal Data
Send us Fan Mail The latest episode of Data for the People! features David Dutwin, executive director and senior vice president of AmeriSpeak, a panel-based research platform from NORC at the University of Chicago. Dutwin joins the show to discuss Americans’ trust in federal statistics, science, institutions, and one another. Learn more about the American Statistical Association's The Nation's Data at Risk: 2025 Report, which includes analyses of AmeriSpeak survey panel data on Americans' per...
30 Jan 2026
Bill Hoagland on Restoring Public Trust in Government Data
Send us Fan Mail In the inaugural episode of Data for the People!, J.B. Wogan (host) and Nick Hart (President and CEO of the Data Foundation) discuss the Data Foundation's mission to promote open data and evidence-informed policymaking. They introduce Bill Hoagland, Senior Vice President at the Bipartisan Policy Center, who talks about the federal government's use of data and evidence for decision-making and strategies to rebuild public trust in government and scientific institutions. Hoaglan...
30 Jan 2026
Trailer: Data for the People!
Send us Fan Mail Every day, millions of Americans rely on federal data—often without realizing it. From checking the weather forecast to planning retirement, from tracking disease outbreaks to measuring economic growth, government datasets power decisions that shape our daily lives and drive billions in economic activity. Welcome to Data for the People!, a new podcast from the Data Foundation that shines a light on this essential but often overlooked infrastructure. Hosted by J.B. Wogan, each...
Inside a recent episode
Building Government That Works Together: Natalie Evans Harris on Data, AI, and Putting People First
Published 27 Aug 2026 · Transcript excerpt
[…] So you think about that. What we had to do on the back end was make sure that this data was interoperable enough so that when it came in, we could do that eligibility determination for each of those agencies' benefits that they deliver, so each of those programs. But for the front end, all the constituent knows is I've applied and I'm getting access to a multitude of benefits. that to me is what being data driven and heart led is all about it's not about dashboards and websites but it's really about how do we use data to help families keep heat in the winter to not worry about food insecurity the architecture behind that the api gateways the matching logics the governance agreements That's what we build, but we're building that to scale across the agencies instead of taking the approach of building it for each agency individually. […]
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