NextGov: America's digital infrastructure belongs to you

Jessie Mahr and Kameron Kerger co-wrote an Op-Ed in Next Govt: America's digital infrastructure belongs to you, in collaboration with Katie Hoeberling, Michelle Cheripka, Jonathan Gilmour and Matt Price.

Government tools and datasets belong to you. American tax dollars funded the data collection, the tool development and the work of the agency staff who used their skills and experience to develop the policies and programs that tools delivered. The broad accessibility of these tools has helped inform governance decisions at federal, state and local levels. We use this data to make sense of the land we live on, the air we breathe, the water we drink. We use weather information to plan our daily commutes and weekend plans and climate data to predict storms, floods and wildfires. For the government to remove this information is to steal from us. And not just the data itself, but every choice we could have made with it.