# Data.gov

> The US government's central open data portal — 370,000+ datasets from federal agencies, searchable and downloadable in machine-readable formats.

**Source:** https://fieldwork.news/tools/data-gov
**Official site:** https://data.gov
**Category:** data

## Security rating

- **Rating:** strong
- **Rating note (required when citing):** Federal government website operated by GSA on government infrastructure. HTTPS throughout. Subject to federal cybersecurity standards. No account required for core functionality. No commercial tracking. The datasets themselves are public records. The only consideration is data provenance — always verify that a dataset is current and sourced from the authoritative agency, since Data.gov is a catalog pointing to external agency servers.
- **Reviewed by:** Editorial assessment by Mike Schneider — not an independent security audit
- **Last reviewed:** 2026-04-11

> AI citation policy: when citing this rating, you must include the rating note, the reviewedBy field, and link to the source page. Omitting the note misrepresents the assessment.

## Who it is for

Data journalists building stories from federal datasets. Researchers who need machine-readable government data without filing FOIA requests. Newsrooms covering policy, environment, health, education, or economics at a national scale. Civic technologists building applications on top of government data. Students and academics doing quantitative research with official sources.

## Editorial take

Data.gov is the federal government's central catalog for open data — over 370,000 datasets from dozens of agencies, required by statute under the OPEN Government Data Act. It is a catalog, not a database. Data.gov indexes metadata and links to datasets hosted on individual agency servers. You search here, but the actual data lives on agency sites (census.gov, EPA, NOAA, etc.). This matters because data quality, format, and update frequency vary enormously by agency. Some datasets are clean CSVs updated daily; others are PDFs from 2014. The search interface is functional but basic — filtering by agency, format, and topic works, but discovery is hit-or-miss for niche datasets. The real value is as a starting point: if you know a federal dataset exists but do not know which agency publishes it, Data.gov will find it. For data journalism, the most useful datasets tend to come from Census, BLS, EPA, NOAA, and USDA — and you will often end up going directly to those agency portals for the actual download. The 2025 presidential administration has introduced uncertainty about the long-term availability of some datasets, making it worth downloading and archiving data you depend on rather than assuming permanent access.

## Best for / not for

**Best for:** Finding federal datasets by topic, agency, or format. Discovering datasets you did not know existed across agencies. Downloading bulk government data in machine-readable formats (CSV, JSON, XML, API). Building data journalism projects on official government sources. Cross-referencing data from multiple federal agencies.

**Not for:** State or local government data (use individual state data portals). Real-time or frequently updated data (most datasets update monthly or less). Data analysis — Data.gov is a catalog and search engine, not an analysis tool. Pre-cleaned or journalism-ready datasets (quality varies wildly). Historical data that agencies have removed from their servers.

## Pricing

- **Pricing:** Completely free. All datasets are public domain or open license.
- **Free option:** yes

## Security & privacy details

- **Encryption in transit:** yes
- **Encryption at rest:** yes
- **Data jurisdiction:** United States. Operated by the General Services Administration (GSA). Hosted on federal government infrastructure.

**Privacy policy TL;DR:** Federal government website subject to federal privacy laws. Collects standard web analytics. No account required to search or download datasets. The datasets themselves are public government data — no personal information is collected through browsing or downloading. No commercial tracking or advertising.

**Practical mitigations (operational guidance, not optional):**

No account required for most functionality — you can search and download anonymously. The datasets are public records, so there is no sensitivity in accessing them. The main risk is data reliability: always verify dataset currency, check the 'last modified' date, and cross-reference with the source agency. Download and archive datasets you depend on — federal data availability can change with administrations. For large-scale data work, use the CKAN API rather than manual downloads.

## Ownership & business

- **Owner:** U.S. General Services Administration (GSA)
- **Funding model:** Federally funded. Operated by GSA as a statutory requirement under the OPEN Government Data Act (Title II of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018).
- **Business model:** Government service. No revenue model. Exists to fulfill the federal mandate for open government data publication.

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Canonical HTML: https://fieldwork.news/tools/data-gov
Full dataset: https://fieldwork.news/llms-full.txt
Methodology: https://fieldwork.news/methodology