Federal Data Excellence Program Federal DataExcellence Program Defining and celebrating exceptional federal data practices Federal data offers insights into nearly every aspect of our society, from the strength of the job market and the economy to the health care needs of veterans and the impact of natural disasters. This data has been a cornerstone of modern and effective government. Making government data widely available empowers leaders to make better decisions, enables more agency accountability and, ultimately, improves the public’s trust in government. Now more than ever, it is critical for agencies to ensure government data remains available to the public. In 2025, the Trump administration reshaped the operations and management of the federal government, leading to staffing and funding changes across many agencies. Federal data collection and dissemination in some domains also transformed, with some products being canceled or paused. The Federal Data Excellence Awards program spotlights the transformative power of accessible, transparent government data and celebrates agency efforts to improve federal data practices. The initiative, now in its second year, is a collaboration between the Partnership for Public Service and USAFacts, whose mission is to inform public knowledge on critical issues by making government data easier to access and comprehend. In 2025, the Partnership and USAFacts reviewed our criteria for assessing federal data products and incorporated insights from federal data leaders. We held discussions with data scientists, evaluators and program officers from agencies across government, including the departments of Commerce, Homeland Security, State, the Treasury and Veterans Affairs, the Federal Communications Commission, the Government Accountability Office and the Inter-American Foundation. Through these activities, we continued to build a community of practice, learn about changes and challenges in the federal open-data landscape and identified future possible refinements for our assessment tool, the basis for choosing the Federal Data Excellence Awards winners. Our Partner USAFacts is a not-for-profit, nonpartisan civic organization that makes government data easy for the public to access and understand. Employing a team of researchers, analysts, statisticians and communications professionals, the organization gathers, examines and synthesizes data on U.S. spending, revenue, demographics and policy outcomes to help ground public debate in facts. Visit the USAFacts Federal Data Excellence page where you can download the complete set of Federal Data Excellence standards and a quick reference guide, as well as learn more about how the program came to be. 2025 Winners Administrative Product Award Honors products that share data collected through agency programs or the delivery of public services and did not rely on geospatial or mapping data. BankFind Suite – Summary of DepositsFederal Deposit Insurance Corporation The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s BankFind Suite enables users to learn more about the banks and saving institutions that we expect to safely hold our deposits. A key portion of the suite is the annual Summary of Deposits, which allows financial experts and data analysts to gain key insights into the health and competitiveness of the U.S. banking sector by examining trends in the value of deposits held by banks and saving institutions, their growth and market share distribution. The data is largely reported by insured banking institutions as a part of the FDIC’s required annual Summary of Deposits Survey. A new user might find the language and methods used in the financial sector difficult to understand, which BankFind Suite attempts to bridge by providing a series of tutorials and explanations. In 2025, a section specifically on the Summary of Deposits was added to the Help page. Included are links to the resources provided to the banks to complete the survey, allowing data users to learn more about that data collection process. The team managing BankFind Suite also tried to make its data both machine-friendly and human-readable in the way they visualize and organize data, as well as the modes available for downloading data such as the robust API. See the product Geospatial Product Award Honors products that share administrative data with geospatial aspects through geographic formats or maps. Landscape Change Monitoring SystemForest Service – U.S. Department of Agriculture The Landscape Change Monitoring System has used remote sensing data to map landscape changes in vegetation cover and land use across the United States since 1985, allowing users to track wildfires impacts and recovery, monitor local ecologies for climate- and human-caused damage and inform community land use plans. Produced by the USDA Forest Service Field Services and Innovation Center’s Geospatial Office, the change monitoring system is also supported by the U.S. Geological Survey, NASA and the academic community, providing land managers and scientists with the best available mapping resources. This resource has a strong, clearly documented basis of scientific literature that clearly explains and backs up the methodology used by the creation team. Those papers, along with many other aspects of the system, are easy to find on a well-designed and accessible website. In addition to downloading data for offline use, users have access to several dedicated online tools that explore different aspects of the data. This includes selectively comparing specific years or creating composite timelapses and animated visualizations of map sections to more clearly communicate changes over time to a wider audience. See the product Statistical Product Award Honors products that share data collected through the analysis of surveys, scientific studies or other research methods. Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Household Component Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality – Department of Health and Human Services The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Household Component uses information collected from a sample of households to estimate how Americans access and pay for medical care. The federal government, as well as state and local policymakers, use these estimates to better understand trends in health insurance coverage and how different demographic groups, like young people or the elderly, receive health care. The estimates also provide a window into opioid usage and the financial impact of chronic health conditions like asthma or diabetes. This resource features a dashboard that visualizes useful and commonly in-demand cuts of the data and provides direct downloads and citation data. The website also includes a dedicated section of data files and codebooks accompanied by a detailed explanation of the survey methodology. Finally, the site offers guidance and resources based on users—such as researchers, policymakers or the media—and a platform that makes it easier to access and search through a library of existing publications that draw on the data. See the product Honorable Mention: Static Product Recognizes exceptional products that do not have an interactive component such as a dashboard or data explorer. National Fire Incident Reporting SystemU.S. Fire Administration The National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) was designed to allow fire departments, emergency medical service (EMS) agencies and fire marshals across the country share data on incidents which they have been called to respond. Since the initial iteration of this reporting program was developed in the 1970s by the U.S. Fire Administration, the data on fire and other incidents was used by local and state governments to set priorities and allocate resources, inform the development of fire prevention policies and safety education programs and help industries and federal agencies identify hazards to make our infrastructure, buildings and consumer products safer. While not featuring an interactive component, the NFIRS data tables were made more accessible through well-organized web pages that explain the coding and reporting systems from both a data-user and data-reporter perspective. They also contain in-depth discussions on the quality of the reported data monitored by the National Fire Data Center. Aside from recognizing the quality of the product, we are also honoring the long history of this program as it officially sunset on January 31, 2026. It has been replaced by the new National Emergency Response Information System (NERIS) jointly developed by the U.S. Fire Administration, the DHS Sciences and Technology Directorate and the Fire Safety Research Institute. See the product OpenFEMA Data Archive How Winners Were Selected We considered 43 data products for the 2025 awards, using a rigorous evaluation process to select the winner in each category. We analyzed the topics and characteristics of the nominated products to create meaningful award categories that covered a wide range of products and had enough entries to make them competitive. Please see our methodology for more information on how we created the assessment rubric and judged products. The State of Federal Data Products in 2025 To better understand how the 2025 government shutdown and decisions made related to the federal workforce and data priorities may have impacted federal data products, the Partnership for Public Service and USAFacts revisited the 55 products nominated in 2024. Many were still accessible as of the end of 2025, but we found that a significant number of those accessible products experienced disruptions to their data releases, reduced their update frequency or were experiencing reduced functionality when they were examined. Read our Report Here Take The Assessment Curious how your data product measures up? Take the assessment! Explore our interactive rubric to discover opportunities for improvement and learn how to make your product more accessible to the public. Get started Methodology Assessment Development Process Experts from USAFacts, the Partnership and several federal agencies developed criteria to assess federal data products. Data scientists, evaluators, analysts and program officers from the departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security, the Census Bureau, the Office of Management and Budget and the National Science Foundation provided feedback on the criteria’s clarity, validity and weighting. Data Products Collection In the fall of 2025, the Partnership and USAFacts solicited nominations from federal employees and their own staff who work frequently with federal data. Together, we assessed 43 data products. We used the following eligibility criteria for data products nominated by federal employees: A nominator of a data product had to be a federal employee and use a federal email address, but products built, in whole or in part, by a federal contractor were considered. The nominators did not have to be a member of the agency or team that produced the data product. The data product and underlying data had to be managed by a federal agency but did not have to be composed solely of federal data. The data product had to be accessible by a publicly available link and have no restricted access requirements. Assessment Process Two program staff members—one from USAFacts and one from the Partnership—served as evaluators who reviewed the products independently, using an assessment rubric and then worked together to determine a final score for each submission. When the graders could not agree on a score, a third grader broke the tie. Weighting and Scoring Each criterion in the assessment was scored on a binary zero-to-one scale. If the element or feature was present, one point was given. If it was not present, no points were given. Partial points were not given. Each criterion was weighted to reflect the reality that data product features vary in complexity and their impact on the user experience. Weights were determined based on feedback from federal data leaders. For more detailed information on our methodology and the full assessment rubric, see USAFacts. 2025 Nominations Have Closed Do you know of a federal data product—anything powered by data, like a map, a series of data tables, a report, a dashboard or another interactive tool—that presents information in a user-friendly way? Nominate it for a Federal Data Excellence Award. Stay tuned for more information on the 2026 nomination process. Want to join our growing community of federal data leaders? 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