The very first Smart Incentives blog article in 2013 was a short description of Sunshine Week. We explained that Sunshine Week is “a national initiative to promote a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information.”
This year, Sunshine Week ran from March 16-22. The goal of the initiative remains to “urge and spread awareness around open government and the needed push for ‘sunlight’.” Open government emphasizes transparency, participation, and accountability.
If you are reading this article, you probably know that incentive transparency and accountability are very important to us. The economic development field has come a long way since 2013 in making information available about state and local incentive use and outcomes. We have more reports, dashboards, and data portals than ever providing details on incentive transactions. Further, more states are conducting regular, high-quality evaluations of their incentive programs, yielding new insights into overall costs and benefits.
That’s the good news at the state and local level. Elected officials and economic development professionals deserve a lot of credit for putting in the work and making real strides in incentive transparency.The news at the federal level today is not good. A wave of headlines in recent weeks has highlighted how a variety of federal data sets are being taken offline or may no longer be fully supported. Budget cuts, staff reductions and dismissal of advisory committees are all matters of concern. The Association of Public Data Users (APDU) has been tracking developments and raising the alarm about what losing these data sources means to all of us. For example,
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) provide essential, nonpartisan data on the condition of education in the United States, including insight into student performance in math and reading, the number of STEM degrees awarded, and how our schools compare nationally and internationally. On Tuesday, March 11, 2025, over 1,000 staff from the Department of Education were laid off. This includes almost all staff from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which housed the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), one of the 13 principal federal statistical agencies.
Public and transparent education data helps hold teachers, schools, and administrators accountable for teaching our children. Education research is how we know what works in teaching our children. Without action, we, residents of the United States, risk losing our only comprehensive, national source of education data—and leave our knowledge of American education fragmented, and without standards, benchmarking, and guidance on protecting learner privacy.
Source: https://apdu.org/?p=5812775
In February, more than 230 national, state, and local organizations representing data users nationwide co-signed a letter calling attention to federal data sets that had been taken offline and urging restoration of the data to federal agency websites. While some of the data sets have be restored, APDU’s President also noted that when data sources about the population, workforce and economy are in flux, it sends “researchers, think tanks and businesses scrambling. You can’t always buy a replacement and what is sold may not be accurate or comprehensive. ”
Transparency is a basic principle of our federal statistical system, one which promotes trust between the data users and the agencies which collect the data. … Reliable, uninterrupted access to taxpayer-funded data is fundamental to open government, public trust, and evidence-based decision-making across all sectors of society.
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