OPEN Government Data Act

Open, Public, Electronic, and Necessary Government Data Act or the OPEN Government Data Act

This bill requires government data assets made available by federal agencies (excluding the Government Accountability Office, the Federal Election Commission, and certain other government entities) to be published as machine-readable data. When not otherwise prohibited by law, the data must be available: (1) in an open format that does not impede use or reuse and that has standards maintained by a standards organization; and (2) under open licenses with a legal guarantee that the data be available at no cost to the public with no restrictions on copying, publication, distribution, transmittal, citing, or adaptation.

If published government data assets are not available under an open license, the data must be considered part of the worldwide public domain. Agencies may engage with outside organizations and citizens to leverage public data assets for innovation in public and private sectors.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) must oversee the completeness and public availability of an enterprise data inventory that agencies must develop to account for any data assets that they create, collect, control, or maintain.

Agencies must: (1) make their enterprise data inventories available to the public on Data.gov, and (2) designate a point of contact to assist the public and respond to complaints about adherence to open data requirements. For privacy, security, confidentiality, or regulatory reasons, agencies may maintain a nonpublic portion of their inventories.

The OMB's Office of Electronic Government is renamed the Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer.

Agencies are not required to publish notices in the Federal Register about information collection that is focused on gathering input about the performance of, or public satisfaction with, the agency's service if the collection is: (1) online and electronic, (2) voluntary with no benefit to the provider of the information, and (3) an extremely low burden that is typically completed in five minutes or less. But agencies must publish representative summaries of such information collections.

The General Services Administration must maintain a single public interface online as a point of entry dedicated to sharing open government data with the public.

The Chief Information Officers Council must work with the Office of Government Information Services and the Office of Science and Technology Policy to promote data interoperability and comparability of data assets across the government.

The OMB must assess the extent of each agency's use of data assets to support decisionmaking, cost savings, and performance.

Written by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. All summary versions on Congress.gov