Government Decisionmaking for the Information Age
Using Better Data to Help Solve Our Health, Safety, and Environmental Problems
Our ability to address health, safety and environmental problems could be greatly enhanced through better information. Currently, there are large unanswered questions that make effective policymaking more difficult. What environmental contaminants are acutely dangerous to children? How does the interaction of multiple toxic substances affect human health? What neighborhoods are most imperiled by polluted air and water? What is the air quality inside American workplaces and industrial facilities?
Information-age technologies give us the power to answer these questions and bring our problems into focus as never before. We are now able to instantaneously collect, aggregate, analyze, and disseminate enormous volumes of information. What’s missing is a coordinated, comprehensive effort to harness these technologies for more effective, data-driven policymaking. Accordingly, we recommend the building of an information infrastructure for stronger health, safety, and environmental protection.
The Plan:
1. Modernize data collection to address critical gaps in our knowledge. We lack basic data about some of our most pressing health, safety, and environmental problems. We should invest in cutting edge information gathering technologies, such as wireless sensor networks, which allow for cost-effective real-time monitoring of just about anything in the physical environment—from air and water quality to the health of ecosystems to traffic flow to the condition of critical infrastructure, such as roads and bridges and the electrical grid.
2. Manage and disseminating data in a way that allows for easy analysis. Information collected by federal agencies is seldom linked together and made available through the Internet. This makes it more difficult for government decisionmakers, researchers, and the public to evaluate cumulative risks within communities, spot trends over time, establish correlations between corporate activity and health effects, and assess the performance of government programs and regulated entities. We should push to integrate data management and dissemination across federal agencies to facilitate analysis.
3. Analyze data to drive decisionmaking. We should develop systems to analyze data to set priorities, measure program performance, and guide effective policymaking. Crucial to this are comparative rankings that place health, safety, and environmental dangers in a context that is easily understood to policymakers and the public alike. For example, drawing on the computational power of computers, we should identify top threats to children’s health, and then rank the communities whose children are in most peril, so that we can target our resources where they are needed most.
For more information: Moving Government Decisionmaking Into the Information Age
The Expert : Reece Rushing
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