SEES:7000 Colloquium - Thursday, 9/10/26, 3:30pm, 255 MacBride Hall

Christopher Steven Marcum, Senior Advisor for Federal Data Policy (Federation of American Scientists)

"Federal Information Policy in a Time of Transformation"

Federal information and data policy determines how government data and scientific knowledge are collected, managed, and shared with the public (or not, as the case may be). Grounded in constitutional principles like the Census Clause, these policies establish that information is a source of power. Drawing on firsthand work within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the White House Office of Management and Budget, this talk examines how federal data policies are designed, defended, and implemented. Current shifts in the Executive Branch have dramatically, and rapidly, refactored the information policy landscape as we know it: since the 2025 inauguration, we've seen an accelerated artificial intelligence adoption policy while restricting public access to federal data and information, rolling back privacy safeguards, ending collections of critical research data, and altering of public data. This talk provides insights into the information and data policy sausagemaking in the federal government - including how policymaking efforts can fail - and what the public can do to inform how federal data is collected, used, and shared.

Christopher Steven Marcum, Ph.D. is a Senior Advisor for Federal Data Policy at the Federation of American Scientists where he brings expertise on information policy and data governance to the dataindex.us and essentialdata.us teams. He is a world leader in the open science movement and has written over 80 scholarly articles and thought pieces. He previously served in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as the Assistant Director for Open Science and Data Policy and as Senior Statistician and Senior Scientist in the White House Office of Management and Budget. Chris is also a Senior Fellow in the Center for Data Policy at the Data Foundation.