In October 2022, the Advisory Committee on Data for Evidence Building (ACDEB) released its Year 2 Report to the Office of Management and Budget. The report is a comprehensive blueprint for the National Secure Data Service (NSDS), envisioning an evidence-building ecosystem where researchers can unlock insights from sensitive government data without compromising privacy.
The ACDEB was established under the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 and is charged with recommending how federal data can be used more effectively to inform policy. Its Year 2 report outlined more than 40 recommendations across six focus areas to guide the NSDS, which Congress later authorized under the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022.
Two recommendations stand out for their alignment with OpenMined’s mission.
- Recommendation 3.12 calls on the NSDS to promote privacy-preserving technologies that support “working with data in situ” analyzing data where it lives, without moving or exposing it.
- Recommendation 5.5 calls for tools and support to help users conduct secure, accurate, and scalable analyses.
Together, they describe exactly the kind of infrastructure PySyft was designed to provide: a platform where data scientists submit code to data owners, run computations on sensitive datasets, and receive results, all without ever seeing or copying the underlying data.
The ACDEB’s vision has only grown more urgent. Executive Order 14243, signed in March 2025, directs agencies to eliminate information silos and maximize interagency data sharing, but doing so responsibly requires the privacy-preserving infrastructure envisioned in the ACDEB report. OpenMined’s work with national statistical organizations, including the U.S. Census Bureau through the UN PET Lab, demonstrates that this technology is not theoretical; it is already enabling secure cross-border data collaboration.
We are committed to ensuring that, as the government opens data for evidence-building, privacy remains a feature, not a trade-off.
