The Federal Data Strategy, released in December 2019, recognized the importance of ethics in its founding principles. The 2020 Action Plan includes developing a Data Ethics Framework to help federal employees, managers, and leaders make ethical decisions as they acquire, manage, and use data.
To achieve the goal of developing a useful Data Ethics Framework for the Federal Government, we formed an interagency team of fourteen government leaders from across government with expertise in statistics, public policy, evidence-based decision making, privacy, and analytics. The resulting Framework applies to all data types and data uses which will help guide the ethical acquisition, management, and use of data for years to come. The Framework does not include requirements or mandates of its own, but rather provides guidance in the form of Tenets to support ethical decision making at all levels of the Federal Government.