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1 1 (February 4, 2025)

handle is hein.crs/govesjb0001 and id is 1 raw text is: OMB Releases OPEN Government Data Act Guidance February 4, 2025 On January 15, 2025, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released Memorandum M-25-05, which contains long-awaited implementation guidance for the Open, Public, Electronic, and Necessary Government DataAct (OPEN Government DataAct, P.L. 115-435, Title II), which was enacted six years earlier in January 2019. Issued in the final days of the Biden Administration, M-25-05 remains in effect. The law generally requires that agency data assets be inventoried, formatted, and presented for the public's access and use through a federal data catalogue. The law expands on the requirement in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA, 5 U.S.C. §552) for agencies to make electronic copies of previously released records more broadly available for public inspection. Building on existing OMB roles and responsibilities for information resources management, M-25-05 rescinds and replaces Memorandum M- 13-13, Open Data Policy Managing Information as an Asset. M-25-05 requires agencies, as part of their data governance process, to describe the processes and criteria they use to identify priority data assets to make available as well as information on how the public can request them. Given the statutory requirement for OMB's guidance to make data open by default, Congress may wish to assess whether the guidance appropriately balances the availability of information against certain privacy and security risks. What Is Access? In practice, the concept of information access is multidimensional. Access may mean increasing the volume of available information and the variety of formats in which the information is presented. For example, the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 (P.L. 114-185) amended FOIAto require the proactive disclosure of information in a public and electronically accessible format and mandated the creation of an electronic portal of requested information, among other changes. To these ends, M-25-05 requires agencies to manage their data assets in specific formats and with descriptive metadata elements and provides guidance on determining their level of public availability through the federal data catalogue or upon request. Congressional Research Service https://crsreports.congress.gov IN12502 CRS INSIGHT Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress

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