The new government website evaluation tool, which is called “gov metadata,” was created by Luke Fretwell and his son, Elias, as part of the Civic Hacking Agency, a project focused on technology for the public good. The system works by scanning government websites and then analyzing the presence of metatags, which can help search engines and other portions of the web to interpret aspects of an online page. A metatag might be a reference to a title or help boost a page’s presence on social media; based on the number of metatags present, the project gives a “score” to each website. 

The point of the project, Fretwell told FedScoop, was to show how well the government was performing on certain important aspects of web page operations. “When it comes to AI, and metadata and data, and customer experience and digital service — these three elements of it — there’s some fundamental things,” he said. (Editor’s note: Fretwell helped establish FedScoop’s digital and editorial operations in its early years, but he is not a current employee of Scoop News Group). 

The stakes can be high, notes Beau Woods, the founder and CEO of the cybersecurity company Stratigos Security. “If a website doesn’t set [metadata tags] up, or doesn’t set them up correctly, it can leave citizens wondering what the site is about [and] which one is the legitimate site,” he said. “It leaves room for other unofficial websites to go to the top of search rankings, and to be the first stop for the citizens when they’re browsing.” 

The U.S. government appears to be on par with other organizations, like academic institutions and nonprofits, that have limited budgets for IT and competing priorities, Woods added.  Importantly, the project wasn’t able to grade websites that its systems couldn’t properly scan.

According to the gov metadata tracker, federal agencies vary widely in how well they’re performing on metatags. Notably, a digital changelog established by the project shows that some government webpages were incorporating new metadata amid FedScoop’s reporting. 

An Office of Management and Budget spokesperson told FedScoop that the agency is working with implementation partners and relevant interagency bodies to expand “best practices on search engine optimization and the use of metadata.” 

“The use of metadata and other related search engine optimization practices plays an important role in ensuring that members of the public can easily discover government information and services via third-party search engines,” the spokesperson said. ”OMB acknowledges the opportunity for agencies to more consistently use metadata as they continually optimize their websites and web content for search. OMB, alongside key implementation partners, continues to support agencies in this and other related efforts to improve digital experiences.” 

Still, Fretwell says the initiative raises the question of what requirements exist around this aspect of federal website upkeep. “What’s the standard that the government is going to adopt for using metadata and actually using it [and] using those things?” Fretwell said in an interview with FedScoop. “Because it’s so varied.”

FedScoop was unable to identify specific metadata tag requirements for federal websites, but the topic has certainly been referenced before. Older government documents, including a 2016 memo focused on federal agency websites and digital services and a 2015 memo for .gov domains, have generally emphasized the importance of search engine optimization or metatags. Digital.gov mentions that standard metadata should be tagged and Search.gov, a government search engine, has metadata recommendations, too.

A memo issued by the Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer last fall — which provided further guidance for following the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act and improving government websites — points to metadata several times. The memo says that agencies should use “rich, descriptive metadata” and use “descriptive metadata in commonly parsed fields” like “meta element tags.” It also states that agencies should use metadata tags to correctly note the timeliness of a page. The OMB spokesperson pointed to this memo and its emphasis on search optimization.

Though the scanner run by the Civic Hacking Agency appears to have a broader scope, a website scanning tool run by the General Services Administration designed to measure performance of federal websites picks up some aspects of website metadata. (The GSA explains in its GitHub documentation that it focuses on collecting data that is helpful to specific stakeholders). 

That GSA initiative also shows varied performance — for example, whether an agency is using a viewport tag, which helps resize pages so they’re more easily viewable on mobile devices. 

“GSA continues to prioritize SEO and accessibility best practices when curating and improving metadata,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement. In reference to the 2023 OMB memo, the spokesperson noted that GSA “continues to work with its web teams to optimize our content for findability and discoverability” and “focuses on metadata as well as things like improved on-site search, information architecture, user experience design, cross references, etc.” 

“Search.gov recommends metadata that supports foundational SEO techniques as well as our metadata-driven search filtering feature,” the GSA spokesperson added. 

In response to questions, the Federal Chief Data Officers Council said that while it had explored implications of metadata through its data inventory working group, the group hadn’t “targeted federal website metadata specifically.” The CDO Council added that it has yet to review the Civic Hacking Agency’s report. 

Agencies respond 

In response to FedScoop questions, several Chief Financial Officers Act agencies said they’ve investigated or will take steps to improve their metadata practices. A State Department spokesperson said the agency was “pleased” with some of its primary page grades but would also review the findings from the project, while the Environmental Protection Agency said that, after reviewing its score, it fixed all of the metadata issues identified.  The Nuclear Regulatory Commission also added its missing metatags to its site templates after FedScoop reached out.

Similarly, a spokesperson for the National Science Foundation said that it would meet metatag requirements “in the near future,” that missing tags will be tracked and incorporated into upcoming releases, and that the agency was assessing its compliance with Dublin Core and Open Graph standards, two specific types of metatags. 

The Agriculture Department said it would research whether its metadata were being pulled correctly. The agency also said it was updating its metadata creation process, including evaluating the accuracy of automatically generated tokens and updating its page creation workflow to emphasize page metadata. 

“We’re considering a cyclical review process for existing content to ensure metadata stays current with page updates. These changes will be passed down to all USDA website owners who manage their own content and we will coordinate with them to ensure the correct processes are in place,” an agency spokesperson told FedScoop. “The nature of our content management system is to not use XML content formats which impedes metadata from being included for each page. We are working to repair this process.” 

Some agencies pushed back on the findings. Terrence Hayes, press secretary at the  Department of Veterans Affairs, said it wasn’t apparent why certain metatags were chosen by the project, or which of the agency’s thousands of pages were being scanned, but added that the department was “reviewing the findings from the referenced report to better understand where gaps may exist.” 

Similarly, the Social Security Administration — which initially received an F — said some of the metatag issues identified were unnecessary but would implement changes to improve its score and meet Search.gov guidelines. (After a new scan by the site, the agency now has an A.)

Darren Lutz, press secretary for the agency, said that it instituted a new content management system for Social Security’s primary customer-facing pages and that each “new section or page that we launch features meticulously crafted metatags that summarize the content in clear, accessible language, ensuring optimization for search engines.”

“All new content will convey the noted metadata improvements,” Lutz added. “In the past year, we have launched four major new site sections, redirecting significant percentages of public web traffic from our legacy implementation to these modern and optimized web pages on our new platform.”

The Education Department — which has several websites managed by different entities — said that Civic Hacking Agency’s scores for its Ed.gov and G5 domains don’t reflect work being done on those sites, but also pushed back on how the tool evaluated its StudentAid.gov site, pointing to, for example, the description and robots field. While the Education Department acknowledged that some tags should be added to its NationsReportCard.gov page, a spokesperson said the tool was picking up archival pages and “content tagging isn’t feasible” for certain types of applications on that site. 

The Education Department plans to launch a new Ed.gov this coming summer, an agency spokesperson added. Meanwhile, its G5 domain for grant management “will be upgraded to significantly improve its usability, analytics and reporting, using machine-readable metadata and searchable content,” the spokesperson said. 

Several agencies, including the Departments of Commerce and Transportation, did not respond to requests for comment. Meanwhile, some agencies, like NASA, celebrated the scores they received. Notably, the space agency last year launched two new major websites: nasa.gov and science.nasa.gov. The agency has also been engaged in a multi-year web modernization project. 

“One of the driving goals of this major effort has been to improve the findability and search engine authority of these core sites through strong metadata tooling and training, and we believe this contributed to our report card score,” said Jennifer Dooren, the deputy news chief at NASA headquarters. 

Overall, the project appears to provide further incentive to improve site metadata. Several agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Labor, noted the importance of the Civic Hacking Agency’s tool. 

“The feedback from the ‘gov metadata’ scoring system is invaluable to us as it helps gauge our performance in implementing basic metadata principles,” said Ryan Honick, a public affairs specialist at the Department of Labor. “It acts as a catalyst for ongoing improvement, driving us to refine our strategies for making our websites as accessible and user-friendly as possible.” 

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The request for information was posted by the General Services Administration for public inspection on the Federal Register Thursday. The RFI asks the public for comments on how to define synthetic data generation, in addition to potential applications, challenges, and ethics of the technology.

After the document is officially published Friday, the CDO Council will accept comments for roughly a month. 

The National Institute of Standards and Technology defines synthetic data generation as a “process in which seed data are used to create artificial data that have some of the statistical characteristics of the seed data.” That data can be used for things like creating “larger and more diverse datasets,” improving model performance, and protecting privacy, the solicitation said.

The council has already determined that there are wide-ranging applications and challenges with the technology, and creating a more formal definition for synthetic data generation would benefit the federal government, according to the document.

President Joe Biden’s October executive order on artificial intelligence listed synthetic data generation as an example of a “privacy-enhancing technology.” The process is already used by agencies, such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, which employed synthetic data during the COVID-19 pandemic to protect veteran health information.

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Based on its 2022 Survey of Federal CDOs conducted with Guidehouse, the Data Foundation holds a federal CDO within the White House would improve the visibility and capabilities of the entire community.

While the survey found more than 60% of agency CDOs have at least five Federal Data Strategy (FDS) 2021 Action Plan items in progress or completed, less than 20% reported they have most or all of the resources needed for full implementation.

“The reason why we aren’t moving forward is because there’s no leadership,” said Katy Rother, senior advisor for federal policy implementation at the Data Foundation, during a webinar on the survey results. “Putting people in a position of leadership, giving them a seat at the table to prioritize the resources that are available, is the only way to get this done.”

Though the Federal CDO Council released its 2021 Action Plan in October of that year, some agencies hadn’t finished implementing the 2020 Action Plan and spent the beginning of fiscal 2022 conducting quality assessments of data infrastructure, skills and assets.

The most commonly completed action items are gathering and assessing data to answer priority questions and improving data inventories.

CDOs face a number of hurdles completing the rest, namely the many data requirements contained in not only the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, OPEN Government Data Act and Geospatial Data Act but five executive orders and memos that lack any funding for data collection, management and retrieval. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law added even more, sometimes vague, data management requirements for specific agencies, said Jason Duke, CDO at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Duke’s Data Division has grown from one to 14 employees ensuring metadata is created for all data and uploaded to a catalog linked to repositories containing complete datasets, as well as captured in data management plans via a centralized template. He also ensured that his agency’s Data Management Policy was updated and a Data Management Handbook and Data Standards Policy created. 

The Data Division created a SharePoint site updated daily, devoted a staff member to customer experience, and is currently working on minimum standards for spatial and aspatial metadata, but Duke wants more resources.

CDOs seek better infrastructure and governance practices, more staff and training, increased OMB check-ins, extra funding, and greater clarity on how their role differs from that of the chief information officer, according to the Data Foundation’s survey.

The Data Foundation recommended that OMB include increased funding for CDOs in its fiscal 2023 budget request and clarify the role of the CDO with guidance mandated by the Evidence Act. The Federal CDO Council’s sunset period should be eliminated, as it’s proven its value, according to the report.

“We’re being asked, as CDOs in the federal government, to do more and more regarding data,” Duke said. “And we’re not really as a whole receiving additional budgeted monies targeted for that specific purpose.”

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Data from Internet of Things technologies, wearables, Internet search histories and social media — not just federal statistical surveys — can help agencies provide services to people they haven’t historically, CDI found in a report released Monday.

The Center for Data Innovation is a research arm of the nonprofit Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

CDI recommends that the Federal Chief Data Officers (CDO) Council amend the Federal Data Strategy (FDS) to acknowledge what it’s calling the data divide: the lack of equitable data collection on certain Americans that impacts their access to health care, education and financial services. The center further recommends directing agencies to increase the amount of high-quality data they collect on underrepresented groups, which could be done through the FDS 2022 Action Plan — assuming one is ever released.

The CDO Council did not publish a Federal Data Strategy for 2021 until October last year.

“I think they should be thinking about how they can use these alternative data sources to fill their existing knowledge gaps,” Gillian Diebold, CDI policy analyst and the report’s author, told FedScoop. “I think there’s a lot of potential that’s gone unexplored there.”

A Year 3 Action Plan could also have agencies amend their own data strategies, increase the number of languages and direct outreach for federal surveys, and redistribute sensors gathering data to underrepresented communities, Diebold said.

Agencies’ data collectors should be required to increase the quality of their annotations, which would in turn avoid biased results and build trust, while agencies should consider the value in crowdsourcing data — like the State Department Humanitarian Information Unit already does through OpenStreetMaps, she added.

A final action the Federal CDO Council could include is equitable deployment of data systems like artificial intelligence in the classroom, which shouldn’t be limited to affluent school districts, Diebold said.

CDI’s report also includes recommendations for lawmakers, namely that Congress establish a bipartisan commission to study the data divide. Legislative action would indicate Congress recognizes the issue, and already some policymakers have moved to protect LGBTQ data, Diebold said.

The Biden administration launched the Equitable Data Working Group, which made recommendations in April for disaggregating health data by race, ethnicity, gender, disability, income, veteran status, age, and other demographics.

“The working group signals to the agencies that this is something to be taken seriously,” Diebold said. “And obviously the Biden administration has been putting out a lot of directives related to getting greater equity.”

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Chief Data Officer Ron Thompson hopes NASA will start sharing operational data with Space Force Space Operations because currently partnerships occur on a programmatic basis.

NASA is rehearsing the launch of its Artemis 1 rocket in preparation for an uncrewed Orion spacecraft mission around the moon, the first in a series of voyages to ultimately land astronauts on Mars. But commercial partners designed and manufactured Artemis 1 components and will be responsible for sharing data on their performance with NASA.

“We need to exchange operational data for these components as we integrate them and stack them,” Thompson said, during an AFCEA Bethesda webinar Thursday. “So it is important not to do that on paper; it is important to do this through an automated way that is not only there for the build but is there for if we have an event, god forbid, or when we go in the operations, too.”

That digital mindset is new to NASA, but it’s being woven into how the agency works with government and commercial partners, he added.

NASA is focusing on engineering, operations and safety data for its human operations, aeronautics and scientific research missions.

Interoperability with other agencies is a maturation of the Federal Data Strategy.

“We have to be better about how we exchange information across the federal space and with our citizens as well,” Thompson said.

Perhaps the best example of this is with supply chain risk management data, as all agencies work to identify which companies their goods and services are coming from, he added.

“A lot of organizations currently are getting that data independently,” Thompson said. “And we are not sharing it.”

Bilateral data-sharing agreements are part of the solution, but so is a Federal CDO Council subgroup focused on data sharing and led by the Department of Health and Human Services’ CDO, he added.

That subgroup is working to streamline data-sharing agreements and make them multi-agency use, but the end goal is to establish data-sharing enclaves — similar to how the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act established an enclave for statistical agencies to share data more freely.

Thompson may not be around to see it. The government veteran of 32 years said he’s in the twilight of his career and will likely be transitioning to another role after July 8, though he’s not sure what that is just yet.

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Together the Center for Analytics and Bureau of Global Talent Management will host a webinar in early April on a new Subject Matter Expert Qualification Assessment, through which qualified applicants will be certified to work at the participating bureau of their choosing.

The qualification will be similar to the one the U.S. Digital Service, Office of Personnel Management and Federal Chief Data Officers Council rolled out on behalf of 10 agencies in January 2021 with subject matter experts reviewing condensed resumes, a written assessment, a multiple-choice questionnaire with some technical questions and conducting structured interviews.

“People have to demonstrate in a fair way these quant skills, which takes more work up front,” Garrett Berntsen, deputy CDO for the State Department, told FedScoop. “But you get people with the hard skills, and then you can still have further discussions with them about team fit following the test.”

A lot more department bureaus want to participate in mid-April when State’s Center for Analytics (CfA) posts a yet-to-be-finalized position description for data scientist positions. This will seek candidates with skills in core math and statistics; written, verbal and visual communication of analyses; and data cleaning and engineering, Berntsen said.

Participating agencies have until April 1, 2022, to hire qualifiers off the original joint hiring announcement certification, or cert, but the State Department finished onboarding the last of its 15 data scientists hired that route the week of March 14.

Several other bureaus hired about 10 data scientists total, after helping craft position descriptions and conduct 500 resume reviews with the CfA and the other department divisions.

“We were looking for people with programming skills, who could do statistics but also understood the mission of the department and could apply data and data science to foreign policy and mission challenges — which is mostly what our office tackles,” Berntsen said.

About 90 of the 100 candidates the State Department sought were interested, boasting backgrounds in tech, consulting, campaigns and media and representing diverse races, ages, genders and sexual orientations.

The State Department made its first hires in the summer, with on-the-job training starting immediately, but the process wasn’t without hiccups. Berntsen detailed many of these in a Twitter thread earlier this month, including the fact new hires had to wait for their security clearances.

Despite the fact relatively young data scientists were hired at the competitive General Schedule-13 and 14 pay grades, most still took salary cuts.

Private sector hires had to adjust to more limited technology access and State Department leadership not always buying into data-based diplomacy, Berntsen said.

On the other hand trust is inherently higher with data scientists who are civil servants rather than contractors, and new hires hit the ground running with leadership opportunities available to them, Berntsen said.

Data scientist hires made by State’s CfA broadly focus on one of two areas: diversity, equity, inclusion- and accessibility related data analysis or strategic competition with China. But the team was also tapped to assist with the response to the Afghanistan retrograde.

“Some of our new team members, their very first day, were thrown in to support what’s called the Afghanistan Task Force that was stood up in July and August of last year,” Berntsen said.

The work involved supplying State Department leadership with data analyses on the situation and assets on the ground.

CfA is also assisting the department’s Operations Center as the situation in Ukraine evolves post-Russian invasion.

“Some [task forces] require more quantitative analysis and tracking, and others don’t,” Berntsen said. “But we definitely support that mission as well.”

When the Biden administration released its modernization agenda for the State Department, it placed an emphasis on acquiring the best talent, skills and information.

CfA has focused “a lot of energy” on addressing its talent gap, Berntsen said.

“It all starts with good candidates applying,” he said. “And you have to communicate and talk outwardly about the great opportunity of serving in government in data and tech roles.”

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Agencies haven’t completed all of the actions in the 2020 Action Plan, which was released in December 2019, and may not begin work on the delayed 2021 Action Plan until year’s end, according to its forward.

The plan blames 2021 being a presidential transition year for its late release on Friday, as well as more immediate priorities of the Biden administration.

“Nevertheless, this action plan establishes these aspirational milestones in order to encourage agencies to make steady progress on the plan’s actions and milestones,” reads the document. “In doing so, agencies will enhance their ability to use data to achieve their missions and deliver to the American public.”

The Office of Management and Budget did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

Actions 1 through 6 in the 2021 Action Plan directly correspond to those of its predecessor.

The first action requires Chief Financial Officers Act agencies and encourages all others to gather and assess data identified for priority agency questions. A total of 17 CFO Act agencies had identified that data by the original action plan’s deadline of Sept. 30, 2020.

Action 2 requires all agencies to mature data governance, after 36 agencies documented the authorities of their data governance bodies that the original plan had them establish by the Sept. 30, 2020 deadline.

The third action has all agencies see to data and infrastructure maturity after 32 agencies held data maturity assessment trainings by the original plan’s Sept. 30, 2020 deadline.

Action 4 requires CFO Act agencies and encourages all others to increase staff data skills, after only six agencies developed a performance plan to do so by the original plan’s Dec. 31 deadline.

The fifth action requires all agencies to publish open data plans, after the original plan required them to identify their priority data assets to that end. Agency plans were put on hold pending open data guidance from OMB.

Action 6 requires all agencies to improve their data inventories, which the original plan required them to publish and update. A total of 33 agencies updated their inventories by the Dec. 31 deadline, but updating them to conform to standard metadata is pending guidance from OMB and the General Services Administration.

Other 2021 Action Plan actions that build of those of the original plan include Action 7, requiring all agencies to develop a robust set of AI use cases and workforce expertise, and Action 11, requiring the Federal Geographic Data Committee to identify investment areas and improve coordination with interagency councils.

The 2021 Action Plan further requires the Federal CDO Council to demonstrate a governmentwide dashboard prototype to other interagency councils, document governmentwide infrastructure solution and funding recommendations, validate data skills workforce development use cases, publish a data skills workforce development playbook, and develop a wildland fuels modernization architecture and roadmap.

Half of the 2020 Action Plan’s 20 actions were completed on time.

Among them the Federal CDO Council and OMB Federal Data Policy Committee were launched; separate repositories for federal enterprise data resources and standards were developed; and a curated data skills catalog, data ethics framework and data protection toolkit were released. A one-stop standard research application and an automated tool for information collection reviews were also piloted.

Only 10 of 40 Federal Data Strategy (FDS) practices expected to be implemented by 2030 go unaddressed by the 2021 Action Plan. They include things like using data to increase accountability, protecting data integrity, aligning agreements with data management requirements, reviewing data for disclosure risk, and leveraging buying power.

“The 2021 Action Plan builds on the 2020 agency actions and affords agencies the flexibility to complete actions not fully met in 2020, as well as to move forward in their foundational activities,” reads the document. “This year’s action plan also focuses on community of practice and shared solutions actions that further cross-agency enterprise data maturity and common
approaches to data.”

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Specifically the RFI asks for feedback on overlooked focus areas, data skills and workforce development, data inventories, data sharing, value and maturity, ethics and equity, and technology.

Responses will inform the efforts of the council’s working groups and lead to the development of additional agency guidance, including a white paper on what their data-sharing culture should look like — given the lack of a one-size-fits-all, federal legal regime.

“Even though we don’t want to be biased toward action, there’s a patchwork of laws that apply,” said Dan Morgan, chief data officer at the Department of Transportation, during the council’s meeting Thursday. “Our hypothesis is there’s a lot of commonality in the ways agencies need to implement them.”

Morgan serves as vice chair of the council and chair of its Data Sharing Working Group, which will synthesize, in part, lessons learned from the RFI into a series of use cases designed to improve agencies’ data-sharing postures no matter the legal methods they use to reach agreements.

The council is currently reviewing literature on the subject, but it’s not the first time the government has attempted to address its data sharing problem.

That’s why the RFI asks respondents to provide details about data-sharing arrangements where a federal agency was a party including the authorities and methods used, intent, status, other datasets being linked or matched, lessons learned, and missed opportunities. Respondents are further asked to put forward agencies whose data-sharing practices and partnerships they admire, as well as strong privacy protections.

There’s a procurement angle to the RFI as well, as the council wants to help agencies make wiser purchases that make data more readily accessible.

“There’s obviously an opportunity to buy smarter as the federal government,” Morgan said.

The council’s efforts to improve data sharing mesh well with the Biden administration’s priority of advancing racial equity and support for underserved communities via the Equitable Data Working Group.

After its first meeting in January 2020, the council quickly ran into sharing issues as it began work liberating Department of Health and Human Services data to ensure safe, continued federal operations amid the pandemic.

Advantages of improving federal data sharing extend beyond improving pandemic response to making better climate investments, avoiding improper benefits payments due to fraud, and securely sharing sensitive information on people to keep the U.S. border secure.

On the workforce front the RFI asks what roles, like privacy and records officers, should make up an expanded data team.

“The data workforce is not just data scientists,” Morgan said.

The council also wants to know about continuous learning opportunities.

Concerning data inventories, most of the government’s focus to date has been on public-facing data catalogs, Morgan said. So the RFI asks how respondents find federal data and what they want to find out.

That information will help the council evolve inventory standards by aligning data use cases.

The other three themes of the RFI — value and maturity, ethics and equity, and technology — are cross cutting.

“A lot of our agencies are working on their data strategies … and they’re definitely looking for ways to communicate the value of this work that they’re taking on,” Morgan said.

So the RFI asks about strategies for effective communication.

The Federal Data Ethics Framework was one of the first things the council released, but the RFI asks how it should evolve to address racial equity.

And the RFI also asks about how to modernize technology to break down data silos and better share information.

Respondents have until Nov. 15 to provide input on the RFI.

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Kaouk switches roles after three years as chief data officer at USDA. He first joined the department in 2011 and has since a variety of roles, including chief of staff and special assistant to the CIO. Earlier in his career, Kaouk was a surface warfare officer in the Navy.

He was also appointed as the first chair of the Federal CDO Council, in which role he spearheaded the use of data analytics dashboards, and supported preparations for the launch of the Federal Data Service.

Since taking the CDO role at USDA in 2018, the department has developed more than 500 data analytics dashboards across its 29 sub-agencies.

Federal chief data officers have faced a significant expansion of their roles and responsibilities over the course of the pandemic, including responding to the volume of demands for datasets from lawmakers and communicating with their staff.

Kaouk’s hiring at OPM comes as the agency looks to boost its use of data and analytics as recommended in a recent independent review.

Federal News Network first reported Kaouk’s hire.

Editor’s note: This story was updated to include additional details of Kaouk’s dual-hat role and his acting replacement at USDA.

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