data.gov launched May 21, 2009 with 47 datasets — now 370,000+ (with >2,000 removed Jan 2025)
Created 2026-06-21
Summary
Claim: data.gov launched May 21, 2009 (impetus: January 2009 Obama Transparency memo) with 47 datasets, now over 370,000 per Wikipedia's Data.gov entry: "Data.gov has grown from 47 datasets at launch to over 370,000 datasets." By end of 2010 most federal agencies had published. OPEN Government Data Act (2018/2019) made the catalog a statutory mandate.
Source: data.gov; Wikipedia; Obama WH archive.
Confidence: Verified.
Caveat: Per the same Wikipedia source, >2,000 datasets were removed January 2025. The catalog is statutory but not immune to administration-level pruning.
Why this matters for Candid: Anchor on the data-driver timeline. The 47→370k growth is the single cleanest "data went from licensed to free" number in the brief.
Related entries
Related
Referenced by (4)
- reference Research brief: the falling cost floor of "real" web functionality for SMBs (June 2026) relates-to
- reference NWS/NOAA api.weather.gov — free public REST/JSON API, no key, no registration, no rate-limit account relates-to
- reference Timeline 2004–2014: the decade when each of the three historically-expensive parts independently got cheap depends-on
- rule R1 — Anchor the falling-cost case on the decade 2004–2014 (infrastructure + parts + data); AI-assisted coding is NOT the spine depends-on