AI-powered tool turns thousands of pages of federal evidence documents into a searchable, citation-backed resource for researchers, policymakers and journalists
WASHINGTON, DC, UNITED STATES, July 9, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — The Data Foundation today launched Evi, an AI assistant built to help users search and analyze the Evidence Act Hub, a public archive of federal evidence-building documents at evidenceact.org. Currently in a beta phase, Evi answers questions about agency Learning Agendas, Annual Evaluation Plans, and Capacity Assessments, and cites the source document for every answer. Evi was co-developed with Data Foundation Senior Fellow Ted Kaouk, former Chair of the Federal Chief Data Officers Council, using Structured Notes, an AI platform built by his firm, Generative Work Labs.
The problem: evidence trapped in silos
Under the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 (the Evidence Act), federal agencies have produced hundreds of documents, such as learning agendas, evaluation plans, and capacity assessments, to describe how they plan to build and use evidence. Until now, understanding this material meant manually downloading and reading dozens of separate PDFs from different agency websites, each formatted differently. A simple cross-agency question — for example, “Which agencies are researching fraud?” — could take days of manual review to answer, but with Evi it can be answered in seconds.
“The enduring promise of the Evidence Act has always been about building and sustaining a culture of evidence-informed decision-making,” said Nick Hart, President and CEO of the Data Foundation. “For too long, valuable insights from agency learning agendas and evaluation plans have been trapped in siloed PDFs, making it nearly impossible to see the full picture of the federal government’s research needs. Adding an AI layer to the Evidence Hub, which we call Evi, moves us from merely monitoring compliance with this important law to now promoting the usefulness of the tools as Congress intended, making complex federal resources searchable and actionable.”
What the Evidence Act Hub is
The Center for Evidence Capacity (CEC), a Data Foundation program, launched the Evidence Act Hub in December 2025. The Hub is a centralized public archive documenting seven years of Evidence Act implementation across the federal government. It enables access to agency learning agendas, evaluation plans, capacity assessments, and related strategic planning documents in one place.
With the retirement of evaluation.gov and cdo.gov, as well as the migration of public information on the Evidence Act to councils.gov, the Evidence Act Hub now serves as the principal, non-federal public repository for this material. It ensures the documents remain accessible even if individual agencies remove or restructure their own web content, for example, during a change in leadership or a website redesign.
What Evi does
Evi is an agentic artificial intelligence query layer built on top of the Hub’s existing document collections. In natural language, users can ask Evi to:
-Find specific information across thousands of pages without manually searching each document
-Compare priorities across agencies; for example, identifying which agencies have learning agenda questions related to topics like AI
-Track how priorities change over time, such as evolving emphasis on topics like improper payments or innovation
-Visually explore a knowledge graph of people, organizations, and concepts woven through agency Learning Agendas, Evaluation Plans, and Capacity Assessments, surfacing connections that would otherwise take days of manual cross-referencing
-Get inline citations for every answer, with direct links back to the original source document
In Beta testing, Evi correctly identified agencies with fraud-related learning agenda questions and, in a follow-up query, correctly linked the concept of “integrity” to fraud prevention, a task that previously required extensive manual review across agency documents.
Every Evi response is grounded in documents housed in the Hub and includes a citation to the original source, so users can verify the answer and read further.
Why AI tools matter for Evidence Act implementation
The Data Foundation built Evi and the Evidence Act Hub to address four specific problems:
-Preserving institutional memory. As government data and record platforms change, the Hub is becoming the sole real-time public archive for some Evidence Act materials.
-Shifting from compliance to use. Evidence Act documents are often produced to satisfy a requirement and then in some agencies may go underutilized or unused. Making them searchable increases the odds the resources are actually applied to build capacity and fulfill evidence needs.
-Removing the manual-synthesis bottleneck. Comparing evidence priorities across dozens of agencies working on cross-cutting topics previously required manually reading each document; Evi does this in seconds to minutes.
-Enabling longitudinal and cross-agency analysis. Tracking how priorities evolve across agencies and over time was nearly impossible without a centralized, searchable tool.
J.B. Wogan
Data Foundation
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