Towards Search Engines for Government Studies and Reports

Civic Technology Community Group,

Hello. Government studies and reports are documents produced by city, county, state, and federal government agencies to inform legislatures, policymakers, and the public about governments' operations, program evaluations, research findings, and policy recommendations. Government studies and reports are also purchased by governments from contractors and consulting firms.

How do government employees in the United States of America presently search for previous and existing studies and reports, including those produced by other cities', counties', and states' governments, e.g., before initiating bureaucratic processes and procedures to create or to purchase new ones? Could these processes and procedures be simplified and streamlined using modern technologies such as artificial intelligence?

In addition to Data.gov initiatives, there is the National Technical Report Library (NTRL, https://ntrl.ntis.gov/NTRL) run by the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) of the Chamber of Commerce. The NTIS acquires, indexes, abstracts, and archives the largest collection of U.S. government-sponsored technical reports in existence while the NTRL offers access to these authenticated government technical reports to libraries and technical information users.

There is also the USA Spending website (https://www.usaspending.gov/) where interested citizens can search through federal government contracts, e.g., basic research, advanced research, development, and special studies/analysis that are not R&D, these kinds of contracts amongst those expected to produce government studies and reports.

An idea for cost-cutting and streamlining government budgets is that it could be made easier for both the general public and government employees to perform advanced, artificial-intelligence-enhanced, searches through previous and existing studies and reports produced by or purchased by city, county, state and federal governments.

Thank you. Any thoughts on these ideas?


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski

Received on Monday, 13 October 2025 12:46:00 UTC