No GIS? No Problem: How Congressional Staff Are Learning to Visualize Policy Data
Last week, we had the opportunity to teach 20 Congressional staffers how to use a new GIS-enabled Generative AI tool, as part of a course we teach: Data Skills for Congress.
This course, supported by USAFacts, is designed to build capacity among staff to engage with data more effectively — especially when making sense of how federal policy choices translate into real impacts on communities.
How can Congressional staffers make better, data-informed legislative decisions - without having deep expertise in data wrangling or data visualization skills?
We posed this question to staffers last week - using the proposed Medicaid cuts cited in the Congressional Budget Resolution as a teaching example.
Rather than relying on national averages or broad narratives, we used localized data to help staffers see how these changes could affect their own districts — who stands to lose coverage, where gaps in care might widen, and what demographic groups are most vulnerable.
Lowering the Barrier to Data-Driven Policy
One of the most significant challenges we see in our work with Congressional staff is that while there’s often an appetite for data, there’s rarely time or technical expertise to work through it. Cleaning datasets, interpreting geographic layers, or building visualizations typically requires tools and training that most policy staffers don’t have — or don’t have time to develop.
That’s where My Sidewalk's new tool, Sidekick came in. It allowed us to quickly surface district-specific data on Medicaid enrollment and demographic trends without needing to code, clean, or map. It wasn't about showing off the tool — it was about demonstrating that with the right support, the barrier between raw data and useful insight can be much lower than most people assume.
Beyond the Tool: Teaching Context and Judgment
Our goal in this session wasn't to train staffers to become expert data analysts — it’s to give them enough confidence and clarity to ask the right questions, interpret results responsibly, and make evidence-informed decisions. Tools like Sidekick can help with that, but only when paired with thoughtful instruction about what data means, what it doesn’t, and how local context shapes interpretation.
In this case, we focused on how federal decisions interact with local realities: rural districts with limited health infrastructure face very different risks than urban ones with higher baseline Medicaid enrollment. We explored how cuts might amplify existing challenges, or create new ones, depending on how eligibility rules and funding levels shift. That kind of granular, localized understanding is essential — and it’s often missing from the broader policy conversation.
Closing the Gap Between Insight and Action
We've come to believe that one of the most practical contributions we can make to evidence-based policymaking isn’t just producing better data — it’s helping people use the data that already exists. That’s what Data Skills for Congress is about, and this report was just one example of how small shifts in access and approach can lead to better-informed decisions on issues that matter.
👉 View the example report we shared with Congressional staffers
