Data for the People: How USAFacts Scales Transparency with Astronomer

The Customer

When former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer founded USAFacts, he had one big idea: Americans deserve the facts — the real numbers that show how their government works. No spin. Just data.

And that vision takes serious technology to pull off.

Today, USAFacts brings together thousands of datasets from across federal, state, and local agencies — everything from jobs and education to taxes and healthcare — and turns them into clear, interactive stories about the nation’s performance. Behind the scenes, the data team orchestrates it all with Astro, Astronomer’s managed Apache Airflow platform, transforming what was once a maze of manual processes into a high-performing data engine that runs like clockwork.

“We’re not here to debate policy — we’re here to show the facts. Astronomer gives us the automation and observability to keep the truth up to date.” Jake Page, Software Development Engineer at USAFacts

The Challenge

Government data is messy. It’s fragmented, delayed, and published in every format imaginable. For USAFacts, that meant an endless cycle of scripts, manual uploads, and troubleshooting — a tough reality for a small team with a huge mission.

“Before Astronomer, data ingestion was ad hoc and hard to manage at scale,” Jake explains. “We were running on scripts and schedules that just couldn’t keep up.”

As the organization aims to expand coverage to 90,000+ datasets, it needed a data foundation built for transparency and scale — one that could keep every update fresh, accurate, and auditable.

The Solution

Enter Astronomer’s managed Airflow, using a modern infrastructure approach built for scale and reliability. With Astronomer, USAFacts automated more than 300 DAGs, orchestrating data flows across Azure Databricks and other services. The result: a unified, resilient data backbone.

“Astronomer lets us focus on scaling and developing instead of managing Airflow. With a small team, that time savings is huge.” Jake Page, Software Development Engineer at USAFacts

This partnership gives USAFacts the speed and confidence to innovate — exploring AI-driven insights and new public dashboards — while keeping its promise of factual, nonpartisan reporting.

The Results

After adopting Astronomer, USAFacts began realizing tangible improvements across efficiency, reliability, and team productivity. The platform transformed how the small data engineering team orchestrates and scales its workflows, freeing capacity for innovation and AI experimentation. Here are the facts:

• From Ad Hoc to Automated: The team used to spend days manually ingesting, transforming, and troubleshooting government datasets — running scripts, managing schedules, and fixing data quality issues. Now, those same workflows happen in minutes, thanks to orchestrated, reliable pipelines.
• 300+ DAGs orchestrated with Astronomer, laying the groundwork to scale towards a larger goal of 90,000 datasets through a dynamic DAG and config-based architecture. As Jake notes, “Astronomer lets us focus on scaling and developing new features instead of managing Airflow. As we grow our data footprint we anticipate scaling to 1,000 DAGs.”
• 50% reduction in platform engineering workload as automation reduced reliance on external engineering resources, freeing the team to innovate on AI-driven data products. “Astronomer has allowed us to shrink the time we spend managing infrastructure and focus on innovation,” Page added.
• Unified observability enables faster troubleshooting, clear metrics, and fewer pipeline failures. “It’s easy to see how our DAGs are performing and identify issues quickly,” said Jake.

“Astronomer has allowed us to shrink the time we spend managing platform infrastructure and focus on innovation—like integrating AI and building new data products.” Jake Page, Software Development Engineer at USAFacts

What’s Next

USAFacts is moving toward AI-driven data products, enabling automatic detection of changes, smarter analytics, and faster content generation. With Astronomer’s orchestration at the core, the team plans to scale from 300 to 1,000+ DAGs, continuing to expand its mission to make government data open, current, and actionable for everyone.

And the message couldn’t be clearer: Data matters. Transparency matters. The facts matter.

Because when the numbers are right, everyone wins.