National Science Foundation awards PolicyEngine $300,000 grant

PolicyEngine has been awarded a $300,000 Phase I grant from the National Science Foundation's Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program (Award No. 2518372). This grant will support our work to strengthen and expand the open-source ecosystem around economic policy analysis tools.

This Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) project increases access to sophisticated economic policy analysis tools, enabling evidence-based decision-making across all levels of American society. The project transforms tax-benefit microsimulations into open-source infrastructure accessible to local governments, nonprofits, and citizens. This innovation enhances scientific understanding by making policy models transparent and reproducible, allowing researchers to validate assumptions and build upon existing work. The OSE provides durable competitive advantage by establishing the United States as the global leader in open-source policy modeling. The model leverages distributed open-source development, where commercial users fund expansions that benefit the entire ecosystem. Primary beneficiaries include households accessing benefits, local governments analyzing policy impacts, and researchers advancing economic science.

This POSE project addresses the critical gap between sophisticated policy analysis capabilities and organizational infrastructure needed for sustainable open-source development. While the team has built comprehensive tax-benefit microsimulation tools with a strong user base, transitioning to a self-sustaining ecosystem requires systematic organizational development. The project's objectives include: 1) conducting ecosystem discovery to map stakeholder needs; 2) establishing a new governance structure; and 3) building contributor infrastructure including documentation, mentorship programs, and community engagement frameworks. The effort involves surveying stakeholders, conducting focus groups, developing governance bylaws, creating contributor onboarding systems, and launching a dashboard tracking ecosystem health. Technical goals include a comprehensive ecosystem landscape report, formalized intellectual property frameworks (e.g., AGPL-3.0 code, trademark protection, contributor agreements), documented partnership models, and quantitative metrics showing increasing contribution rates and growth in monthly users. This organizational infrastructure ensures PolicyEngine's technical capabilities, including state and congressional district-level analysis powered by machine learning calibration, can sustainably serve community interests and drive development.

The NSF POSE program helps open-source projects develop robust ecosystems with strong governance, community engagement, and technical infrastructure. Phase I focuses on ecosystem discovery and planning, while Phase II provides implementation funding for projects ready to scale their impact.

Our grant activities focus on three key areas:

• Conduct 100+ stakeholder interviews to understand the needs of policy researchers, government agencies, nonprofits, and academic institutions
• Map the landscape of policy analysis tools and identify gaps in current capabilities
• Study successful open-source economic modeling projects to learn best practices

• Attend and present at key conferences to engage with the policy analysis community
• Develop partnerships with organizations that can contribute to and benefit from our tools
• Create documentation and resources to lower barriers for new contributors

• Design governance structures that support transparent decision-making and community involvement
• Develop sustainable funding models that align with our open-source mission
• Create processes for managing contributions and maintaining code quality

Dr. Dan Feenberg, creator of TAXSIM (cited in over 1,100 academic publications), will serve as our external mentor through the I-Corps for POSE training. TAXSIM has successfully built a large user community at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and we'll learn from their decades of experience creating an ecosystem around tax microsimulation tools. Many current TAXSIM users are potential PolicyEngine users, and Dr. Feenberg is helping us understand how to best serve this community's needs.

As part of our ecosystem discovery efforts, we'll be attending and presenting at major conferences in economics, public policy, and open-source software development. These events will help us engage with potential users and contributors, learn from other projects, and share our work with the broader community.

You can view our complete NSF POSE Phase I application materials, including our project proposal and supporting documents, in our public Google Drive folder.

We invite researchers, developers, and policy analysts to join our open-source community. Visit our GitHub repositories to contribute, or explore our platform at policyengine.org to see how we're democratizing policy analysis.

The NSF POSE Phase I grant will help PolicyEngine strengthen its open-source ecosystem and expand access to sophisticated policy analysis tools for researchers, policymakers, and citizens alike.

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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. 2518372. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.