Earlier today, President Obama signed an Executive Order directing his administration to take historic steps to make government-held data more accessible to the public and to entrepreneurs and others as fuel for innovation and economic growth. The White House drafted and released the official Open Data Policy of the United States on GitHub! The Presidential Memorandum calls for the creation of Project Open Data, with the goal of making government data "available, discoverable, and usable – in a word, open".
Read the Executive Order (EO) on open data
Read the new Open Data Policy
Thanks to US Chief Technology Officer Todd Park for getting this done, and for letting science media know.