What Did Your Firm Rely On at the Time?

About the role

Build evidence-grade monitoring for high-liability federal datasets: capture every version, catch retroactive revisions, and prove what FEMA, NOAA, or EPA published on the reliance date. This is not another climate archive—volunteers have proven they can build those. You are building the system that answers one expensive question: What information did your firm rely on at the time?

The opportunity

The play: Build evidence-grade monitoring for high-liability federal datasets. The money: 100 engineering firms at $900/month is $90K MRR. ACEC alone counts 5,500 member firms, so the base case needs under 2% of one association.

Four-part product spec

• Capture through export
• Pricing indexed to state statutes of repose
• The citation exposure scan that opens doors
• 90-day build plan and four compounding moats

The hidden dependency inside signed work

Data.gov lists 364,126 datasets. It's a metadata catalog, which means it's an index. It doesn't host the files, control their availability, repair broken links, or promise that any agency will keep an earlier version around. Fine for discovery, useless for evidence.

Pew Research found that 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were gone by late 2023, and that 21% of government webpages carry at least one broken link. A 2014 Harvard Law Review study found that roughly half the URLs cited in U.S. Supreme Court opinions no longer point to the material they were cited for, and that more than 70% of URLs cited in the law journals are dead. If the Court can't keep its citations alive, a drainage report from 2019 has no chance.

The good sources move even when they don't break. FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer holds the current effective flood-hazard data, continuously updated as Letters of Map Revision fold new geometry into the layer. EPA's Enforcement and Compliance History Online refreshes weekly, exporting more than 1.5 million regulated facilities in a single zip, with a lag of a week to three months between a record entering the source database and surfacing in ECHO.

Retention requirements

The joint document-retention guidelines that NSPE and ACEC risk-management committees published in 2016 tell firms to retain the data supporting a report's conclusions, and to hold reports and studies indefinitely. Retention periods key off the statute of repose: six years in Colorado, seven in Florida, ten in Texas, Illinois, and Missouri, twelve in Pennsylvania, and effectively none in Kentucky, where the courts struck the construction repose statute down. Illinois practitioners are advised to hold project records fifteen years. Florida's window was ten years until the legislature cut it to seven in 2023.

Why this works now

Public data has always drifted. The commercial trigger is that a decade of drift is about to land on every stormwater design in the country at once. NOAA Atlas 14 is the precipitation-frequency standard written into engineering design standards and floodplain regulations across the United States. Its successor, NOAA Atlas 15, refreshes source data that is ten to twenty years old in places, and it abandons the stationary-climate assumption Atlas 14 was built on.

• Preliminary Atlas 15 estimates for the continental U.S. go out for peer review in September 2026
• Published estimates arrive for use in 2027
• Alaska, Hawaii, and the territories run a year behind on both

Atlas 15 itself spent part of 2025 paused by the administration and resumed only after pushback. Every design sized against Atlas 14 is about to have a superseding standard sitting on top of it. When a claim lands in 2031 on a system designed in 2024, the question won't be whether the engineer used the best available science—it'll be whether the engineer can show which values the government published on the day the design was sealed, and whether those values still exist anywhere.

NOAA's FY2026 request proposed a $1.7 billion cut, roughly 27%, eliminated its research arm as a line office, and carried the literal line "Total, Climate Research: $0." Congress refused. The FY2026 Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations act became law on January 23, 2026, funding NOAA at $6.14 billion, some $1.64 billion above the request. Research survived as a line office, with a subset of its programs moved to the National Weather Service, and climate research got $224 million. Climate research survived because appropriators voted to fund it, and no statute protects it from the next request.

Why existing products leave an opening

Climate.us preserves and republishes climate information beautifully, and it builds nothing resembling a project-specific audit trail. Visualping and Hexowatch flag that a page changed, which is useful reconnaissance and blind to twelve revised rows inside a CSV or a shifted floodway boundary. Fathom and the flood-risk modelers sell proprietary hazard intelligence to insurers, answering what the risk is rather than what the federal source said.

Pagefreezer archives websites for legal, compliance, and e-discovery work using WORM storage, SHA-256 hashes, digital signatures, and FedRAMP authorization. The architecture is built around web pages and communications. Source-aware comparison of federal tables, GIS layers, APIs, and historical time series was never the design target. Pagefreezer can tell you a page changed. It can't tell you a 2024 rainfall observation got revised in 2027, or which of your sealed designs depended on the old number.