TroothSlooth

🚨🚨THE CASE FOR @DATAREPUBLICAN FOR CITIZEN JOURNALIST OF THE YEAR 🏆 Jennica Pounds—Deaf, nonspeaking, on the autism spectrum—spent her career as a senior machine-learning engineer. At Snap she worked on sign-language translation tech. She burned out in Big Tech, moved her family to Utah, and started posting election maps and early-vote models under the handle DataRepublican. In 2020 and 2024 she was one of the few calling the data clearly when conventional wisdom insisted otherwise. After the election she turned the same skills on government spending. She built AI tools and datarepublican(dot)com that index hundreds of thousands of nonprofits and over a million grants. She made the opaque searchable. She connected the dots on USAID, NGO networks, and taxpayer money flows that others treated as too big to read. Elon Musk amplified her work repeatedly. Sen. Mike Lee called her a gift to America. Her following exploded past a million. When Rolling Stone doxxed her in early 2025, she didn’t go quiet. She confirmed her identity, resigned her job, and went full-time. Her family faced harassment. She kept posting the receipts. 🏆Courage: She spent a lifetime being overlooked in rooms and still chose to make the invisible visible. 🏆Impact: Her tools and threads shifted the conversation on government waste in real time. 🏆Consistency: Years of quiet, precise data work before the spotlight. 🏆Ethics: Public data, public tools, no paywall on the index. 🏆Storytelling: She turned dense grant databases into something ordinary people could actually use and understand. The data was always public. Nobody was looking—until the woman who had been sitting silent for decades decided the rest of us should see it too. Vote DataRepublican for @JamesOKeefeIII Citizen Journalist of the Year Award. The criteria exist for a reason. Who else turned a lifetime of being unheard into a million people finally listening?