DataRepublican never spoke in a meeting. A million people are listening now.

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice

Jennica Pounds was in the corner, as usual.

It was a meeting at Snap, and the way it worked was simple: her communication partner, Brent Mills, typed notes to her on a laptop. She typed back. Mills translated her shorthand for the room. Most meetings, nobody looked at her screen. That was fine. It had worked for years.

Then Evan Spiegel stopped mid-sentence.

“Wait,” the CEO said. “I want to know what Jennica is saying.”

Forty years. That was the first time anyone in a meeting had done that.

Jennica Pounds—known online as DataRepublican, small r—is deaf and nonspeaking. She spent more than fifteen years inside some of the biggest technology companies in the world: Amazon, eBay, Snap, Upstart, where she was a senior distinguished machine learning engineer. 

She built systems. She optimized algorithms. She sat in rooms where decisions got made, communicating through typed shorthand while the conversation moved around her.

Today, her X account has more than a million followers. Elon Musk has amplified her work at least two dozen times. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah has called her “a gift to America.” Her tools at datarepublican.com track 913,000 nonprofits and 1.3 million grants, and they’re built around a single conviction: data does not equal transparency.

She’s bringing that work to Colorado. DataRepublican is a featured speaker at RMV’s Freedom Festival on Saturday, June 27, at the Douglas County Fairgrounds in Castle Rock. The two-day event runs June 26–27. Tickets are available at https://events.rockymountainvoice.com/events/rmv-freedom-fest-2026.

The thread that started it wasn’t about NGOs or grant flows or federal spending architecture. It was about a fire.

In January 2025, before Trump’s inauguration, the Los Angeles fires were spreading. Sen. Elizabeth Warren posted an ActBlue link directing people to donate for victims. People started noticing something. DataRepublican did what engineers do.

She traced each entity in the donation chain and calculated how much overhead each one was taking before money reached an actual fire victim.

“At least 40% was disappearing into administrative costs across the various entities,” she said. “Once you see how much money is being siphoned through these chains, you can’t unsee it.”

She was on a leave of absence from Upstart at the time. Then Rolling Stone published her name and location on Feb. 26, 2025. She and her family temporarily relocated out of state.

The leave ended and she didn’t return. The doxxing settled it.

She said there was a moment when she realized that we the people could be Davids facing the Goliath of the captured state.

Around the DOGE launch, thousands of people flooded into the work—pulling 990s, mapping grant flows, reading Federal Register notices at 2 AM. An entire open-source intelligence community materialized. DataRepublican had been doing it alone. Suddenly she wasn’t.

“Elon gave it reach. Regular people just… showed up. With spreadsheets. That’s the slingshot. AI in the hands of a million Davids who finally realized the giant’s armor has seams.”

Mike Benz built the intellectual framework, she says. “NGO” used to be a term nobody outside policy circles knew. Now it comes up at every gathering she attends.

“I meet someone new almost every day who tells me they spend their evenings digging into nonprofit filings for fun. You can feel the Overton window moving in real time,” she said.

There’s a part of this story DataRepublican doesn’t talk about publicly anymore.

Before DataRepublican, before the grant maps and the 990 threads and the million followers, she was doing work on disability access and communication technology that she still carries on behind the scenes. The connection to federal spending transparency is real to her—both are about giving people without institutional access capabilities that used to belong only to insiders. She hopes to share it publicly one day.

But the public fight has a cost she didn’t expect.

“When you’re known for one thing, everything else you touch gets weaponized against the community you’re trying to help,” she said. “I can only fight on one front at a time right now.”

When RMV asked what she’d want a Colorado reader to walk away ready to do, her answer was a step-by-step: find a nonprofit on your state’s Secretary of State website, pull their EIN, look up the 990 on ProPublica, go to Schedule I, follow the grants three levels deep.

“They always end at the same funders,” she said. “You’ll never look at a ‘grassroots’ campaign the same way again.”

That’s what datarepublican.com automates at scale. But she’s clear on one thing: you don’t need her tools to start.

“The data is public. It’s always been public. Nobody was looking.”

What would she tell the version of herself in that Snap conference room—the one in the corner, waiting for someone to look at her screen?

She’s not sure that version of herself would listen.

“Probably nothing she’d believe,” she said. “That in a few years, a million people would care what she’s saying. That the voice she never had would turn out to be the loudest in the room. I think she’d laugh. Then go back to typing.”

She’ll be in Castle Rock on June 27. Tickets for the Freedom Festival are at https://events.rockymountainvoice.com/events/rmv-freedom-fest-2026.