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Children between the ages of 1-4 owned deaths than any other cause of death. In 2023, almost a quarter of adults received mental health treatment, an increase of 3.4 million people from the previous year. The number of immigrants from border countries in Mexico and northern Central America was stopped in 2022 due to the number of immigrants from other countries.
The federal government knows these things because it collects, organizes and shares the data behind it. Every year, each year, institutional workers that many of us have never heard of, make decisions at all levels of government and accumulate statistics that inform the decisions of business leaders, school administrators and healthcare providers around the country.
The survival of that data is currently questionable as a result of the comprehensive attack on the Department of Government Efficiency’s federal bureaucracy.
Reactions to these cuts, of course, focus on the harm that hundreds of thousands of civil servants who have lost or are on the verge of losing their jobs, and the millions of people may suffer as a result of the closure of aid programs. What’s overlooked amidst the confusion is the fact that many of Doge’s cuts focus on very specific aspects of the federal government. Its collection and data sharing. In government agencies, governments have lost the ability to measure how American society works, making it much more difficult for elected officials and others to measure the nature and scale of the problems we face and the effectiveness of the solutions being deployed against them.
Data collection efforts at risk of being closed or reduced are astounding in terms of breadth. In some cases, datasets from the past few years have become orphaned, caretakers are expelled, and the future is uncertain. In others, past data has disappeared for some time, and it is unclear when it will appear. Here are some examples:
The Department of Health and Human Services, currently led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has fired a team of 17 people responsible for the national investigation into drug use and health. Management of the department for children and families is weeks behind the annual updates of the adoption and upbringing care analysis and reporting system, a national database of child welfare cases, after layoffs effectively wiped out teams compiling that information. The department then left the team overseeing the pregnancy risk assessment and monitoring system. This is a collection of survey responses from women before and after birth, and has become an important tool to address the unwillingness of maternal mortality after birth.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention monitors the department that oversees the WISQARS database of everything from fatal shootings and poisoning to car accidents, and the team that maintains Atlasplus, an interactive tool for tracking HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to stop demands on oil refineries, power plants and other industrial facilities to measure and report greenhouse gas emissions, as it did in 2010 and it is difficult to know whether policies intended to slow climate change and reduce disasters are effective. The EPA has also removed Ejscreen, a website mapping tool. This allowed people to see how much industrial pollution occurs in their communities and how much it compares to other places and the past few years.
As the Office of Homeland Security Statistics has not yet updated its monthly tally on deportation and other immigration enforcement indices, it is difficult to judge President Donald Trump’s claim of victory in crackdown. The last available figures are from November 2024, the last few months of President Joe Biden’s tenure. (“We submitted reports and data files for clearance, but the report and data files posting will be delayed during review of the new administration,” Jim Shay, operations director for statistics, told ProPublica.
And in a particularly specific example of stopping measurements, the National Weather Service’s deep cuts force the fire to reduce balloon firing.
Looking at one method, there are obvious potential motives for the war with measurement. It makes it difficult for critics to measure fallout caused by Trump administration layoffs, deregulation, or other changes in policy. In some cases, currently abandoned data covers concepts or presumptions that the administration fundamentally rejects. For example, EJScreen represents “environmental justice.” This is an effort to ensure that communities suffer disproportionately from pollution and other environmental harms. (A spokesperson for the EPA said the agency is “working diligently to implement President Trump’s executive orders, including “end and hope for the radical and futile government DEI program.” The spokesman said “EPA continues to support its mission to protect human health and the environment in Trump’s second term.”
Rutgers’ public health professor Laura Lindbergh lamented data at the American Population Association’s annual conference in Washington last week that she was at the threat of pregnancy risk. In an interview, she said the revocation of the administration’s data collection efforts, including Florida’s withdrawal in 2022 from the CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey, reminded us of recent actions at the state level after the state blocked discussions in sexual orientation classrooms. (The state education secretary said the investigation was “inflammatory” and “sexualised.”) The investigation was stopped, making it difficult to identify whether the law would have a negative effect on mental health among Florida teens. “The state assumes policies that harm people and say they don’t want to collect data on the impact of the policy,” Lindbergseyed said. “Burning your head in the sand is not a way to keep your country healthy.” (HHS did not respond to requests for comment.)
But what makes the suspension of data collection more confounding is the fact that in some areas information at risk of being lost supports some of the administration’s own claims. For example, Trump and Vice President JD Vance have repeatedly cited it as a surge in fentanyl addiction over the past decade as a more severe border enforcement debate. The mental health component of the study also receives research into the threat posed to the country’s youth through smartphones and social media, which many conservatives have featured as embracing big technology.
Or get an education. The administration and its conservative allies could argue that democratically-led states had kept schools closed for long periods of time during the pandemic. However, the NAEP may now be reduced in scope as part of a lame layoff at the Ministry of Education’s National Center for Education’s National Education Statistics. This has been reduced from nearly 100 employees to just three, and doubts the NAEP as well as a wide array of long-term longitudinal assessments and detailed tally of enrollment in K-2 and higher education across the country. The department did not respond to requests for comment, but issued a statement on Thursday saying that the next round of the NAEP assessment will take place next year.
Dan Goldharbor, an education researcher at the University of Washington, cast in dull words the self-defeating nature of the administration’s war on education assessments. But the only reason we know is because of our NAEP data collection efforts! ”
Shelley Burns, a mathematical statistician who worked for NCES about 35 years ago before the entire team was fired in March, earned similar points for the decline in student performance. “How does the country know that? They know it because we gathered it. And we didn’t turn it. We said, ‘Biden is president, so let’s look good,’ she said. “Their new ideas on how to make education great again – if there’s no independent data collection, how do you know if it works?”
“There’s a well-known liberal bias in reality,” Stephen Colbert said, preferring QUIP, and there were many liberal commentators who had been trained at face value over the years. In fact, this is not the case in many areas.
No, President Trump, income tax wasn’t wrong. But it was an accident.
It is worth noting that the long blueprint for the Trump administration’s Project 2025 does not make explicit recommendations to cancel government data collection efforts. The blueprint is full of references to database decision-making, and in some areas, such as immigration enforcement, encourages the next administration to collect and share more data than its predecessors.
However, when the administration is making such a coordinated effort to curb the assessment of the government and society as a whole, it is not difficult to conclude that it is not confident in the effectiveness of the current national overhaul. As datasets fall on the roadside, national policymakers lose the ability to make evidence-based decisions, and the public lose the ability to hold them accountable for the outcome. Even if future administrations attempt to revive some of the reduced efforts, the 2025-29 hiatus will make identification and understanding more difficult.
Who knows whether a country can reconstruct its measurement capabilities in the future? For now, the losses are immeasurable.
