"Disappearing data"
Julia Conley for Common Dreams
In a new report, the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities (CBPP) detailed how Trump’s overt politicization of data has
combined with funding cuts to make it harder for experts—and the public that’s
impacted by the Trump administration’s agenda—to see how those very policies
are impacting households across the country.
“Without sufficient funding and freedom from political
interference, the federal statistical system as we know it—and our ability to
make economic and policy decisions based in reality—are in jeopardy,” said CBPP
senior research analyst Victoria Hunter Gibney and vice president for housing
and income security Cara Brumfield.
The report warns of “disappearing federal data”—both
information that has been surreptitiously yanked from public view and data that
the administration has announced will no longer be available, like the US
Department of Agriculture annual Household Food Security reports.
As Common Dreams reported last
week, the agency called the survey “redundant, costly, politicized, and
extraneous” and claimed they have “failed to present anything more than
subjective, liberal fodder,” as it said it would stop publishing the data—the
federal government’s main source of information on hunger.
The decision followed the Republican Party’s passage of the
One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which includes the biggest-ever cuts to the
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) at a time when more than 47
million Americans—including 1 in 5 children—are facing food insecurity.
In addition to preemptively rejecting research that would
have shown the impact of the GOP’s SNAP cuts, the administration has shown no
interest in tracking weather disasters via its Billion Dollar
Weather and Climate Disasters database, which was discontinued in May; the
effects of crime on LGBTQ+ Americans via National Crime Victimization Survey;
and even the existence of LGBTQ+ communities via the National Health Interview
Survey.
The administration has also stopped the federal government
from collecting data by overseeing mass layoffs across the public servant
workforce, with the Department of Health and Human Services placing researchers
with the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System on administrative leave in
April—ending the government’s accounting of maternal mortality numbers. HHS
also laid off the analysts who worked on federal poverty guidelines that are
used to calculate eligibility for parts of Medicaid as well as nutrition and
home energy assistance.
In a multitude of ways, the CBPP said,
the administration is “suppressing data that would reveal the harmful effects
of the Republican megabill’s deep cuts and leaving families’ struggles harder
to track.”
The report also warns that “brain drain” is worsening the US Census Bureau’s ability to collect population data that helps determine communities’ representation in Congress, federal funding allocation, and plan community services. Former Census Bureau Director Robert Santos left halfway through his five-year term shortly after Trump took office in January. Santos spearheaded efforts to make the survey more inclusive and emphasized rebuilding trust with immigrant and Latino communities after Trump, during his first term, pushed to include a citizenship question on the survey.
A top economist at the Census Bureau, Ron Jarmin, was also
replaced this month by Trump appointee George Cook, who has “no prior
government experience and no advanced training in statistical methods,” the
CBPP said.
The Republican Party is currently pushing to further weaken
efforts to count the population of the US, with the House Appropriations
Committee reporting out legislation this month to officially designate the
decennial census as voluntary and drastically limit efforts to follow up with
nonrespondents. Mandatory participation is not enforced, but the Census Bureau
has found that response rates plummet when the survey is officially designated
as voluntary.
The proposed change would “seriously exacerbate risks to
data quality from nonresponse bias,” said the CBPP.
The same bill reported out by the House committee proposed
slashing $40 million from the Census Bureau budget, impacting the Survey of
Income and Program Participation (SIPP), which collects data on a number of
economic well-being indicators and “enables policymakers to understand how
proposed laws will change eligibility and costs.”
The reduced version of SIPP that would be funded by the bill
“is unlikely to provide the uniquely rich content (such as month-by-month
income data) and structure (such as following children as they move between
different caregivers’ homes) that allow the current SIPP to answer
policymakers’ questions about families, their needs, and the programs that
serve them,” said the group.
The CBPP released its analysis as Liza Featherstone wrote at The New Republic that the
president is “waging a catastrophic war on data” that is “fundamental to Trump
and his authoritarian regime.”
Trump’s destructive cuts to agencies and surveys that
collect crucial data have been paired with numerous baseless claims by the
president and his allies—that Tylenol taken
in pregnancy causes autism, that violence is
surging in cities where he plans to deploy federal troops, and that transgender
people disproportionately commit mass
shootings and violence.
“It will be increasingly hard for correctives on such points
to get traction, however, since Trump’s administration has greatly reduced its
own ability to collect and disseminate accurate information about crime,” wrote
Featherstone.
“Without data, it is also going to be hard not only to
fact-check Trump and his cronies but to measure the (most likely horrific)
impact of Trump’s policies,” she added. “That too is almost certainly
intentional—or at least very convenient for him.”