Public Data Is Under Siege: Why It Affects You
How the systematic deletion of government data is another threat to our democracy
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At 5pm on Friday, January 31st, more than 8,000 government websites that host public data shut down. One of the most important ones of these was data.CDC.gov - the most important website in America for health data.
On the Wednesday right before, the Office of Personnel Management sent an email to agency heads to strip “gender ideology” from websites, contracts and emails. This was guidance that OPM was implementing based on President Trump’s Executive Order Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government. As the Associated Press reported, “It also directed agencies to disband employee resource groups, terminate grants and contracts related to the issue, and replace the term ‘gender’ with ‘sex’ on government forms.”
If someone looked at the CDC website now, they would effectively have no idea that long-COVID was ever a disease that impacted nearly 10% of the US population.
For the CDC, nearly all of their data includes information on gender — death records, birth counts, opioid overdoses, COVID-19 cases, and much more. More than 3,000 CDC no longer work, which offer contraception guidance; a fact sheet about HIV and transgender people; drug use, bullying; preventing chronic disease, S.T.D. treatment guidelines, information about Alzheimer’s warning signs, overdose prevention training and vaccine guidelines for pregnant people. As The New York Times reported, “the use of the phrase ‘pregnant people’ could have contributed to its removal.”
At 5:01pm on Friday, the most important government website for data census.gov went dark. Links to US Census data sets sent users to the message, “an error occurred while processing this directive.” Research data from national surveys of American children called the “Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance System” also wasn’t available on Friday.
Overall, more than 3,000 census.gov pages have been removed.
The purges have removed information about vaccines, veterans’ care, hate crimes and scientific research, among many other topics.
Perhaps one of the most pernicious are the 200 pages from the federal Head Start program that have disappeared. Head Start is meant to help low-income children get the resources they need to overcome early adversity in life. Without many of these resources, these children will stand very little chance of getting ahead.
For the first time in its 70-year history, The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the official journal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was not published last week as part of a communication pause among federal health agencies.
History is written by the victors
Public data is essential for explaining what is happening in the world. When we erase this data, we erase our history, our priorities, and our openness. This data is not only essential for medical research, but for planning veterans’ care, preventing domestic violence, stopping hate crimes, and protecting our most vulnerable communities.
If someone looked at the CDC website now, they would effectively have no idea that long-COVID was ever a disease that impacted nearly 10% of the US population (according to an archived NIH report).
In the 2 days between Wednesday when OPM sent the email and the Friday afternoon when the websites went dark, hobbyists and data advocates took the burden upon themselves to try to archive and save these websites. They stood up temporary websites, logged thousands of gigabytes of data on hard drives and uploaded them to public servers, and shared out messages about how these services could still be accessed. This is not only completely unsustainable, but it puts the burden on the people who probably need this data the most.
Another agenda
This executive order is not about defending women or restoring truth to the federal government, as the title would have us believe. This is about the systematic erasure of information that Donald Trump does not want in the public record. He does not want data on hate crimes, does not want data on how many LGBTQ people there are, does not want data on how many transgender people there are in America. Because beginning to count those things is an admission that they exist.
But in scanning these websites, other strange things started to appear as well. Several people on Twitter pointed out that pages from the Internal Revenue Service had also disappeared, most notably a transcript of a video titled “Here’s how to avoid I.R.S. penalties and interest”. Others pointed to pages that had disappeared from the Department of the Interior that outlined environmental policy initiatives and included the phrase “environmental justice”. Other pages on the Health Resources and Services Administration site also disappeared that offered information on the Mpox vaccine.
Getting rid of IRS penalty information, environmental protection information, and vaccine information has nothing to do with gender. Beyond this, the pages that were removed have nothing to do with data in the classic sense — they are all PDFs, YouTube videos, or reports. The executive order isn’t just about identity politics, it is about casting a shot across the bow. Executive Order 14168 is meant to tell all government agencies to get in line not just over gender, not just over spreadsheets, but over any piece of content that might misalign with Trump’s broader plan for the future of America.
The Path Forward
As someone who has spent over a decade relying heavily on these government agency datasets (90% of American Inequality articles pull data from one of these government agency portals. It is the #1 input for the maps I build), I’m deeply dismayed to see this change. Many friends of mine maintain these datasets and help make them publicly accessible. I was one of those hobbyists who downloaded a lot of data in that 48 hour window between Wednesday and Friday. And like hundreds of others, I’ve uploaded much of it to our website for public use.
But to make things right going forward, there are short-term, medium-term, and long-term solutions that we can focus on:
Data Sharing Through Third Parties (short-term)
Agencies can collaborate with non-governmental organizations, academic institutions, or private research groups that can legally publish or analyze data.
By providing anonymized datasets or summary statistics to these entities, the information can still be made available to the public without violating the executive order.
Alternative Data Reporting Methods (Medium term)
Agencies might not publish data in traditional formats but could provide insights in legally permissible ways, such as reports, case studies, or metadata that describe trends without explicitly mentioning certain populations.
Open records laws (e.g., FOIA requests) could still allow external entities to access and distribute information, albeit with delays.
Legislative or Judicial Challenges (long-term)
Agencies can work with lawmakers to pass new legislation that overrides the executive order and mandates transparency.
If the order conflicts with existing laws, agencies or advocacy groups can challenge it in court, arguing that withholding the data harms the public interest.
INTERESTING ON THE WEB
New study reveals the worst ‘dental deserts’ in America - Harvard (see our reporting on this issue from July 2024)
Standardized testing makes the education system LESS biased against poor kids - results from Dartmouth
Did a Private Equity Fire Truck Roll-Up Worsen the L.A. Fires? - Matt Stoller
The global elite are more diverse than you might think - World Elite Database
I’ll be speaking at Middlebury on February 24. Come join if you’ll be in the area - Middlebury
Stateline interviewed me for their recent piece on homelessness in America - Stateline
Thank you for this. I hope everyone reads it.
I'll do my best to amplify this, Jeremy. Such critical work you are sharing here!