Dropping the Data
Terry H. Schwadron
April 23, 2025
As individual developments, we are hearing that the Weather Service is no longer able to send up as many balloons to gather data for forecasts of serious storms or that the people who track bird flu are no longer on the job.
Add in that the Trump administration is more than casual about holding onto communications, transcripts, and documents, or even actively using private electronic apps with which to avoid keeping records usually required by law.
We’re missing the bigger picture: There’s a Trump campaign underway to stop asking questions, systematically gathering data or analyzing trends. Even three months into this Trump 2.0 term, clearly government is laying the foundation both to shun outside information that might guide its judgments and to avoid public evaluation of what it does. Trump doesn’t need or want data, and apparently thinks it somehow may get in his way.
If the administration doesn’t ask, it won’t collect data that may challenge a predetermined policy path. If Team Trump doesn’t collect data, it won’t be able to be held accountable to Congressional oversight or through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Appropriate data collection normally would be the best guide to decision-making; rational thought says you might want to understand the issue before seeking a fix that may not prove effective. But the first 100 days tells us that Donald Trump “knows” the answer, whether by gut or in accordance with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and does not want to be dissuaded by fact. And he certainly does not want to be judged by comparing results to data about the problem.
Given that data is, well, nonpartisan, we can wonder aloud whether this targeting of information is an unintended stupidity or a campaign of darker, political intention.
Widespread Loss of Data
News organization ProPublica has started asking questions about just what we no longer know. The answers even now are widely disturbing. In four years, some developments from loss of measures might verge on dangerous.
Through worker dismissals and program shutdowns seemingly for spending cuts, we have stopped collecting information about child deaths, changes in mental health visits or the effectiveness of substance abuse programs, immigration and mass deportation numbers by any means other than press release, factory and refinery greenhouse gas emissions and more.
The global blowup over tariffs, for example, appears as much about Trump’s disregard for economic data as it is for the continued — if expected — ripples of his still-changing, uncertain policies. The spread of measles while Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. insists that science of proven vaccines is wrong shows why eliminating health data gathering promises trouble. Just last week, weather officials were talking about reduced ability to give tornado warnings because weather balloon launches are down with fewer people to do systematic data gathering.
“Many of DOGE’s cuts have been targeted at a very specific aspect of the federal government: its collection and sharing of data,” ProPublica reported. “In agency after agency, the government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder for elected officials or others to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing, and the effectiveness of solutions being deployed against them.”
Indeed, by slashing teams that gather critical data, the administration has left the federal government with no way of understanding if policies are working — and created a black hole of information whose consequences could ripple out for decades.”
ProPublica noted datasets being orphaned or erased in health services, pollution, aid to children and education.
Elimination of the 17-person team in charge of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health means no tracking of substance abuse — at a time when the administration says fentanyl is such a problem that it threatens military operations into Mexico. The group monitoring pregnancy risks is on administrative leave at a time when there are concerns about high maternal mortality rates. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has cut workers overseeing bird flu — and now seeking to rehire them — and HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.
At the Environmental Protection Agency, we have stopped requiring refineries, power plants and industrial facilities to measure and report emissions, and the agency has taken down a website mapping tool allowing public access to community pollution. At Homeland Security, statistics on immigration enforcement lag, apparently being routed for review at higher political levels, but making it difficult to evaluate how the war on immigrants is going.
Effectiveness and Avoidance
Clearly, Trump and advisers are out to eliminate regulation, regardless of data guidance on effectiveness. It’s difficult to think that any data that points to a need for climate change response is wanted by a government set on denying that climate change exists, for example.
It wouldn’t be the first time. In Florida, after passing the don’t-say-gay laws, the state withdrew from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Clearly, you wouldn’t want to know that ignorance might result in more mental health cases rather than fewer.
The Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics has cut about 100 employees to three, casting into doubt the future of a wide array of long-running longitudinal evaluations and detailed public school enrollment information. This comes amid a push for reassigning public dollars to private schools in the name of parental choice. The joke is that the only reason we know formally about school curriculum and national testing effectiveness is because of such data collection.
Indeed, Project 2025 recommended more, deeper data gathered about politically friendly areas, like immigration.
“Looked at one way, the war on measurement has an obvious potential motivation: making it harder for critics to gauge fallout resulting from Trump administration layoffs, deregulation or other shifts in policy,” ProPublica said.
In place of evidence-based decisions, apparently, we will have to depend on the king to tell us what to do. Trump claims God-given insight into what ails us, and sole ability — with his Sharpie pen — to intuit what steps are needed, scientists, economists, critical thinkers and weathermen aside.
Without data, in the eventuality that a new administration advances, the map to repair Trump policies will be more difficult to determine.
Without independent data gathering, just how are we going to know when Trump Makes America Great Again?
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Eradicating ‘Anti-Christian’ Bias
Donald Trump’s White House task force assigned to “eradicate anti-Christan bias” convened for the first time yesterday.
It was the day after the White House lawn was devoted to an Easter egg roll, the same day that a majority of Supreme Court justices appeared to favor parental religious rights to pull young students from kid book readings promoting respect over gay themes, a week in which the Health Secretary won’t promote vaccines even against measles. It came just after the death of Pope Francis, who repeatedly criticized Trump over deportations, border policies and treatment of the poor.
Chair Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and most speakers intoned about years of what they see as anti-Christian prosecutions, investigations, even suggestions from the Joe Biden government intended for public health or to stop attacks on school boards.
There was no mention of white supremacists joining Trump at Mar-a-Lago, anti-Muslim attacks or antisemitism, nothing about Oklahoma mandating Bible classes in public school or Trump’s plan to shift tax money to private and parochial schools, no discussion of separation of church and state as outlined in the Constitution.
It is the first act since Trump established a White House “faith office,” headed by his friend, Rev. Paula White, to identify and review any anti-Christian bias in any federal agency to conform with an executive order by a president who publicly says he was anointed by God to Make America Great Again.
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