Since President Trump took office, vast amounts of government data and tools have been removed from public access. This includes crucial datasets on climate, global development, gender, poverty, education, and more. Besides impacting research, the loss of data will fundamentally undermine policymaking by depriving decision-makers of the information needed to allocate resources effectively and address critical societal challenges.
Accessible, reliable data is the foundation of evidence-based policymaking and accountability. Researchers, journalists, and civil society organizations rely on open data to track progress, evaluate programs, and hold governments accountable. The removal of these datasets threatens transparency and weakens the ability to monitor the effectiveness of policies.
Another major loss that affects federal data quality is the dismantling of key advisory committees. The Technical Advisory Committee and the Data User Advisory Committee, which advised the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on economic indicators by bringing together economists, academics, and corporate experts, have been disbanded. Similarly, the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee, which provided guidance on federal economic data collection and analysis, has also been eliminated. These committees played a crucial role in maintaining data accuracy, refining methodologies, and ensuring that statistics on inflation, unemployment, productivity, and economic growth remained reliable and timely.
Experts have expressed skepticism about the rationale behind these eliminations, particularly given that committee members were unpaid and provided vital oversight on data quality and methodology. The loss of these expert groups raises serious concerns about the credibility and integrity of labor and economic data, which policymakers and businesses rely on for informed decision-making.
Finally, the wide-scale firing of federal employees across agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Labor will limit agencies’ ability to maintain and collect new federal data.
Consequences of data loss
The consequences of federal data loss are dire. State and local governments depend on timely and accurate data to make informed decisions across a wide range of issues, from social welfare to economic planning. Without reliable data, effective governance becomes nearly impossible, as resource allocation requires trade-offs that must be guided by empirical evidence.
The rapid removal of data related to equity, climate change, and environmental justice will severely hamper efforts to address climate change in an equitable way. Tools such as the Environmental Protection Agency’s EJScreen, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Social Vulnerability Index, and the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST) are vital to researchers and policymakers seeking to address the environmental and health burdens that disproportionately fall on low-income and minority communities. These tools are critical for state and local governments, institutes of higher education, businesses, and nonprofit organizations developing federal grant proposals to support climate and environmental justice initiatives.
Preserving lost resources
Researchers and policymakers are working to preserve lost resources. Beyond simply archiving the data, they are securing methodologies, code, guidance notes, and documentation to ensure these resources remain usable and accessible for future research and policymaking. However, storing and maintaining these datasets requires significant money, far beyond what most organizations can handle alone. Hence, volunteers and researchers are collaborating to identify and prioritize the most essential datasets for saving.
While saving data from being lost is the first step, it is equally important to recognize that if data collection ceases, tools such as CEJST and EJScreen will soon become obsolete, failing to reflect the realities on the ground. Without funding for data collection, we risk losing not only valuable data but also the institutional knowledge and technical expertise necessary for informed decision-making, the long-term consequences of which will be felt in governance, research, and society at large.
Legal action has been taken to challenge these losses. Earthjustice has sued the Department of Agriculture on behalf of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Environmental Working Group to prevent the erasure of climate-related web pages and restore access to critical information.
Some notable efforts
- Public Environmental Data Partners
This is a collective effort among several organizations and research institutes to preserve access to federal data related to the environment, climate, and energy. They are working on archiving and making these datasets publicly available.
- Data Rescue Project
This project is a collaboration among data organizations, including the International Association for Social Science Information Service & Technology (IASSIST), Research Data Access & Preservation (RDAP), and the Data Curation Network. It has created a Data Rescue Tracker to catalog ongoing efforts to recover public data, ensuring that work is not duplicated.
- Data.gov archive
This is an effort by the Library Innovation Lab team at the Harvard Law School. The team released an archive of 16GB worth of data from data.gov that includes over 311,000 datasets.
- Climate Change and Health Research Coordinating Center (CAFÉ RCC) Collection
This is a collaboration between the Boston University School of Public Health and the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health. They are accepting data into a collection at Harvard Dataverse which is a repository for research data.