<
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/aug/18/trump-federal-data-deleted-altered>
"A database of federal law enforcement officer misconduct records. A survey
measuring physical, sexual and emotional violence against children and youth.
Real-time pollution readings collected by air quality monitors from US
embassies around the world.
These are among the hundreds of federal datasets that the Trump administration
has taken down or altered as part of its aggressive campaign to wipe all
mentions of data findings that do not align with the administration’s
priorities.
Over the past year and a half, at least 28 federal datasets have been deleted
and another 338 data collections have been modified, according to an online
tracker released last week from dataindex.us, a group of data policy experts,
researchers and developers that formed last year to monitor changes to
government data.
“We’re at a very vulnerable point as a nation,” said Denice Ross, former US
chief data scientist under the Biden administration and a co-founder of
dataindex.us. “We’re facing a future where we are not going to have the
information that we need to make decisions that will save lives and benefit
American communities.”
The tracker includes detailed information about deleted or altered datasets
from more than 60 federal agencies that span the environment, labor, law
enforcement and other topics. But datasets on health appear to be the most
affected by the Trump administration’s crackdown, comprising about 40% of the
total number of terminated or altered data collections tracked by dataindex.us.
One of the main changes to these health datasets is that they no longer collect
information on queer and trans people – as part of Donald Trump’s executive
order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological
Truth to the Federal Government”.
Multiple Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) surveys, for example,
have removed questions about respondents’ gender identity. These include the
National HIV Surveillance System, the primary source of case data for HIV
infections, the National Violent Death Reporting System, the CDC Diabetes
Prevention Recognition Program, the
National Intimate Partner and Sexual
Violence Survey and specific surveys evaluating Prep uptake among gay men and
in communities of color.
In addition, there are at least four health datasets that are no longer being
updated at all, including the Substance Abuse and Mental Health
Administration’s (Samhsa) Drug Abuse Warning Network, a surveillance system
that doctors and public health researchers used to track drug-related emergency
room visits in near real-time to spot emerging overdose trends.
“These data are critical for identifying emerging epidemics and what parts of
the population are most vulnerable to different types of health conditions,”
said Thomas Babor, a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut who
specializes in public health and addiction.
“We need to know what direction the trend is going, whether it’s the beginning
of an end; we need to learn from prior episodes of epidemics and how they were
responded to and what impact the responses had,” Babor said. “Taking down, even
temporarily, some of the most important surveys that we have, especially for
comparative purposes, is like we’re erasing our institutional memory for public
health.”"
Via Janet Logan.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
