Down with measurements

For WaPo Opinion, Catherine Rampell describes this year’s string of resource reductions for U.S. government statistical agencies.

To be clear, administration officials do not appear to be overtly massaging numbers to reach their preferred conclusions — or “beating the data until it confesses,” as the saying goes. More often, officials are depriving agencies of resources necessary to crunch the numbers in the first place. Early retirements, “deferred resignation” offers, hiring freezes and haphazard budget cuts have made it difficult for our gold-standard statistical agencies to complete some of their core responsibilities, including some required by federal law.

When data science was becoming a thing, people would often say that you can’t fix what you can’t measure. The premise was that we should collect data on all the things to make things better. I didn’t realize at the time that some people heard that and went a different direction.