As data provides ways to more accurately estimate how things are going, the administration continues its removal of federal datasets that they don’t agree with. For ProPublica, Alec MacGillis reports:
The survival of that data is now in doubt, as a result of the Department of Government Efficiency’s comprehensive assault on the federal bureaucracy.
Reaction to those cuts has focused understandably on the hundreds of thousands of civil servants who have lost their jobs or are on the verge of doing so and the harm that millions of people could suffer as a result of the shuttering of aid programs. Overlooked amid the turmoil is the fact that many of DOGE’s cuts have been targeted at a very specific aspect of the federal government: its collection and sharing of data. 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.
Reality is going to hit regardless. Less data means diminished resources to prepare for the inevitable, like an unhealthy person unwilling to get a checkup.
