Trump administration erases or alters nearly 400 federal data sets, sparking public-health concerns

A team of researchers behind dataindex.us released an online tracker documenting the Trump administration’s systematic pruning of federal data collections. Their findings indicate that over the last year and a half the government has fully deleted at least 28 datasets and altered another 338 across over 60 agencies, including the CDC, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Center for Education Statistics. Health information is disproportionately impacted, accounting for roughly 40% of the changes; notable examples are the removal of gender-identity questions from CDC surveys such as the National HIV Surveillance System and the halting of updates to the SAMHSA Drug Abuse Warning Network.

The tracker also notes the disappearance of the USDA’s farm-employer wage survey and a teacher-pay and working-conditions survey from NCES. Because agencies are not required to announce such terminations, the true scale is difficult to assess, prompting the group to ask users to report additional deletions. Critics argue that erasing these records undermines the nation’s ability to track epidemics and protect public health.