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. 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In addition, there are at least four health datasets that are no longer being updated at all, including the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration’s (Samhsa) Drug Abuse Warning Network, a surveillance system that doctors and public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. Christopher Dick, a co-founder of dataindex.us and former chief of the population evaluation, analysis and projections branch at the Census Bureau said they launched the online tracker because it was difficult to know exactly how many federal datasets had actually been deleted. Government agencies aren’t required to notify the public when data collections are terminated, and some datasets have simply stopped updating because of a lack of staffing while others have been quietly pulled from federal websites with little notice.
Some federal datasets also change or update on a regular basis, so it can be hard to figure out what is actually permanently deleted compared with a regular update. The group identified important deleted or altered datasets through a combination of research about how the dataset was used, crowdsourcing from media reports, government employees, and people who used the datasets, monitoring social media, and tracking notices posted about proposed regulations from the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The dataindex.us tracker is not a complete list, and is probably still an undercount of all the deleted or altered datasets there are, said Ross.
But the hope is the tracker is just a starting point. The Guardian’s Deleted data series explores how critical US government information is being deleted and what the consequences will be, and will preserve or recreate lost datasets. If you know about any datasets, webpages or government materials that have been deleted or altered in the past year, or are willing to share how those changes affect you, we’d love to hear from you.
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