More children between the ages of 1 and 4 die from drowning than any other cause of death. Almost a quarter of adults received mental health treatment in 2023, increasing by 3.4 million compared to the previous year. The number of migrants from Mexico and North American countries stopped in the US border patrol, was crossed in 2022 by the number of migrants from other countries.
We know these things because the federal government collects, organizes and shares the data behind them. Every year, year after year, the employees of the agencies, which many of us have never heard of, collected statistics that are subjected to decisions at all levels of government, and reports on the opinions of businesses, administrators of schools and medical workers across the country.
The survival of this data is now in doubt, as a result of the comprehensive attack of the Department of Government Effectiveness on the Federal Bureaucracy.
The reaction to these cuts was clearly focused on hundreds of thousands of civil servants who have lost their jobs or are on the verge of this, and to the detriment that millions of people could suffer from the shutter of assistance programs. Unlucky against the backdrop of shock, this is that many doge cuts were aimed at a very specific aspect of the federal government: its collection and exchange. The agency after the agency the government loses its ability to measure how American society acts, which significantly complicates the selected officials or others to evaluate the nature and scale of the problems we face, and the efficiency of the solutions that unfold against them.
Data collection efforts that have been closed or at risk to reduce them are stunned in their width. In some cases, the orphan data sets, their superintendents and their future are uncertain; Others, past data still have disappeared, and it is unclear whether they would appear. Here are just a few examples:
The Department of Health and Human Services, now headed by Robert F. Kennedy -Youth, fell from the team 17 people The task of the national poll on drug use and health, which for more than five decades has been monitoring the trends on addiction and mental health disorders. The administration of the department for children and families lags behind the annual upgrade of the adoption and reception and reporting system, a nationwide database on children protection, after the dismissal effectively destroyed the team that makes this information. And the department is placed on vacation A team that oversees the monitoring system at risk of pregnancy, gathering responding women before and after birth, which has become an important tool in an attempt to solve the country’s high speed Maternal mortality.
Disease control and prevention centers have caused units controlling the Wisqars database at random deaths and injuries – all from deaths to car accidents – and teams supporting Atlasplus, an interactive tool for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to stop the requirement of refineries, power plants and other industrial facilities Measure and report on their greenhouse gas emissionsAs they have done since 2010, it makes it difficult to slow down the climate change and reduce the catastrophe. The EPA also removed the EJScreen display tool on its site, which allowed people to find out how much industrial pollution is going on in their community and how it is compared to other places or previous years.
Office Statistics Homeland Security has not yet updated your Monthly Tallies on Deportation and other forced performance indicatorsIt makes it difficult to judge President Donald Trump’s victorious requirements for repression; The latest numbers have been available – since November 2024, in recent months, President Joe Biden. (“While we submitted reports and data files for registration, reporting and location of data files are delayed when they are under review of the new administration,” said Jim Shey, Operations Director and Statistics Company, PROPBLICA.)
And, in a particularly specific example of stopping measurement, deep cuts in the national weather service make her Reduce the launch of the balloonCollecting a huge repository of the second per second about everything, from temperature to humidity to atmospheric pressure to improve prediction.
Looking at one path, the war on measuring has a clear potential motivation: it makes it difficult to criticize the rainfall that arises from the dismissal of the Trump administration, de -deregulation or other shifts in politics. In some cases, the data that is now allocated is aimed at concepts or assumptions that the administration fundamentally deflects: ejscreen, for example, deciphering as “environmental justice” – efforts to prevent communities disproportionately from pollution and other damage to the environment. (The EPA press secretary said the agency “is working on the President Trump’s executive orders, including” the completion of the radical and wasteful state programs of Dei and the preference. “The press -secretary added:” The EPA will continue to support its human and the environment’s health mission in Trump’s second term.
Laura Lindberg, Professor of Public Health Rutgers, lamented the threat of pregnancy risk at the annual conference of the American population in Washington last week. In an interview, she stated that the cancellation of the cancellation of data collection reminded her of the latest actions at the state level, such as the cancellation of Florida in 2022 from a CDC risk behavior after the state passed its law that reject the sexual orientation discussion. (State education secretary stated that the poll was “inflammatory” and “sexy”.) The interview complicated to find out whether the law had the unfavorable consequences of mental health among adolescents in Florida. “The states have taken a policy that will harm the people, and then says,” We do not want to collect data on the influence of politics, “” Lindbergside. “The funeral of the head in the sand will not be a way to keep the country healthy.” (HHS did not respond to a comment request.)
However, the termination of data for data collection is more embarrassed is that in some areas the risk information was backed up by some requirements of the administration. For example, Trump and Vice President J. D. Vens has repeatedly referred to the argument for more rigid border border, in recent decades, depending on the dependence on the fentanyl – the tendency that has been finally recorded by the national drug use, which is now involved. The components of the mental health of this poll have also been investigated by the threat provided by the youth of the nation by smartphones and social media, which many conservatives have taken as belonging to great technologies.
Either take education. The administration and its conservative allies were able to claim that the states under the leadership of the Democratic larger drops in student achievements in areas that remained closed longer. But now NAEP is likely to be reduced as part of crippled dismissal at the National Education Statistics Center, which was cut from almost 100 staff only up to three, exposed to the future not only NAEP, but also a wide range Detailed Tallinn Nationwide K-12 and Enrollment of higher education. The Department did not respond to a comment request, but on Thursday published a statement stating that the next NAEP estimates will take place next year.
Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University of Washington, gave the independent nature of the administration of the educational evaluation: “The irony here is that if you look at some statements around the Department of Education, it is an X billion in the department, and yet the achievements fell from the cliff.” Naep!
Shelli Burns, a mathematical statistics that worked in NCES for about 35 years before the whole team was fired in March, made a similar point on the fall of student achievements. “How does the country know it? They know it because we gathered it. And we didn’t turn it. We didn’t say,” Biden is the president, so let’s do it well, “she said.
“Reality has a famous liberal bias”, Stephen Kolbert liked to bloom, and there was a lot Liberal commentators For many years, they have taken this crowd for the denomination, believing the figures all show in the country’s political debates. In fact, in large numbers, they do not.
It is worth noting that a long plan of the 2025 project for the Trump administration does not give a clear recommendation to cancel the government’s efforts to collect data. The representative is filled with references to decisions based on data, and in some areas such as forced immigration execution, urges the following administration to collect and share more data than its predecessors.
But when the administration makes such a concerted effort to stifle the assessment of the government and society as a whole, it is difficult not to conclude that it lacks confidence in the effectiveness of her present national capital. As one set of data after the second submits to the background, the country’s politicians lose their ability to make decisions based on facts, and the public loses the ability to prosecute them for their results. Even if the future administration strives to resurrect some of the curtailed efforts, the 2025-29 break will make the tendencies more difficult to identify and understand.
Who knows if the country will be able to restore this measurement in the future. As long as the loss is countless.
