"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute." -- George Orwell, 1984
Scientific information on the CDC's website was replaced this week with anti-vaccine talking points, including false claims that link autism and vaccines. It's the latest move by the Trump administration to alter longstanding US vaccine policy and cast doubt on vaccinations. "We are updating the CDC's website to reflect gold standard, evidence-based science," Health and Human Services spokesperson Andrew Nixon said Thursday. But abundant evidence has shown that there is no connection between vaccines and autism. In a CNN interview, a former top CDC official called the website changes "a national embarrassment" that could leave parents confused.
In August, Trump’s decision to fire Erika McEntarfer, the BLS commissioner, grabbed headlines,2 but the top job is hardly the only hole this administration has blown in that agency. At the time of McEntarfer’s firing, a third of senior BLS leadership positions were already vacant. (That’s still the case, in fact.)
The rest of the agency has been swiss-cheesed too. Some regional field offices—such as the consumer price index offices in Buffalo, New York; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Provo, Utah—have been shuttered entirely. Meanwhile, post-COVID, the agency was already struggling with reduced survey-response rates, which have made its numbers noisier and more susceptible to big revisions. The administration’s response has been to disband the task force working to fix these problems.
The result is that federal data are being degraded—or deleted altogether. And deletion is especially common when statistical series measure issues that this administration would rather not track.
In September, for instance, the administration canceled a three-decade-old annual survey that measures how many Americans struggle to get enough food. A few months earlier, HHS eliminated the team that produces the poverty guidelines, which determine how we count the number of people in poverty and eligibility for benefits such as SNAP, Medicaid, Head Start, and childcare subsidies. But hey, if you never determine who’s eligible for benefits, maybe that means no one is.
Over the past ten months, I’ve been tracking similar cuts to federal data collection on substance abuse, natural disasters, children’s literacy, climate change, race, crime, immigration, gender identity and other issues. (My non-exhaustive, running list lives here; please send me examples I may have missed.)
