A concerning trend has emerged within the Trump administration: if data highlights an inconvenient truth, the solution is simply to stop collecting that data. This strategy became notably clear last week when the administration announced it would no longer require thousands of industrial facilities to report their planet-warming pollution.
This pattern of data suppression extends to critical areas. For instance, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has ceased tracking the most costly extreme weather events—those causing at least one billion dollars in damage.
NASA is also facing changes, with Trump officials proposing to decommission two advanced satellites. These satellites are crucial for providing precise measurements of the greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.
Meanwhile, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a division responsible for maintaining vital statistics on issues like car crashes, gun violence, and homicides has been severely impacted by layoffs.
The consequences of these actions could be far-reaching. Experts warn that if the government cannot quantify an issue, it becomes incredibly difficult to address the underlying problem.
Sarah Pralle, an associate professor of political science at Syracuse University, emphasized, “When we don’t measure things, it makes it much harder to claim that there is a problem and that the government has some kind of responsibility to help alleviate it.”
Dr. Pralle added, “Measuring itself is a political act with political consequences. And clearly the Trump administration does not want to do anything to alleviate a problem like climate change.”
These recent actions echo a notable episode from President Trump’s first term. In June 2020, as federal statistics showed a surge in coronavirus cases, Mr. Trump famously stated, “If we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”
The impulse to disregard facts and figures that the president dislikes has escalated in Mr. Trump’s second term, even impacting the officials responsible for this information. For example, in August, the president fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, baselessly claiming that weak jobs numbers had been “rigged” and “phony.”
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, defended the administration’s handling of government data, asserting the president’s commitment to accuracy.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, agencies are refocusing on their core missions and shifting away from ideological activism,” Ms. Rogers explained in an email. “The Trump administration is committed to eliminating bias and producing Gold Standard Science research driven by verifiable data that informs Americans’ decision-making while keeping them safe.”
Image: A satellite dish in front of an office building. The NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction in College Park, Md. Trump officials said in May that they would stop updating a NOAA list of weather disasters that cost the country at least $1 billion each.
At the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Trump officials announced that they would end the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. This program is the nation’s most comprehensive system for tracking heat-trapping greenhouse gases that dangerously warm our planet. Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, characterized the program as “nothing more than bureaucratic red tape.”
For the past 15 years, this program has gathered data from approximately 8,000 industrial facilities across the country, including coal-burning power plants, oil refineries, and steel mills. Research from 2023 by Sorabh Tomar, an assistant professor of accounting at Southern Methodist University, suggests that the public availability of this data encouraged many companies to reduce their emissions, likely striving to appear greener than their competitors.
“It’s kind of like an Orangetheory effect, where you can see everyone else’s workout on the screen and you don’t want to be at the bottom,” Dr. Tomar remarked, drawing a parallel to the popular group fitness classes.
However, the EPA program has its conservative critics. Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who leads the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment at the Heritage Foundation, a right-of-center research organization, contended that it imposed burdensome reporting requirements that hindered American businesses.
Ms. Furchtgott-Roth argued, “It discourages energy-intensive manufacturing in the United States and makes it go to other places where it’s done in a dirtier way, such as China and India.” It’s worth noting that both China and India do require many large companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions.
The Trump administration’s efforts to halt emissions measurements extend beyond Earth, reaching into space. Officials are seeking to decommission and potentially destroy two NASA satellites that monitor greenhouse gases. These satellites, costing over $800 million to launch, have provided highly precise measurements of carbon dioxide, one of the most prevalent greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Concurrently, the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund recently lost contact with another satellite, MethaneSAT, which had been monitoring methane emissions from oil and gas sites globally. Methane is an even more potent greenhouse gas, approximately 80 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere in the short term.
Mark Brownstein, senior vice president of energy at the Environmental Defense Fund, stated that MethaneSAT collected nearly a year’s worth of data before its malfunction. The group plans to analyze and release this crucial information in the coming months.
“Any claim, whether it’s made by a government or industry, ultimately needs to be underpinned by good data,” Mr. Brownstein asserted.
Image: Orange flames erupt from the top of a metal stack at a refinery. Flaring at a refinery in Indiana. Coal-burning power plants, oil refineries and steel mills were among the facilities that reported emissions to a government program.
At NOAA, Trump officials announced in May that they would cease updating a list of the country’s most expensive weather disasters, each costing at least $1 billion. Kim Doster, a NOAA spokeswoman, attributed this decision to “evolving priorities and staffing changes.”
The list of these so-called billion-dollar disasters had dramatically increased, from just a few per year in the 1980s to an average of 23 annually between 2020 and 2024. Experts have attributed this rise to both an increase in populations living in hazard-prone areas and climate change, which has intensified the frequency and severity of events like hurricanes, wildfires, and droughts.
State and local governments have relied on the NOAA database to guide investments in projects, such as elevating roads and bridges, to protect against extreme flooding. Insurance companies also used this data to inform their marketing efforts to property owners.
“There’s nothing better for an insurance commercial than seeing how many billions of dollars of losses we’ve had from disasters,” noted Jesse M. Keenan, an associate professor and director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University.
At the CDC, the administration last month terminated approximately 170 employees at the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. This center gathers data on diverse issues, including car crashes, drownings, gun violence, and traumatic brain injuries. Furthermore, the proposed House version of the government spending bill would eliminate the center’s funding entirely.
Image: A hand-lettered sign saying “Stay Strong CDC We Love You” is stuck in the sidewalk outside the C.D.C. headquarters. The C.D.C. in Atlanta, where layoffs have decimated a division that maintained statistics on car crashes and gun violence, among other things.
Sharon Gilmartin, executive director of the Safe States Alliance, a nonprofit focused on injury and violence prevention, warned that these layoffs and proposed funding cuts could jeopardize the National Violent Death Reporting System. This system meticulously tracks homicides, suicides, and violent deaths caused by law enforcement officers in the line of duty.
“The data set is so useful for those of us who work in prevention, because it really tells the story of where to intervene,” Ms. Gilmartin explained. She cited an example where statistics revealing a surge in suicides by law enforcement officers in certain states prompted the National Sheriffs’ Association to offer mental health counseling and other programs in those regions.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department, the CDC’s parent agency, confirmed that the database remains operational.
“C.D.C. databases that track data on concussions, car crashes and suicides remain operational,” Mr. Nixon stated in an email. “Any such reporting otherwise is false. H.H.S. and C.D.C. remain committed to tracking public health data to inform policy decisions through evidence-based decision making.”
As government data faces the threat of disappearance, several groups of dedicated data enthusiasts, self-dubbed “data nerds,” have embarked on a mission to preserve vast amounts of federal information. One such initiative, the Data Rescue Project, has successfully archived 1,244 data sets from 86 government offices, thanks to the efforts of over 500 volunteers.
Lena Bohman, a founding member of the Data Rescue Project, highlighted the immense scale of government data production. “The U.S. government is one of the world’s largest data producers — the scale is massive,” she said.
This critical information, she stressed, “is used all over the place in ways that people don’t always appreciate.”