Government data is at risk. Federal funding for the main statistical agencies — like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Commerce Department — has been tight for years.

But since the Trump administration took office in January, threats to the availability and comprehensiveness of federal data have reached a new level, impacting everything from national health and crime statistics to key economic reports. 

Last September, Drew DeSilver, an analyst at the Pew Research Center, clicked onto the Office of Personnel Management’s FedScope database to find out what percentage of the federal workforce was Black or Latino. (He published the findings earlier this year.)

After the Trump administration took office, he checked the database again and got a rude awakening. 

“The diversity module, which included all the racial and ethnic breakdowns — that has disappeared,” DeSilver said. That, combined with the fact that the database hasn’t been updated since the administration took office (the latest data is for September 2024), makes it more difficult to figure out how massive federal job cuts initiated by DOGE are impacting Black and Latino workers. 

OPM did not respond to questions about FedScope or about workers of color in the federal workforce by Marketplace’s deadline for this story.

Denice Ross, who served until December 2024 as U.S. Chief Data Scientist, said this is part of a broad pattern across federal statistical agencies: “The targeted, surgical removal of data sets, or elements of data sets, that are not aligned with the administration’s priorities.”

Ross is now at the Federation of American Scientists and has been tracking these changes. Her current projects to monitor and advocate for federal data under the Trump administration are America’s Data Index and America’s Essential Data.

She offered multiple examples of databases that have been altered or taken down entirely.

“The Office of Personnel Management: the race and ethnicity category has been removed in response to the president’s agenda to remove mentions of DEI. NOAA’s billion-dollar disaster data set has been terminated, because it’s talking about climate. CDC’s National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System, removing questions related to sexual orientation and gender identity. And that’ll make it harder to understand how diseases are impacting those populations.”

Steve Pierson, director of science policy at the American Statistical Association, cited another example in the same vein: “Sexual orientation or gender identity answer options have been removed from the National Crime Victimization Survey, which comes out of the Bureau of Justice Statistics,” he said.

Ross and her colleagues have been documenting the trend.

“Since Jan. 20, we’ve identified over 400 changes to federal forms and surveys, specifically to comply with administration priorities, such as erasing gender identity and DEI.”

There’s another way federal data is being undermined, said Steve Pierson: across-the-board job cuts initiated by DOGE starting at the beginning of the Trump administration, which Pierson estimates led to 15% to 40% staff attrition at some statistical agencies. 

“The biggest impacts so far have been just the reductions of force, which are collateral damage,” said Pierson, leaving fewer trained statisticians to sample, survey, and analyze results for error, seasonal, or regional variation. (ASA is monitoring individual actions to change federal databases and data collection here.)

This, combined with funding cuts, is starting to impact core economic data, like the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ consumer price index, said Michael Strain at the American Enterprise Institute.

“We’ve seen the government do less field surveys to come up with the official measure of consumer price inflation, and that’s just because they don’t have adequate funding,” he said. “If the government slightly mismeasures consumer price inflation, that can mean spending hundreds of billions of dollars on Social Security payments that it shouldn’t be spending.”

Strain said maintaining the quality and integrity of federal economic data “is something that I am very concerned about. High-quality government data is extremely important to financial markets, business decisions, households’ decisions.”

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for BLS said the agency “remains committed to providing the public with accurate and timely data … BLS supplements direct data collection with various alternative data sources, including purchased data files, crowd-sourced data, and administrative records,” and that despite current challenges, “BLS remains confident in the quality of the information we produce.” (BLS’s documentation of changes to data collection methods for CPI and PPI.)

Former BLS Commissioner Erica Groshen, who is now a senior economic advisor at the Cornell ILR School, said the agency so far has maintained the integrity of its most important economic reports — for instance, on employment and prices.

“They’re trying to preserve the quality of the headline numbers that drive monetary policy, appear in long-term contracts, while adjusting to having real staffing and resource issues,” she said. “These changes are intended to preserve the integrity of the top-line number, at the expense of some of the granularity that was available before.”  

Groshen predicted that in the face of ongoing funding cuts — BLS faces an 8% nominal funding reduction under the president’s budget, she said — the agency might eventually have to stop publishing some of its other reports. She said those most likely to be scaled back or cancelled include: “the American Time Use Survey, the national longitudinal surveys, occupational injuries and illnesses, and even JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey), because the information is a little bit aged when it comes out.”

For more of a data-informed understanding of the economy, check out the Marketplace Dozen, which features charts and graphics on jobs, inflation, and more.