Can you trust government data these days? And what if you can't find government data anymore - that is, data that used to be easy to find, such as air pollution, climate change, health data, whether you live near hazardous chemicals, and certain medical topics? Well... it turns out that the current U.S. government has deleted or altered nearly 400 data sets since January 2025.
So what information can we now trust? It is interesting that the independent news site The Guardian is writing about this, but silence in most of the media in the US. Ooops. Knowing what information or data has been altered or deleted is very important to know because the US federal government does not have to notify us that that are deleting or altering data sets.
To follow in depth go to the online tracker , the site put together by dataindex.us (the group of researchers and experts that have put together this information in one place). The list is not complete, so they also want YOU to notify them if you know of more deletions and alterations.
Excerpts from The Guardian: Trump 2.0 has deleted or altered nearly 400 US datasets, endangering public health, education and more
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.
“We’re at a very vulnerable point as a nation,” said Denice Ross, former US chief data scientist under the Biden administration and a co-founder of dataindex.us. “We’re facing a future where we are not going to have the information that we need to make decisions that will save lives and benefit American communities.”
The tracker includes detailed information about deleted or altered datasets from more than 60 federal agencies that span the environment, labor, law enforcement and other topics. 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.
Other deleted datasets include the US Department of Agriculture’s twice-annual survey of farm employers that counted the number of farm workers employed and their wages that informed the minimum pay rates for H-2A visa workers and a National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) survey of the pay and working conditions of teachers and principals at public and private schools across the country.
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 question we’re trying to answer is: are certain datasets being taken away that have an impact on the American people?” Dick said.