Trump Administration’s Data Deletions Set Off ‘a Mad Scramble,’ Researcher Says

NEW YORK (AP) — Researchers are in what one described as “a mad scramble” to sort out what public data the Trump administration has deleted from government websites and electronic publications.

Late last week, federal agencies took down scores of government webpages as staffers hurried to comply with President Donald Trump’s order rolling back protections for transgender people, which required the removal of “gender ideology” language from websites, contracts and emails.

Some of the sites were back online Monday, but data analysts say it’s not clear exactly what was removed or changed.

“You go looking for something and it’s just not there,” said Amy O’Hara, a Georgetown University researcher who is president of the Association of Public Data Users.

Social science researchers and other federal data users on Monday described feeling like a five-alarm fire was triggered when they discovered late last week that vital federal datasets were inaccessible.

It sparked “a mad scramble right now” to grab copies of whatever federal data was posted before, O’Hara said.

While the administration’s stated goal was to delete gender and transgender terminology, O’Hara said some researchers worry that other politically charged topics — such as climate change or vaccines — might be removed or altered.

A expert panel affiliated with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention demanded a meeting on the deletions.

The committee, chartered by Congress to advise the CDC director, asked the agency’s acting director, Susan Monarez, for an explanation about why it had cut off access to datasets “that allow people across the country to understand the health of their communities.”

The panel had yet to receive a response, said committee member Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a former federal health official who is now a health policy expert at Johns Hopkins University.

Experts say datasets and summaries were affected, but so too were codebooks that explain different variables. They say they also saw changes to published research that used affected datasets, and even redactions to lists of publications about certain topics.

“The scale of this is quite stunning,” O’Hara said.

Researchers are still stumbling on what was taken down or changed, she added.

“We are finding out about omissions when somebody goes searching for it,” O’Hara said.

On Monday, for instance, when a query was made to access certain data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s most comprehensive survey of American life, users got a response that said the area was “unavailable due to maintenance.”

The CDC’s official public portal for health data, data.cdc.gov, was taken down entirely on Friday but went back up over the weekend, albeit with a yellow ribbon at the top saying: “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.” The agency’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey data was restored too, but with at least one of the gender columns missing and its data documentation removed.

CDC officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Some researchers took steps to make sure federal information stays available. On Monday, the American Sexually Transmitted Diseases Association posted federal STD data and treatment guidelines that were hastily downloaded from the CDC website Thursday night.

“Taxpayers paid to collect those data, to analyze those data, and to make them public for people to use,” explained Abigail Norris Turner, an Ohio State University medical researcher who is the association’s president.

“Executive orders don’t change who has STIs or who needs evidence-based care for them,” she added. “We wanted to make sure that rigorous information continued to be available to people to provide the best possible care.”

The U.S. statistical system is considered the best in the world and researchers fear that the removals will undermine trust and put the integrity of the data at risk.

“This sets a really dangerous precedent that any administration can come in and delete whatever they don’t like,” said Beth Jarosz, a senior program director at the Population Reference Bureau. “Regardless of your politics, this should alarm you since this is taxpayer-funded data and it belongs to the public.”

In a joint statement, the presidents of the Population Association of America and the Association of Population Centers called the takedowns “unacceptable” and called on Congress and the Trump administration to restore the datasets.

Paul Schroeder, executive director of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, said people looking for data may have to resort to suing for access or submitting Freedom of Information Act requests for the datasets.

“The removal of several public datasets from agency websites goes against everything the statistical agencies stand for and were intended for,” Schroeder said Monday. “Public data users are being left in the dark about what is going on.”

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Schneider reported from Orlando, Florida. AP data journalist Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this story.

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