When the Trump administration said last week that it would stop requiring thousands of industrial facilities to report their planet-warming pollution, the move fit a growing pattern: If data points to a problem, stop collecting the data.
At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, experts are no longer tracking the most expensive extreme weather events, those that cause at least $1 billion in damage.
At NASA, Trump officials want to decommission two powerful satellites that provide precise measurements of the greenhouse gases that are driving climate change.
And at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, layoffs have gutted a division that maintains statistics on car crashes, gun violence and homicides, among other things.
The consequences of these moves could be far-reaching, experts said, since the government cannot address a problem if it cannot quantify the issue in the first place.
“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,” said Sarah Pralle, an associate professor of political science at Syracuse University.
“Measuring itself is a political act with political consequences,” Dr. Pralle said. “And clearly the Trump administration does not want to do anything to alleviate a problem like climate change.”
The recent moves echo an episode from President Trump’s first term, when federal statistics showed coronavirus cases surging in June 2020. “If we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any,” Mr. Trump said at the time.
The impulse to get rid of facts and figures that the president dislikes has reached new heights in Mr. Trump’s second term, where it has extended to the officials who oversee that information. In August, for instance, the president fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, saying without evidence that weak jobs numbers had been “rigged” and “phony.”
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, defended the administration’s handling of government data, saying the president was committed to accuracy.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, agencies are refocusing on their core missions and shifting away from ideological activism,” Ms. Rogers said 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.”
At the E.P.A., Trump officials said on Friday that they would end the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, the country’s most comprehensive way to track the heat-trapping greenhouse gases that are dangerously warming the planet. Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, said in a statement that the program was “nothing more than bureaucratic red tape.”
For the past 15 years, the program has collected data from roughly 8,000 industrial facilities nationwide, including coal-burning power plants, oil refineries and steel mills. The publication of this data has resulted in many companies reducing their emissions, most likely because the firms tried to become greener than their competitors, according to 2023 research by Sorabh Tomar, an assistant professor of accounting at Southern Methodist University.
“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 said, referring to the popular group fitness classes.
The E.P.A. program has its conservative critics. Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who directs the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment at the Heritage Foundation, a right-of-center research organization, argued that it had imposed burdensome reporting requirements that had stifled American businesses.
“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,” Ms. Furchtgott-Roth said. (China and India, however, both require many large companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions.)
In the United States, the Trump administration’s efforts to end emissions measurements extend even to space, where officials want to decommission and possibly destroy two NASA satellites that monitor greenhouse gases and cost more than $800 million to launch. These satellites have provided highly precise measurements of carbon dioxide, one of the most prevalent greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere.
At the same time, the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund recently lost contact with another satellite that had monitored methane emissions from oil and gas sites worldwide. Methane is an even more powerful greenhouse gas that is roughly 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, said the satellite known as MethaneSAT had collected a little under a year’s worth of data before its demise. He said the group planned to analyze and release that 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 said.
At NOAA, Trump officials said in May that they would stop updating a list of the country’s most expensive weather disasters that cost at least $1 billion each. Kim Doster, a NOAA spokeswoman, said in an email that the decision came in response to “evolving priorities and staffing changes.”
The list of so-called billion-dollar disasters had surged from just a handful per year in the 1980s to an average of 23 per year from 2020 through 2024. Experts had attributed the increase to more people living in hazard-prone areas as well as climate change, which has increased the frequency and severity of disasters like hurricanes, wildfires and drought.
State and local governments had relied on the NOAA database when deciding whether to invest in projects like elevating roads and bridges to protect against extreme flooding. Insurance companies had also used it to inform their advertising 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,” said Jesse M. Keenan, an associate professor and director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University.
At the C.D.C., the administration last month fired about 170 employees at the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, which collects data on issues as varied as car crashes, drownings, gun violence and traumatic brain injuries. The House version of the government spending bill would also eliminate the center’s funding.
The layoffs and proposed funding cuts could jeopardize the maintenance of the National Violent Death Reporting System, which tracks homicides, suicides and violent deaths caused by law enforcement officers acting in the line of duty, said Sharon Gilmartin, executive director of the Safe States Alliance, a nonprofit group focused on injury and violence prevention.
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 said. For example, when the statistics showed a surge in suicides by law enforcement officers in certain states, the National Sheriffs’ Association began offering mental health counseling and other programming in those areas, she said.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department, the C.D.C.’s parent agency, said the database is up and running at the moment.
“C.D.C. databases that track data on concussions, car crashes and suicides remain operational,” Mr. Nixon said 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 has begun to disappear, several groups of self-described data nerds have been racing to preserve vast amounts of federal information. One of these initiatives, the Data Rescue Project, has archived 1,244 data sets across 86 government offices with the help of more than 500 volunteers.
“The U.S. government is one of the world’s largest data producers — the scale is massive,” said Lena Bohman, a founding member of the Data Rescue Project.
This information, she said, “is used all over the place in ways that people don’t always appreciate.”
Maxine Joselow reports on climate policy for The Times.
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