Where U.S. Government Data Is Disappearing

Dear reader,

Over the past several months as we’ve explored different measures of how the U.S. is faring, a pattern has emerged: In multiple areas, statistics and reports long compiled by the federal government were delayed, missing or suspended.

Ordinarily, much federal data is the domain of a niche network of wonks. When a federal report goes missing or loses key information, think tanks, advocacy organizations and researchers may sound the alarm, but the broader public might never know.

But the sprawling federal data apparatus has an even vaster set of uses. Cities, businesses, schools and individuals rely on government reports for all sorts of functions, and if the data collected is faulty — or if it’s not collected at all — it can have far-ranging consequences.

For one example, flash back to September when our colleague Caroline Hopkins Legaspi reported a story with an ominous headline: “Cuts to the Food Safety System Threaten Americans’ Health.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had quietly pared back its food pathogen tracking system and would no longer mandate the collection of data on the spread of several pathogens associated with food-borne illnesses, including cyclospora.

Ten months later, Caroline was reporting on the aftermath: Thousands of Americans have reported extreme cases of diarrhea, many requiring hospitalization, in a cyclospora outbreak.

This week, our dive into the indicators goes meta: My colleague Ama Sarpomaa and I look into the health of the federal data apparatus itself.

— Matthew Thompson

What’s happening to federal data collection?

The federal data apparatus is so vast that it defies simple quantification. Data.gov currently hosts more than 362,000 data sets, but that includes data provided by states, and excludes some data available only to select users.

During the first Trump administration, environmental researchers and advocacy groups raised alarms about sudden disappearances of federal data. So the tight-knit network of people most familiar with it were on guard even before the second Trump administration began.

“I was serving as the chief data scientist at the United States in the Biden-Harris administration,” said Denice Ross. Just a few weeks after the election, she hosted some of her colleagues in her dining room. “We took the pictures off the wall and we mapped out what do we think might happen to federal data,” she said.

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By February 2025, thousands of pages were removed from government websites. “Although government websites often change between administrations,” Ethan Singer reported in an article for The Times, “this weekend’s changes appear to be of a much wider scope than those that have happened in the past.”

As fast as government data was disappearing, though, a colossal grass-roots effort to back up and archive that data was amassing. A group of organizations already maintained projects, such as the End of Term Archive, that mirrored federal data, some predating the first Trump administration. That February, several groups came together to form the Data Rescue Project, inviting volunteers to archive and mirror some of the public data at risk.

Ross, now director of federal data policy at the Federation of American Scientists, said she and her colleagues were surprised not just by the speed at which data was disappearing, but also by the near-immediate cuts to staffing and with them, the reduced capacity of the government to collect, process and disseminate information.

At F.A.S., Ross’s team created a URL tracker that monitored changes to government websites. Over the next year, that effort expanded into a project called the Data Checkup, which assesses six factors of risk for federal data sets. They found only a few dozen that had been terminated altogether. “Most of these data sets are facing like a very quiet or slow degradation over time,” Ross said.

What are the effects of these changes?

In many cases, often prompted by presidential executive orders, information about gender identity or race and ethnicity has been deleted from government surveys and reports. This prevents analysts from understanding which populations are most affected by common challenges, such as air pollution, and where resources and policy solutions should be applied, said Leah Hendey and Kathryn Pettit of the Urban Institute, who help steer the organization’s National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership. Evidence of clear disparities will begin to disappear from the record, they said.

Over the past year, the Trump administration made some of the largest cuts to food benefits since the inception of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In fall 2025, the Department of Agriculture announced that it would no longer release the annual report on household food security in the U.S., which had been distributed for 30 years. The department said the report had become “overly politicized, and upon subsequent review, is unnecessary to carry out the work of the department.”

“Ending the report will hide the impact of the cuts that have been made to SNAP,” said Crystal FitzSimons of the Food Research and Action Center, a nonprofit that supports anti-hunger programs. “We really need to understand whether or not families are struggling to put food on the table, how many families are starving, what the impact is.”

Several federal agencies, including the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, did not respond to requests for comment before our deadline.

What will happen from here?

Experts cited many parallel private-sector initiatives to protect the integrity of federal data:

Efforts to back up, preserve and monitor existing federal data are continuing. The Data Rescue Project maintains a robust list and invites additions from the public.
Many groups have brought lawsuits against agencies to try to prevent some changes to reporting and data collection. Democracy 2025, a liberal-leaning legal group, manages a litigation tracker that can be filtered to show cases involving data integrity.
Beth Jarosz, a board member at the Association for Public Data Users, said public education and maximizing public comment before changes to federal reports made an impact. Several organizations, such as the Food Research and Action Center, have produced guides to public comments on issues they follow.

What can I check out next?

Here’s a guide from our colleagues at Well on what to know about the cyclospora outbreak that’s causing severe stomach illnesses across the country.
In June, Quinn Glabicki reported on the effort by former staffers of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to reproduce climate science information formerly housed at climate.gov.
Growing climate uncertainty has fueled a boom for a disaster-tracking app, Watch Duty, that started with disseminating info on wildfires in California.
This week, Jason DeParle and the photographer Adriana Zehbrauskas gave Times readers a probing look at the aftermath of SNAP cuts in Arizona.
For The New York Times Magazine, Sheri Fink, who reported on the 2014 to 2016 Ebola outbreak from West Africa, looks at why communities grappling with epidemics often turn against health workers.

— Matthew Thompson and Ama Sarpomaa

Your turn

Test your knowledge: In February, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual revision to job estimates for the past two years. What did this revision find, relative to previous estimates?

1,000,000 more jobs

Tell us your thoughts: Do you rely on federal reports for your work or in your community? Have you experienced any effects of missing or faulty government data? Or do you have thoughts about the changes in what the government reports? Please email your thoughts to [email protected].

Following up: While our final send in our opposite of violence series last week focused on the health of charities in the U.S. (such as nonprofits that offer adolescent health and sex education programs, as our colleague Jan Hoffman reported this week), funding cuts to foreign aid have also shrunk or ended many global programs. Cuts to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the largest global H.I.V. program, for example, led to the closure of 1,700 H.I.V. treatment sites. This means fewer people, particularly children, are receiving treatments that have kept them alive.

Ama Sarpomaa contributed reporting.

The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.

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