Trump Administration Deletes or Alters Hundreds of US Government Datasets

By Staff, Agencies

The Trump administration has deleted at least 28 federal datasets and altered another 338 over the past year and a half, raising concerns that critical information on public health, education, the environment, and law enforcement is being removed or changed to fit political priorities.

The figures come from an online tracker launched by dataindex.us, a group of data policy experts, researchers, and developers monitoring changes to government data.

The tracker covers more than 60 federal agencies and identifies health data as the most affected, accounting for about 40% of the deleted or modified collections.

Among the affected datasets are federal records on law enforcement misconduct, surveys tracking physical, sexual, and emotional violence against children and youth, and real-time pollution readings from US embassy air monitors worldwide.

Health data has faced particularly significant changes. Multiple Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveys have removed questions on gender identity following Trump’s executive order targeting what it calls “gender ideology.”

Affected programs include HIV surveillance, violent death reporting, diabetes prevention, intimate partner and sexual violence surveys, and studies tracking PrEP use among gay men and communities of color.

At least four health datasets have also stopped being updated, including the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration’s Drug Abuse Warning Network, which was used to monitor drug-related emergency room visits and identify emerging overdose trends.

Public health experts warned that removing or interrupting such data can undermine the ability to detect emerging health crises and assess how communities are affected.

Thomas Babor, a public health and addiction specialist, said eliminating key surveys risks erasing institutional memory needed to understand and respond to epidemics.

Meanwhile, other affected datasets include a US Department of Agriculture survey tracking farm employment and wages, which helped determine minimum pay rates for H-2A visa workers, and a National Center for Education Statistics survey covering the pay and working conditions of teachers and principals.

Dataindex.us co-founder Christopher Dick said the tracker was created because it was difficult to determine how many federal datasets had actually disappeared.

US agencies are not required to notify the public when data collections end, while some datasets have stopped updating because of staffing shortages and others have been quietly removed from government websites.

The group compiled its findings through research, media reports, government employees, dataset users, social media monitoring, and regulatory notices.

However, co-founder Denice Ross said the tracker is not comprehensive and likely undercounts the number of deleted or altered datasets.

The group is now urging researchers, journalists, government workers, and others who rely on federal data to identify additional datasets that may have been removed or changed.