By Undermining Federal Data, Trump Is Following an Authoritarian Playbook

One of the defining features of Donald Trump’s second term is an aggressive drive to control the narrative, in part by burying inconvenient evidence. A key example is his regime’s multi-pronged assault on federal data infrastructure and independent institutions that safeguard public knowledge. In just its first hundred days, Trump’s regime has laid siege to federal data agencies, eliminated or drastically overhauled key reports, ceased collecting crucial information, and pressured scientists and statisticians to alter findings that conflict with the Trumpian political narrative.

These attacks on government statistics pose a threat to democratic accountability, one that will unmoor demands for change by making it harder for the public to keep track of how much the goalposts have moved and how much damage is currently occurring. Trump’s approach is notably distinct from that of previous administrations; while US politicians have long attempted to spin and cherry-pick data to suit their political ends, Trump has sought to erase information that does not fit his agenda. This authoritarian approach to government data is incompatible with a functioning democracy.

The US Census Bureau, already hollowed out by years of underfunding, has faced deeper hiring freezes and staffing cuts under Trump’s second term. These cuts threaten to slow field operations, delay key releases, and reduce oversight for data accuracy. Trump officials have also eschewed subject matter expertise by disbanding many of the Census Bureau’s outside advisory committees. Even more alarmingly, the Trump regime has brazenly disregarded privacy norms in its attempts to weaponize government data against immigrants. The harmful new precedents jeopardize the efforts of federal surveyors who rely on public trust to maintain adequate response rates.

The War on “DEI”

The Trump regime has further burdened federal statistical agencies with a reality-denying executive order targeting (nebulously defined) diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. The directive is premised on denying the actual diversity of the United States, and requires that products be quickly brought into compliance or scrubbed altogether. In addition to undermining data reliability and veracity, the new restrictions put additional strain on the underfunded and understaffed skeleton crews struggling to keep things afloat. Trump’s insistence on restoring something like Jim Crow in federal data products is awful in its own right. Compliance with his directive also diverts time and resources from mission-critical work, further hollowing out the government’s capacity to serve the public.

Efforts to comply with the Trump regime’s war on “DEI” meant that, for example, parts of the American Community Survey (ACS) Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) — a critical dataset used to track economic and demographic shifts across the US — were temporarily taken offline early in Trump’s second term. Codebooks for the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), a vital longitudinal dataset that tracks how working-class families use public assistance, were also made unavailable. Public access to multiple health datasets was temporarily suspended, along with summary pages that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) produces in part to guide medical practitioners. The unannounced purge left researchers scrambling to locate archived copies of datasets, while health care workers struggled to advise patients in the absence of once-reliable sources of information.

Defunding Data Preservation

Enter the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library that has played a critical role in preserving government websites, federal reports, and public communications from previous administrations. Among the Internet Archive’s key products is the Wayback Machine, which scrapes and preserves websites in a way that allows users to track site changes and retrieve information that has been removed. The Wayback Machine also accepts user submissions, meaning researchers who had already downloaded missing datasets could make them available to others. Amid the alarming series of dataset removals and alterations early in Trump’s second term, the Internet Archive took on renewed importance in preserving data access and institutional memory.

This makes the latest maneuver by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — an Orwellianly named group of government saboteurs — all the more egregious. DOGE has once again supplanted Congress’ power of the purse, this time to slash funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), including by rescinding already-awarded grants. Among the casualties is the Internet Archive, which was midway through a $345,960 NEH-funded project to preserve access to historic government publications and web records. DOGE’s legally dubious defunding jeopardizes one of the final lines of defense against authoritarian memory-holing. As such, it’s hard not to conclude that the Archive is being targeted because its effectiveness makes it an obstacle to the Trump regime’s project of strategic erasure. After all, this is the same Trump who has impugned the integrity of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, implying that their standard revisions meant that their US employment estimates were fraudulent.

Deciding what gets measured, and how frequently those measurements are updated, are always political choices – if nothing else then because implementing those decisions uses finite resources. And politicians across the spectrum have presented data in ways that align with their policy goals. During the Biden administration, for example, public health advocates expressed concern when the CDC quietly recalibrated its cutoffs for “high”, “medium”, and “low” levels of COVID-19 in wastewater. Crucially, however, Biden’s CDC preserved public access to the underlying data so researchers and watchdogs could still see the full picture, making it possible to challenge the official narrative using a shared set of facts.

Trump’s conduct during his second term is different in kind from that of the Biden administration and others before it. Trump’s strategy has not been to spin or cherry-pick, but to erase inconvenient facts altogether. To do so, Trump has impugned the neutrality of the data and the integrity of career public servants, and his regime has circumvented Congress to gut public access to public information. Some have noted that the Trump regime’s actions are curiously out of sync with Project 2025, a conservative blueprint that appears to be shaping some of Trump’s second-term agenda. But viewed through the lens of an insecure authoritarian who doesn’t want to take chances with the truth, Donald Trump’s behavior makes perfect sense. It’s familiar territory for a man who attempted to rewrite the results of the 2020 presidential election — an election he continues to falsely insist he won.

The sabotage of data infrastructure is a form of epistemic control. If there is no record of how things were before, it becomes far easier to accept today’s reality as how things have always been. Devoid of context, things like economic contraction, climate disaster, erosion of public health, and ballooning inequality become unpleasant but inexplicable, rather than results of deliberate policy choices. Rejecting Trump’s authoritarian new normal means preserving the evidence that things weren’t always this way — and continuing to collect the data that makes it possible to track, understand, and challenge what comes next. That means safeguarding the information and the people that this regime is trying to disappear.