The Trump Administration’s War on Data

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The CIA World Factbook occupies a special place in the memories of elder Millennials like me. It was an enormous compendium of essential facts about every country around the world, carefully collected from across the federal government. This felt especially precious when the World Factbook went online in 1997 (it had previously been a classified internal publication printed on paper, then a declassified print resource), a time when the internet still felt new and unsettled. Unlike many other pages on the World Wide Web, it was reliable enough that you could even get away with citing it in schoolwork. And there was a special thrill in the idea that the CIA, a famously secretive organization, was the one providing it to you.

Memories are now the only place the World Factbook resides. In a post online yesterday, the agency noted that the site “has sunset,” though it provided no explanation for why. (The agency did not immediately reply to my inquiry about why, nor has it replied to other outlets.) The Associated Press noted that the move “follows a vow from Director John Ratcliffe to end programs that don’t advance the agency’s core missions.”

The demise of the World Factbook is part of a broad war on information being waged by the Trump administration. This is different from the administration’s assault on truth, in which the president and the White House lie prolifically or deny reality. This is something more fundamental: It’s a series of steps that by design or in effect block access to data, and in doing so erode the concept of a shared frame for all Americans. “Though the World Factbook is gone, in the spirit of its global reach and legacy, we hope you will stay curious about the world and find ways to explore it … in person or virtually,” the CIA wrote in the valedictory post. Left unsaid: You’re on your own to figure it out now.

If the World Factbook was indeed shut down because it didn’t meet Ratcliffe’s standard for core CIA functions, that reflects the Trump administration’s impoverished view of the government’s role. The World Factbook was a public service that helped Americans and others around the globe be informed, created a positive association with a shadowy agency, and spread U.S. soft power by providing a useful service free to all. I’ve been unable to determine how much it cost the government to maintain, but there’s no reason to think it would be substantive.

At least the raw information the World Factbook collected is available elsewhere (and the current version of the Factbook is available on the Internet Archive). The same is not true of some of the other casualties in the war on information, which have fallen victim to both ideology and incompetence. The executive branch has removed data from its websites, such as those of the CDC, the Census Bureau, and other departments, or removed the webpages that hosted them. Almost 3,400 data sets were removed from Data.gov in the first month of Trump’s term alone. At the start of the second Trump administration, some nongovernmental bodies worked to preserve government data by scraping information from existing sources. That’s valuable as far as it goes, but it doesn’t help with future data—or data that never get collected in the first place.

As the University of Michigan law professors Samuel R. Bagenstos and Ellen D. Katz write in a new paper, “The Trump Administration has scrapped existing obligations to collect and report racial, ethnic and gender-based data involving law enforcement, education, federal contracts, public health, environmental justice, and social research.” In some cases, the administration has simply stopped collecting information. In others, it has significantly changed what data it collects, especially information related to gender identity and race, because of executive orders from the president.

These shifts may sound abstract, but changes in federal data-collecting can have direct impacts on people’s lives and livelihoods. As NOTUS reported this week, data erasure means it’s harder to disseminate word about opioid drugs, feed hungry Americans, assess U.S. schools, and understand changes in prices. After the CDC’s entire Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System staff was placed on administrative leave in April, maternal-mortality data weren’t collected for months. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose commissioner Trump fired last summer, did not report monthly jobs data for October, because of the fall government shutdown—the first time in 77 years that an unemployment rate was not released.

The war on information is perhaps even more dangerous than the war on truth. When people can see evidence that obviously contradicts what the administration is saying, they’re primed to disbelieve the officials. (Case in point: A new Quinnipiac poll finds that only 22 percent of people believe that Alex Pretti’s shooting was justified.) But democracy requires voters having access to accurate and shared information so that they can assess the claims that the government makes. This is what the Trump administration is undermining. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said that everyone was entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts. Now it’s not clear that anyone is entitled to any facts at all.

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Today’s News

The Trump administration issued a rule making it easier to discipline and potentially fire about 50,000 senior federal workers by reducing long-standing job protections.
The New START treaty between the United States and Russia has expired, ending decades-long limits on deployed nuclear warheads. No replacement talks are under way, and officials and experts warn that the lapse could fuel a new nuclear arms race.
The Trump administration is set to launch TrumpRx.gov, a website designed to connect Americans with drugmakers to buy prescription medicines directly and, according to the White House, at lower costs.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: A new iron curtain now separates American dance and Russian dance, bringing an abrupt end to a rich dialogue that spanned centuries, Sara Krolewski writes.

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Evening Read

Photo-illustration of Mike Vrabel with the players Rhamondre Stevenson and Drake Maye — Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Sources: Kathryn Riley / Getty; Winslow Townson / Getty.

Mike Vrabel Is Redefining NFL Coaching

By Sally Jenkins

The New England Patriots coach Mike Vrabel leads from his ventricles—not from shallow-chested sentiment but from the pump action of his brawny heart, out of which blood occasionally makes its way to spurt from a split lip after a head bump from one of his players. During the team’s playoff run, the defensive tackle Milton Williams gave Vrabel a celebratory helmet to the mouth. “I forgot Vrabes ain’t got no helmet on,” Williams said, to which Vrabel, a former linebacking great, replied, “I’ve been hit harder than that.”

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