The covid.gov website says covid-19 most likely originated in a Chinese lab, although scientists are in fact deeply divided over its origin. A widely read report posted on energy.gov/topics/climate concludes that humans’ impact on climate is relatively small, a finding sharply at odds with the scientific consensus.
On DHS.gov, the government informs Americans that nearly 2 million undocumented migrants have “self-deported” this year, an assertion that mystifies researchers. And cdc.gov/vaccine-safety dismisses the conclusion that vaccines do not cause autism as not “evidence-based.”
Researchers and activists increasingly fear that under the Trump administration, the U.S. government is abdicating its historic role as a clearinghouse for reliable information — a momentous shift for what has been the world’s foremost producer of widely accepted data for everyone including academic researchers, local governments and ordinary citizens. Despite sharp swings in the worldview of successive presidents, most agencies have maintained their reputation for evenhanded information.
That may now be under threat.
“Federal agencies, especially the ones that have historically been nonpartisan, have done historically a pretty good job of maintaining credibility across administrations,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California. “What we have seen in the last few months is the complete and total collapse of that credibility.”
The issue arose again Thursday when the Labor Department announced a surprisingly low inflation figure of 2.7 percent for November. Economists immediately noted quirks that could have artificially lowered the rate: prices were not gathered until the second half of November, when Thanksgiving discounts kicked in, and no increase was shown in housing costs, though they clearly went up.
Skeptics, revisionists and conspiracy theorists have long challenged facts and figures supplied by the U.S. government, sometimes with more justification than others. Now doubters oversee much of the government’s vast research and information machinery, while it is outsiders who are scrambling to preserve and promote scientifically accepted data.
Across the government, much information is simply no longer being collected.
The Department of Homeland Security for years had issued monthly reports on immigration statistics; the Trump administration stopped that practice in February. The law requires the administration to conduct an annual report on the federal workforce; officials did not deliver it this year. Dozens of climate change reports and data collections have been taken down across the government.
When information is produced, it may be in skeletal form. The Education Department is required by law to produce a yearly report on the condition of education in America, but the 2025 version omits key data and is “extremely truncated,” according to Rachel Dinkes, president of the Knowledge Alliance, a coalition of research education groups.
“Data is a flashlight that lets us see, and if we don’t have that light, we’re in the dark,” Dinkes said. “There is no other entity that can provide reliable, high quality timely data that the federal government provides. It’s unique to the federal role.”
An Education Department spokesperson said the agency will update the information “on a rolling basis,” ensuring it is current. Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said DHS provides updates on arrests and deportations “regularly — more than monthly.”
A number of ongoing surveys have also been dropped, including the Agricultural Labor Survey, which collected wage information from farms; the Drug Abuse Warning Network, which monitored hospital data on substance abuse; and a household survey on hunger, according to watchdogs.
The Trump administration responds that it is embracing truth and transparency after the waste and bias of previous administrations. The academic establishment is hidebound and leftist, they say, and the administration is championing “gold standard science,” in the words of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy told a Senate Committee recently that under former president Joe Biden, “a countless number of policies, panels, grants and messages were construed for overt political reasons.” In contrast, he said, he has “removed divisive ideology from committees and grants.”
It is hard to overstate the U.S. government’s importance as the world’s leading producer, collector and disseminator of trusted information on almost every topic, including population, employment and weather. The Constitution ordered the government to conduct a census every 10 years, and that role has only expanded as the U.S. has assumed global leadership.
“It touches every aspect of our lives,” said Denice Ross, former U.S. chief data scientist. “Federal data are like invisible infrastructure that we take for granted, like the internet or bridges. It’s fundamental to running a modern society, and we don’t even notice that it’s there.”
The government’s record of honest fact-finding is hardly spotless. The Pentagon Papers in 1971 revealed that several administrations had misrepresented the facts of the Vietnam War. More recently, debates have swirled around the FBI’s crime statistics and federal data on race and genetics.
But the growing aggressiveness of conspiracy theorists — who question the official version of everything from the Charlie Kirk assassination to Jeffrey Epstein’s death — suggests that distrust in government information goes far deeper than particular incidents. President Donald Trump’s rise was fueled in part by those who feared the machinations of a “Deep State” potentially in league with a ring of satanic pedophiles.
With Trump back in office, federal information gathering has taken hits from many directions, including sweeping staff cuts and Americans’ distrust of surveys. Most federal statistical agencies have lost more than 20 percent of their staff, according to a new study by the American Statistical Association.
Trump is sending unmistakable warnings to those who provide information he dislikes.
When the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised its jobs report for May and June, Trump fired BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer, saying the numbers were “RIGGED.” When the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that U.S. strikes on Iran had not significantly hurt its nuclear capability, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the agency’s director, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse.
Trump has long shown an instinctive skepticism of data and facts. During the covid-19 pandemic in his first term, he mused, perhaps jokingly, that if there was less testing, the number of cases would go down. He has increasingly taken to citing precise but impossible statistics, like saying he cut drug prices by 1,500 percent. Denying a well-established fact — that Biden won the 2020 election — appears to be an asset in winning an administration job.
The administration is also discarding disfavored facts in quieter ways, many researchers say. That includes not just discontinuing studies, but affirmatively producing reports that are dubious or controversial.
Many researchers cite an Energy Department report on climate change in July, which concluded that global warming is “less damaging economically than commonly believed,” aggressive mitigation strategies “may be misdirected” and U.S. policy has “undetectably small impacts.” Few climate scientists would agree with any of those conclusions.
The Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, rewrote its “Causes of Climate Change” page to eliminate any mention of human activity as a catalyst. Swain, of the University of California, said the alteration of a formerly reliable webpage is especially revealing.
“It is actively offering misinformation that is scientifically inaccurate,” Swain said. “It would even be different if this was a new page. It would still be wrong, but this is more illustrative of intent. … They are both very problematic, but one is more deeply concerning because it demonstrates empirically a willingness to misinform.”
Trump climate officials say it is their predecessors who substituted ideology for science, embracing climate action with an irrational zeal. “This agency no longer takes marching orders from the climate cult,” said EPA spokeswoman Brigit Hirsch.
“At the Trump EPA we uphold gold-standard science, total transparency, and a commitment to fulfilling our statutory obligations,” Hirsch added. “Previous iterations of the website that do not meet those standards are archived and available to the public.”
Joshua Sharfstein, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said HHS is no longer even following its own guidelines on how to analyze data, such as subjecting it to good-faith criticism.
“That foundational infrastructure is being corrupted,” Sharfstein said. “You have scientists who are terrified to speak because they’ve been threatened. You have qualified people being fired from advisory committees. You have the opposite of a rational process for figuring out the right thing to do.”
Critics also say some reports are eliminated because they reflect poorly on the administration. The Social Security Administration, for example, stopped reporting call wait times and other performance metrics amid record backlogs this summer. Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, said the scrapped survey of federal workers was also unlikely to yield positive results.
“They took a hammer to the workforce and then decided to eliminate the survey,” said Stier, whose group advocates for federal workers. “They damage a fundamental part of the country — in this case the federal workforce — and then they deep-six the data.”
This upended information landscape has produced a modest but notable backlash. A small army of researchers and data enthusiasts is focused intently on monitoring which data is eliminated and scrambling to preserve reports and datasets.
A group called the Data Rescue Project, for example, recently said it had archived a collection of geospatial data, helpful for emergency planning, that went offline in August. Public Environmental Data Partners, a coalition of groups, is accumulating cloud storage space to build a hub of erased government data.
Another initiative, America’s Essential Data, has assembled an “In Memoriam” list of “Dearly Departed Datasets.” Still others are filing request for hidden data under the Freedom of Information Act.
“I would even call it a social movement of people who are concerned about the future of data,” said Lynda Kellam, a data librarian at the University of Pennsylvania and a founding member of the Data Rescue Project. “I don’t think people understand how precious it is that we have access to this information. It is key to democracy, since it makes it possible to have an informed electorate.”
In some cases, researchers say, the administration is not completely erasing data, but rather leaving chunks of it in raw form in little-known agency records rather than collating it as it used to.
That makes it all but useless, researchers say. “Data is there to be used,” said Gretchen Gehrke, co-founder of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, another data rescue group. “If it is in an almost unusable state, then it is not serving its purpose.”
Activists say private groups cannot come close to replacing what the U.S. government does. But without an alternative, some Americans have begun turning to private sources in areas like childhood vaccination.
“Given what is happening on vaccines, the center of gravity of serious recommendations is moving away from the federal government,” Sharfstein said. “The American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical groups will be providing the most credible recommendations. That may not change back so easily. Maybe that is the world we will have to live in until we can figure something else out.”
Some experts warn that if even some federal data proves unreliable, it could dissuade Americans from believing any government information at all. Existing skeptics on the political edges could be joined by centrists in dismissing government claims, removing another pillar of Americans’ shared beliefs.
“What is the path that average American would take if you no longer can trust federal sources?” Swain said. “What is the path to a sense of shared reality, to making decisions that are information-dependent? How do we do that?”
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