Maggie Levenstein (3:05)

Agencies weren't sure that their websites would be consistent with the policies. They just brought the entire websites down, and that meant that data that had been collected and was accessed through those websites became inaccessible.

Tim Harford (3:18)

While this was happening, the Department of Government Efficiency was plowing on with their goal of cutting $2 trillion from government spending. They haven't got anywhere close to those savings.

Maggie Levenstein (3:29)

By the way, lots and lots of people were fired. And those people are often people who produce data or people who provide access to data. And without those people in place, access was impossible. And there also were budget cuts that were affecting data access and data collection going forward.

Tim Harford (3:48)

Now, most of the government websites did eventually reappear. Some data sets were fully restored, but some data sets were discontinued and some reappeared. Although researchers soon noticed they'd been changed.

Maggie Levenstein (4:03)

There were actual decisions for particular data sets to alter them to obscure information about gender identity or about vaccines or about sexual behavior or about climate, that those were policy areas where there's a lot that the administration didn't want people to have access to that data about those questions. And so those data were removed or were altered.

Tim Harford (4:28)

When data goes missing or is altered, it can have very real life consequences. For example, some might see the eradication of the non binary gender category as purely a symbolic move. But we know that teenagers who identify as non binary more likely to be more vulnerable to certain risks than their peers. That's something we couldn't have known without collecting the data in the past. And without the data now, are we.

Maggie Levenstein (4:55)

Providing the appropriate social supports to them? It's very hard to know without the data that was being collected about the mental health of young people and their gender identity and their risk and their sexual behaviors. When we don't have that information, it's much harder to provide the resources that people need to live full and healthy lives.

Tim Harford (5:19)

The data at risk spans all areas of life and society. Recently, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that when calculating cpi, the consumer prices index, they would stop collecting the data from three cities due to budgetary cuts.

Maggie Levenstein (5:36)

Businesses rely on these and they rely on them to be high quality measures. When we reduce spending and the resources that the BLS has, that we get lower quality measures. And as a result, businesses are kind of much more likely to be flying blind.

Tim Harford (5:56)

Many websites also now have government mandated disclaimers on their homepage throwing doubt on the data. For example, if you go on the cdc, the center for Disease Control and Prevention's homepage for national HIV surveillance systems, you're met with this.

Maggie Levenstein (6:13)

Per a court order, HHS is required to restore this website as of 11:59pm Eastern Time, February 11, 2025. Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female.

Tim Harford (6:38)

The fate of other data Sets is uncertain. For example, a decades old dataset that monitors birth outcomes in the us. Prams.

John Cubali (6:47)

Prams, or the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, is kind of the gold standard for assessing and monitoring maternal and child health in the us. That's an area where the US has consistently lagged behind other high income countries.

Tim Harford (7:03)

That's John Cubali, a research assistant professor at the University of Michigan who specialises in epidemiology. The Department of Health and Human Services states that the purpose of PRAMS is to reduce infant morbidity and mortality by influencing programmes and policies aimed at reducing health problems among mothers and infants. As an infant is around three times more likely to die in the US than in Finland, Japan or Sweden, this seems like a pretty important data set.

John Cubali (7:35)

It's something that is used both by policymakers and by researchers really to understand how are different aspects of maternal and child health changing over time and what populations are most impacted. That's really important information that you need to have if you're going to be considering how to design interventions to address some of those challenges.

Tim Harford (7:57)

This data is collected by local states and governments and then sent to the CDC to be merged and for population weighting to be added. To access the data, researchers needed to apply for access and sign a declaration stating they wouldn't share the data.

John Cubali (8:13)

I started getting contacted by researchers and essentially these requests were just going unanswered. I submitted multiple requests myself. I reached out to that office directly. You know, I never heard any response. And so essentially any of the data from the last 10 years, so 2016 or later, that's not publicly available. And so if you did not have access to that already, you're kind of out of luck at this point.

Tim Harford (8:37)

Do we know whether they're still collecting the data?

John Cubali (8:39)

Yeah, there is some uncertainty around that. There was an announcement, I believe in early to mid February saying, oh, we're going to discontinue this data collection. And there was a massive backlash and outcry and there was kind of a clarification, oh, no, we're not going to discontinue this, but we're going to kind of push it back until April 2025 and then we'll start it up again. But April 1, the entire prams office was essentially fired. And so now it's really uncertain what this means for this data collection moving forward.

Tim Harford (9:11)

Since February, there's been a scramble to try and safeguard as much data as possible. Both Maggie and John are involved in this process, but snapshots of old web pages do not a full data set make.

Maggie Levenstein (9:23)

So there's some data that you can't get to at all. There's some data that we don't know is gone yet. There's also data that's been preserved, but we don't know for sure that it hasn't been changed. And you also don't have the context, what we call metadata, the description of the data, all the things that allow you to make inference from the data.

Tim Harford (9:44)

The case remains open. Thanks to Maggie Levenstein and John Cubali. That is all we have time for this week, but if you have any questions or comments, please email in to more or lessbc.com until next week. Goodbye.

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Maggie Levenstein (10:38)

America is changing, and so is the world.

Tim Harford (10:42)

But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.

Maggie Levenstein (10:50)

I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm.

Tim Harford (10:53)

Tristan Redmond in London, and this is the Global Story.

Maggie Levenstein (10:56)

Every weekday we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet.

Tim Harford (11:02)

Listen on BBC or wherever you get your podcasts.