No data, just vibes

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Unexplainable – "No data, just vibes" (Jan 26, 2026)

Overview

This episode of Unexplainable explores the importance of federal data collection in science and public health, and the alarming consequences of recent rollbacks under the second Trump administration. Hosted by Meredith Hodinot, the conversation features Vox reporters Dylan Scott (health) and Umair Irfan (science & climate), who break down how key government agencies and their data-gathering missions have been dismantled or disrupted. They discuss the cascading effects—on research, policy, public trust, and our fundamental understanding of reality—when robust, publicly available government data disappears.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Vital Role of Federal Data

• Historical Impact: Blood lead level surveys by the CDC in the 1970s led to sweeping health regulations and massive reductions in lead exposure.
  • “Survey data ... is the bedrock of good science, so it can profoundly impact our everyday lives.” (Meredith Hodinot, 01:58)
• The federal government is uniquely positioned to collect large-scale, reliable data across the nation.
  • “The federal government is like the biggest public health pollster that we have.” (Dylan Scott, 03:10)
• Only the federal government can deploy resources—like nationwide surveys, weather satellites, and environmental monitoring networks—at the required scale.
  • “Without this, we have a much more murky picture of what's going on in the country.” (Umair Irfan, 03:54)

Erosion of Data Collection Under the Trump Administration

• In the past year, key data-gathering offices like the EPA’s Office of Research and Development have been shuttered.
  • “The United States is now functioning without one of the most robust and best institutions that was doing this kind of work.” (Umair Irfan, 05:20)
• Deliberate Suppression: Government efforts to remove or obscure climate change data, e.g., Project 2025 and deleting climate references.
  • “Literally deleting the words ‘climate change’ in some cases ... There’s a pretty deliberate effort to stop data collection, to stop scientific research around the climate.” (Umair Irfan, 05:37)

Impact on Health, Science, and Everyday Life

• Reduced Data Collection: Certain health and demographic categories may not be tracked (e.g., LGBTQ health data, opioid overdose trends), leaving major blind spots.
  • “The administration just won’t collect data related to LGBTQ people. We’re going to have a much fuzzier picture into what's happening with those folks and their health.” (Dylan Scott, 06:41)
• Funding Cuts: Layoffs and changes at agencies like NIH reduce the capacity for critical research—both in monitoring problems and finding medical solutions.
  • “We won’t know what we missed out on ... we’re going to miss out on something as a result of these cuts.” (Dylan Scott, 08:20)
• Invisible Consequences: The lack of data will likely be invisible for years, leading to slow response times to emerging health or climate crises.
  • “Our blind spots are getting bigger and because those blind spots are getting bigger, we are more likely to get blindsided.” (Meredith Hodinot, 09:54)
• Trust at Risk: As public data sources shrink, trust in institutions (like weather forecasting) erodes—potentially endangering lives during disasters.
  • “If you don’t trust your weather forecast, are you going to believe when they issue an evacuation warning for a hurricane?” (Umair Irfan, 10:08)

Can We Recover Lost Ground?

• Archiving Efforts: Nonprofits and academics are racing to preserve government data before it disappears, but these efforts are small-scale and cannot replicate ongoing federal collection.
  • “In terms of the collection of the data itself, nothing really rivals the US Federal government ... it’s always going to be a stopgap measure.” (Umair Irfan, 13:34)
• Limits of Private Data: Private companies may fill some gaps but often have incentives (like paywalls) that reduce public access.
  • “Some of this publicly available information ... could end up behind a paywall.” (Umair Irfan, 15:32)
• Global Effects: The U.S. cutting climate monitoring cripples worldwide scientific efforts.
  • “The whole world is going to be losing an important measurement tool.” (Umair Irfan, 16:42)

Practical Struggles for Journalists and Researchers

• Reporters now face significant friction to answer basic questions, as official databases disappear.
  • “There used to be central places where I could reliably go to find basic facts ... They took that database offline.” (Umair Irfan, 17:02)

The Danger of Ideological Resistance to Data

• Data itself is often perceived as apolitical, but deciding what to measure and how is inherently political.
  • “People often think of data as this completely objective, apolitical, bloodless thing, and it’s not. There’s a lot of political decisions and value judgments that go into data collection.” (Umair Irfan, 20:45)
• The Trump administration’s solution to imperfect data is to stop collecting it or to question the validity of all data.
  • “They acknowledge an imperfect picture, and their solution is to not look at the picture at all.” (Umair Irfan, 21:00)
• Motivated reasoning—seeking data to match a predetermined conclusion—undermines scientific integrity.
  • “If you reach a conclusion first and then look backwards for the numbers that will support you, very likely you’ll find those numbers. But that’s not how you do science.” (Umair Irfan, 21:44)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the vanishing of trustworthy data:
  • “The reliability of that data might be more doubtful than it was in the past. An asterisk on every research paper that cites it might be appropriate.” – Dylan Scott (14:10)
• On the changing relationship to official sources:
  • “If the official sources are not aligning with your priors, you can find somebody else. And that ... sows distrust in the official sources of information.” – Dylan Scott (19:31)
• On the future’s unknowables:
  • “There are going to be health problems, health trends ... that we’re going to look back and think like we could have gotten on this sooner.” – Dylan Scott (09:00)
• Summing up the risk:
  • “Our blind spots are getting bigger and because those blind spots are getting bigger, we are more likely to get blindsided.” – Meredith Hodinot (09:54)
• Political choices behind science:
  • “There’s a lot of motivated reasoning going on here and that’s why this ... pushback on the numbers and trying to erode how we measure the world is so important and so troubling.” – Umair Irfan (21:59)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Lead survey and the bedrock of good science: 00:41–01:58
• Why federal data is irreplaceable: 03:10–04:21
• EPA Office of Research and Development shutdown: 04:33–05:26
• Deliberate erasure of climate change data: 05:37–06:38
• Rollbacks in health data collection and funding: 06:41–08:54
• Invisible and long-term consequences: 09:00–10:08
• Loss of public trust and social harms: 10:08–10:31
• Private/Nonprofit archiving efforts and their limits: 13:34–14:10
• Private sector’s role and challenges in filling the gap: 15:32–16:57
• Practical challenges for reporting: 17:02–18:22
• The ideological fight over data itself: 19:20–21:59

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Tone and Language

The conversation is urgent yet measured, with reporters expressing both technical expertise and deep concern about the future of knowledge, research, and trust in American life.

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For listeners, this episode reveals not just the details of disappearing public data, but also its real-world consequences—reminding us that without robust government science, we’re left not with facts, but just vibes.

Transcript

[Dylan Scott]

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[Dylan Scott]

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[Meredith Hodinot]

This is unexplainable. I'm Meredith Hodinot. Lead used to be everywhere. It was in the air, pumped out of industrial smokestacks and cars, burning leaded gasoline. It was in the water lining municipal water pipes. Lead was in the ground soil. It was painted onto walls. It was glazed onto dinner plates. And so in 1976, the CDC surveyed thousands of Americans across the country to see just how much of that lead was in people's blood.

[Dylan Scott]

And obviously that's like really labor intensive work. You've got to like go out in the field to a nationally representative sample, do this blood testing.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Dylan Scott reports on health for vox.

[Dylan Scott]

And what this survey reported back was that like blood lead levels were much higher than people had assumed and had reached a really concerning threshold.

[Meredith Hodinot]

This survey in the 70s was a wake up call. It led to decades of bans, regulations and emissions controls.

[Dylan Scott]

We've gotten to a place where it's like, you know, there is still lead poisoning in the U.S. but it's, we're in a completely different reality than we were 30, 40, 50 years ago. And that was made possible by the.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Survey data, Data going out into the world and collecting information on what's actually happening through surveys and blood tests, but also monitors, sensors, experiments. Data is the bedrock of good science, so it can profoundly impact our everyday lives. But over the last year, Dylan covering public health and Umair Fan covering science and the environment, they've seen the systems we rely on to collect good data get eroded away. Hello, Dylan. Hello, Umair. You guys report for vox's Health Science and Climate team. And so we're coming up on a year into the second Trump administration, a year that is totally transformed scientific research in this country. And I wanted to dig in with you. Like when I think of the federal government, I don't necessarily think, oh yeah, so crucial for gathering basic data I guess, like beyond the census or something. But, like, can you lay out how important the federal government is in this role?

[Dylan Scott]

Yeah, I mean, I cover healthcare. And something to your point, Meredith, that I think I knew in the back of my mind, but did not feel fully appreciate until this past year, is that the federal government is like the biggest public health pollster that we have. Like, the federal government, you know, is the only one that has the resources to go ask tens of thousands of Americans about all kinds of stuff, whether it's like, do you smoke, what do you eat, are you obese, do you have a substance abuse problem, things like that, to just keep our finger on the pulse of what's happening in this country and with people's health.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Umair, where does the federal government play a role for climate science and data gathering?

[Umair Irfan]

Well, the federal government has a lot of resources. There are almost no private institutions that can launch satellites at the scale that the US Federal government can do. There are almost no networks of sensors, of weather monitors, of weather balloons that can cope with what the US Federal government does. So without this, we have a much more murky picture of what's going on in the country.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Umair, there. There's a lot of overlap between people's health and the environments that they live in. Tell me about the changes at the EPA and how that's making it harder to understand those connections.

[Umair Irfan]

Well, the EPA's Office of Research and Development, like, their mission was to provide a scientific basis for regulations. Epa, when it issues a rule, it has to draw on real world data. And so they actually conduct tests on animals and they use sample data from the environment, and they collect a lot of information and study human physiology to see if they can unpack the mechanism behind which something like nonstick coatings on your frying pans affect your health. Or whether some of these additives to plastics can be endocrine disruptors. They measure that, they validate that with testing, and then they issue a regulation based on that. And over the past year, we've seen the Office of Research and Development, it was shuttered. And without this, the United States is now functioning without one of the most robust and best institutions that was doing this kind of work.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Wow. Looking kind of wider to the big climate picture here, how has this year impacted what we know about how the climate is changing?

[Umair Irfan]

Well, we've seen a pretty conspicuous effort across the government to diminish climate change as an issue of public concern. Project 2025, which was this guidebook put together by the Heritage foundation for the incoming Trump administration, they pretty directly said that they wanted to eradicate climate change references from everywhere across government, literally deleting the words climate change in some cases and in others, taking web pages offline or putting them behind several other layers and making them less publicly facing. One of the recent, more recent proposals from the Trump administration was to shut down the national center for Atmospheric Research. And the reason why, cited by the White House Budget Director, Russ Vaught, was that this institution, ncar, was one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country. So this is a pretty deliberate effort to stop data collection, to stop scientific research around the climate, because it conflicts with their ideology.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Dylan, how have you seen this play out in health research?

[Dylan Scott]

Yeah, so there's a couple of different ways. So, first of all, there's just sort of what data is being collected. So, you know, with some of these surveys, it remains to be seen because some of these run on, like an annual biannual basis or maybe only coming up here in 2026 on the first time that they'll be performed under this new Trump administration. But, like, one obvious area of concern is that the administration just won't collect data related to LGBTQ people. We're going to have a much fuzzier picture into what's happening with those folks and their health. But then, in addition to that, we have seen layoffs at some of the teams that are responsible for collecting this information, like with the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which has been sort of our benchmark data point on things like opioid overdose deaths. And then you also have medical research grants. Nih, they provide funding to outside academics who are investigating all kinds of medical and scientific questions. So this is a really important function. And that's another area where we've seen cuts. We've seen sort of changes to how institutions and investigators are able to use the money that they receive from the nih, which could also limit just ultimately their ability to perform their work. Honestly, this is the kind of thing where the impact is not going to be clear to us, I think, for a long time. Like, with a survey, if that data gets collected or it doesn't, like, we're going to find that out pretty fast. And yes, it creates some disruptions and obviously limits our ability to see into these problems. But, like, that's pretty clear cut, a very obvious result. But when we're talking about, like, we.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Know what we don't know there.

[Dylan Scott]

Exactly. But when we're talking about scaling back NIH funding and, like, the ability to both investigate some of these more niche problems as well as importantly like test interventions, I mean, new medications, trying to figure out how to actually treat and fix the health problems that we're identifying. Like, yeah, those are the things that, as you put it, Meredith, we won't know what we missed out on. And yet, like it seems clear given what we know about what leads to breakthrough medical treatments, that we're going to miss out on something a result of these cuts.

[Meredith Hodinot]

How will this lack of data, lack of knowledge start showing up in everyday people's lives?

[Dylan Scott]

That's a good question. I mean it will be the kind of thing that is probably invisible to people a lot. It may not be obvious to people immediately and they might even be tempted to think like, so what's the big deal? Like, I'm not noticing anything different in my life. I mean this is a prediction and those are always dangerous. But I imagine there are going to be like health problems, health trends that, that crop up, that we're going to look back and think like we could have gotten on this sooner and we could have like, you know, started coming up with an intervention more quickly. And so I do wonder with this data collection stuff, like it may not show up for 5 to 10 years, what the consequences really will be. And then it may take sort of another generation to really appreciate like, you know what, really robust data collection by the federal government is a really important thing for the government to do.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Right. I mean it sounds like the idea is that like our blind spots are getting bigger and because those blind spots are getting bigger, we are more likely to get blindsided.

[Dylan Scott]

Exactly.

[Meredith Hodinot]

And have to deal with problems when they're much, much larger.

[Dylan Scott]

Exactly.

[Umair Irfan]

And to pick up on one of Dylan's points, I mean, I think one of the most immediate and pernicious effects of this is going to be trust, the lack of trust in government. If you don't trust your weather forecast, are you going to believe when they issue an evacuation warning for a hurricane in your community? And I think that can be pretty dangerous and have very far reaching consequences.

[Meredith Hodinot]

So the data is disappearing, but the real world is still out there. Can we get back on track? That's after the break.

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[Dylan Scott]

What do you want from me? We want the numbers, Mason. That's all we've ever wanted.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Is there any chance of getting back on track?

[Umair Irfan]

There are some groups that are working to try to salvage government data. They are archiving government websites and trying to take public data sets and download them and save them for other people to use. But again, there's in terms of the collection of the data itself, nothing really rivals the US Federal government. So while there are researchers and institutions that are privately trying to fill in the gaps, it's always going to be a stopgap measure compared to what the US Government as a whole can do.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Yeah, Dylan, are we fated to a whole generation of scientific Papers with an after 2026.

[Dylan Scott]

Yeah. So I do think it's worth it, keeping in mind a couple of things, you know, like when a lot of the CDC data was getting scrapped, deleted in the early days of the Trump administration, there was a very concerted effort by outside research groups, basically download all the backlogs, everything that had been published online before, to at least kind of preserve the historical archive of the information that's been collected thus far. Going forward, it does seem inevitable that we'll be collecting less data, and the reliability of that data might be more doubtful than it was in the past. An asterisk on every research paper that cites it might be appropriate. I do think something that remains to be seen is how much can sort of the nonprofit and academic sectors step up to try to fill this gap where it is like survey data, like, you're just calling people up and asking questions. And so I don't think it's that, like, we're going to be completely closed off to understanding what's happening with people's health. There's going to be additional friction. It's just going to be harder. You know, it just adds additional obstacles to good public health.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Absolutely. Dylan, you mentioned private sources that might be able to piece together that information. Umair, I'm curious, in climate, are there other sources we could pull together and what would that look like?

[Umair Irfan]

Sure, there are definitely private companies that are starting to get into this space as well. Like, private weather forecasting is actually an emerging industry. And in fact, that has actually been one of the other challenges here because basically some of these private companies want to sell their forecasts as a product. And when the government is offering weather and climate data for free, that really undermines their product. And so there's actually been a push from some of these private companies to take some of these publicly available government weather data offline or have it passed through these private entities before it can be in a forecast. And that means that some of this publicly available information that we normally get for free could end up behind a paywall. Now, with climate change being a global issue, yes, there is global level monitoring of this issue. There's satellites launched by other countries that track CO2 from the air. But the United States has an important role here because it leads the way. Like, the US has been at the forefront of satellite monitoring of things like greenhouse gases. And the Trump administration has explicitly said that they want to shut down satellites that have CO2 monitoring capabilities and they want to take CO2 monitoring instruments out of the Next generation of satellites, the whole world is going to be losing an important measurement tool. Some other countries and companies may try to step up there, but again, they'll be scrambling to catch up to a very robust system that the United States has made.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Right. So how is this impacting your jobs as reporters?

[Umair Irfan]

I mean, as Dylan was saying, it adds a lot of friction. I mean, there used to be, like, central places where I could reliably go to, to find basic facts. Like oftentimes when I'm reporting a story, I just need to look up a number. Like, like one recent example was just that, you know, Noah used to have this database of disasters in a given year whose damaged holes were greater than a billion dollars. They called this the billion dollar disaster database. And it was just a good way for me to just to kind of get a snapshot of just what were some of the costliest disasters in a given year. But they took that database offline. They said the last year of Data collection was 2024. They did not collect any data for 2025. There's no reporting of that. So if I wanted to find out what was the most expensive disaster last year, I kind of have to do an archival search. I have to go through the news reports. I have to go to insurance companies and ask them, you know, where were the largest payouts over the past year? I'm not entirely sure how to answer that question. I thought initially it was the Los Angeles wildfires we saw, but now I have to double check and I don't have this one easy reference anymore. And it's just going to add more time and energy that I would have to expend on reporting just to answer that basic question.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Right.

[Umair Irfan]

And without that, we're again having to caveat and add lots of different qualifications to everything that we cite. And oftentimes we can't make as robust conclusions about what we're reporting on.

[Meredith Hodinot]

What do you think we won't know in the future that we might have if we had this data?

[Dylan Scott]

So something that just happened here is the federal government has told states that they can stop reporting childhood vaccination data for kids and mothers covered by Medicaid, which is a huge. That's more than 40% of births are covered by Medicaid. So we're talking about like an enormous sample. And so one question, the obvious question that I have is like, what. What is the consequence of the federal government rolling back its, its vaccine recommendations? And that the answer to that question is going to be harder to figure out because at the Same time the federal government is going to stop, stop collecting data that could provide us with the answers.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Could you tell me a little bit about like the ideological resistance to numbers themselves, like the. What seems to be the motivations behind the erosion of this data collection system?

[Dylan Scott]

Meredith? So you just want us to unpack all of the problems with American society today?

[Meredith Hodinot]

Oh, yeah, you know, casual, just, you know, easy peasy.

[Dylan Scott]

I mean, I think there's a couple of things that factor into this. One is obviously just the complete overhaul of the information ecosystem system. And there are now sort of seemingly limitless sources of information. And it's not that hard to find information that aligns with what you would prefer to believe. And so if the official sources are not aligning with your priors, you can find somebody else. And that obviously there then sows distrust in the official sources of information. And frankly, Meredith, I honestly don't know how that bell gets unrung. But yeah, I think we're in the middle of a really heady and long term change and story, and it's hard to know exactly where it's going, but it has been a sort of surreal experience to watch how much people's relationships to, you know, experts, institutional authorities in general, the kind of data and science that we, we, I think, would all like to undergird good public policy. Like, that relationship has really frayed and again, how it gets repaired I'm not totally sure.

[Umair Irfan]

I think one point worth making is that people often think of data as this completely objective, apolitical, bloodless thing, and it's not. There's a lot of political decisions and value judgments that go into data collection.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Right.

[Umair Irfan]

And this has been discussed long before the Trump administration. What's changed now with the Trump administration is that they acknowledge an imperfect picture and their solution is to not look at the picture at all. Rather than refining, improving the resolution, filling in the blanks, they've decided that they're going to paint a completely alternative picture or just say that no picture is valid or that all pictures are equally valid. That's kind of the situation that we're in right now. And so it's that ideological framing of that context around these, this data collection that that seems to be the most significant and the most potentially detrimental for our understanding of this, that if you reach a conclusion first and then look backwards for the numbers that will support you, very likely you'll find those numbers. But that's not how you do science. I mean, you have to look at the numbers first and then see the patterns that emerge but there's a lot of motivated reasoning going on here and that's why this, I think this current pattern of data, lack of collection, this sort of pushback on the numbers and trying to erode how we measure the world is so important and so troubling.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Dylan Umair, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I really appreciate it.

[Dylan Scott]

Thank you for having me.

[Umair Irfan]

My pleasure.

[Amy Padula]

This episode was produced by me, Amy Padula editing from Meredith Hodnot and Sally Helm, mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala and music from Noam Hassenfeld. Melissa Hirsch checked the facts, Julia Longoria and Jorge Just are our editorial directors. And Joanna Solotarov has the cutest little dog named Mo. And Bird Pinkerton sprinted out of Platy's hole. Someone, anyone Platy needs help. And also on that note, does anyone have any idea who Eric Flapton is and where can I find him? As always, thank you to Brian Resnick for co creating the show with Noam and Bird, who scouted this episode for us. If you'd like to support the show and the journalism that Vox does, we would love it if you would become a member. It's really easy to do. Go to Vox.com members. You'll get access to all of Vox's journalism, but you would also know that you are supporting Vox journalism. And for those of you who have emailed us to let us know that you signed up because of Unexplainable, thank you. If you can't join our membership though, that's totally okay. If you wanted to leave us a nice review on your podcast platform, five stars or a written review, you we would totally appreciate that too. Or if you wanted to tell someone in your life that they might want to listen to the show. Those things make a real difference. Thank you. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast network and we'll be back soon with another episode about everything we don't yet know.

[Umair Irfan]

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