Trump orders to ‘throw away’ inconvenient statistics, experts warn of ‘authoritarian playbook’ tactics

Donald Trump has taken aggressive steps to control government data that conflicts with his political agenda. Since taking office in January, his administration has removed or altered hundreds of federal datasets, fired statistical agency leaders, and halted crucial data collection programs across multiple government departments.

The most visible example came in August when Trump fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer hours after her agency released a jobs report showing weaker employment growth than initially reported. Without evidence, Trump called the data ‘rigged’ and implied that McEntarfer manipulated the numbers ‘for political purposes,‘ showing his pattern of blaming statistics when they don’t support his narrative.

Trump’s approach to dealing with unfavorable statistics appears to be simple: “change them or throw them away,” according to reporting on his administration’s data manipulation efforts. Political science experts say this follows what Robert Cropf, a political science professor at St. Louis University, called “a page from the authoritarian playbook.” Cropf explained that “what he’s trying to do is to present the best possible picture of what he’s doing, even if that means he has to cook the numbers, even if that means he has to distort the data, following his well-documented pattern of dishonesty.

Data disappearing across multiple government agencies

Denice Ross, former U.S. Chief Data Scientist who now works at the Federation of American Scientists, has documented what she calls “targeted, surgical removal of data sets, or elements of data sets, that are not aligned with the administration’s priorities.” Her research has identified over 400 changes to federal forms and surveys since January 20 to comply with administration priorities.

At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, scientists are now forbidden to collect gender data on any programs, including abortion data, HIV/STD prevention, violence prevention and mental health programs. Federal collection of abortion data stopped on April 1 following widespread layoffs across the Department of Health and Human Services.

The administration has also discontinued dozens of climate databases and government-funded studies, including efforts to quantify damage caused by natural disasters and understand how heavy rainfall will intensify as the planet warms. Officials removed key climate data and reports from the internet, taking down the website of the U.S. Global Change Research Program and deleting Climate.gov.

Drug crisis monitoring has also been affected, with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration stopping updates to the Drug Abuse Warning Network in June, making it harder for researchers to track street drugs and overdoses. The administration also shut down the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, raising questions about the future of the National Youth Tobacco Survey that helped alert the country to teen vaping.

Economic data has been targeted as well, with Trump’s budget proposal for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration seeking to eliminate nearly all climate, weather and ocean research labs whose studies help with weather forecasting and business planning. Basic public figures, like how many people work for the federal government, have been frozen or delayed for months.