1. United States
2. S.C.
3. Letter

For the past year, the Trump administration has been both altering and removing public datasets representing decades of taxpayer funded research that touch every aspect of Americans’ lives. This federal data was directed by Congress, paid for by taxpayers, belongs to us, and is being destroyed by an executive branch that has an ideological aversion to measurable data. The loss of this data tracking is not abstract. Americans lives are impacted in real ways, and we are sicker, more ignorant, and more vulnerable for it. The Trump administration disappeared an EPA tool that allowed Americans to search by zip code for their chemical hazard risks. The Trump administration stopped tracking why the US has a higher infant mortality rate than almost all other high income nations. The Trump administration cancelled any further surveys on hunger and food insecurity while making the largest cuts we have ever seen in our history to SNAP aid to combat hunger. The Trump administration removed questions about transgender youth from youth risk behavior surveys, and 360 other federal data collections including those dealing with suicide, unhoused youth, and sexual victimization. This was despite disproportionate exposure for these adverse experiences among trans youth. The Trump administration discontinued NOAA’s billion dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database, leaving homeowners, communities, insurers, states, and Congress without information about the increasing number of large-scale climate events and their locations. This data does not belong to Trump or his loyalists to choose whether we are allowed to have it. Failing to measure social and environmental variables doesn’t make them go away but it does make it highly unlikely we will accurately identify a problem, intelligently develop a solution, and correctly predict the outcome of implementing that plan. Congress must act to ensure agencies are producing, maintaining, and publishing data that allows both Congress and the public to judge the effectiveness of the agency and the safety of our systems.