The death of data: Under Trump, key information is disappearing

Hard to see how the USA is going to recover any time soon of the impact of the Trump/Musk administration with so few guardrails and a totally subservient Republican Congress neglecting its broader and constitutional responsibilities:

…Statistical agencies in the U.S. and elsewhere have struggled with weaker survey participation for many years. In one notable example, only about one-third of businesses approached to fill out the BLS’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey do so – about half the proportion in the 2010s.

The BLS and other agencies contend that data quality remains high, although critics point to non-response bias – the idea that non-respondents may be inherently different than those who continue to fill out questionnaires, which would skew the numbers.

If response rates continue to fall, there is a greater likelihood that economic data will become less reliable. The danger is that reports “will stop telling us about who’s doing well and who’s not well by any degree of disaggregation,” said Armine Yalnizyan, a Canadian economist and Atkinson fellow on the future of workers.

Funding is another concern, particularly as the Trump administration makes sweeping cuts. These include the termination of roughly US$900-million in Education Department contracts, spelling an end to various research projects on academic performance.

When data disappear or become less reliable, it becomes tougher to challenge the policies of the Trump White House, Ms. Yalnizyan said. “You can’t see what is really happening, so you cannot dispute what they say.”

Ms. Jarosz said the public has paid for data produced by the government – and that information should remain in the public domain.

“I think part of what is so concerning about this is it sets a really dangerous precedent that any administration could delete data they don’t like for any reason,” she said.

Source: The death of data: Under Trump, key information is disappearing