Federal Data Is Disappearing

Joy Binion worked for the federal government collecting data on emerging substance abuse trends in emergency rooms across the country. Her work was part of the Drug Abuse Warning Network, which President Donald Trump’s first administration funded at the recommendation of his commission on the opioid crisis.

Six months into Trump’s second term, his administration axed the data collection effort entirely, laying off Binion and her division.

“They flat out eliminated DAWN, which was actually surprising to me, because DAWN was kind of the Trump administration’s baby in 2016 as they really looked toward fighting the opioid epidemic,” Binion told NOTUS, adding that healthcare providers no longer have a comprehensive resource to learn about the new drugs that could require emergency medical responses

Since retaking office, the Trump administration has transformed how the government collects data, cut access to previously-public data and stopped collecting some data altogether. This overhaul has left significant holes in data on everything from substance use to maternal mortality.

NOTUS spoke to 18 data experts and researchers who rely on federal data who said the breadth of information no longer being collected or distributed by the federal government has been nearly impossible to track. Researchers estimate that well over 3,000 data sets have been removed from public access.

The current reality is that the federal government is no longer a reliable source of widespread data collection.

“The status quo was, the federal government is going to collect and disseminate data and statistics,” said John Kubale, a University of Michigan professor who helps direct the world’s largest archive of social science research data, including sensitive U.S. federal government data. “That is no longer a reasonable assumption.”

NOTUS verified dozens of instances of lapsed federal data to capture the range of information that is no longer being collected, has been paused or is now not available to the public. This is only a small sample of the data collection the Trump administration has made changes to:

• The Department of Agriculture terminated a report on household food security in September, claiming it was “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous.” Feeding America said it relied on this survey to guide its programs.
• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped releasing data on maternal and infant mortality in April 2025 after the administration placed all of the agency staff managing the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System on administrative leave. The data collection resumed in at least some states in July 2025, but recent data contains gaps.
• Trump directed the Justice Department last year to suspend a Biden-era database tracking misconduct by federal law enforcement officers.
• The administration removed questions on gender identity from the National Crime Victimization Survey, the National Health Interview Survey and other surveys. Homeless shelters, mental health hotlines and substance use recovery programs all used this data for policymaking and planning.
• The Department of Homeland Security ended public access in October to its public safety and infrastructure dataset, called Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data.
• The National Center for Education Statistics missed a mandated deadline to release its annual report on the condition of the American education system, and the materials released were lacking in data compared to previous years.
• The Health and Human Services Department’s 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health omitted information about drug use based on race and ethnicity. HHS laid off the team that collected the data, though the agency is reportedly working with a contractor to resume its collection.
• The Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Education and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration no longer allow researchers to apply to access and study their data.
• The Bureau of Labor Statistics produces fewer calculations for its producer price index program and has cut down where it collects data from.

Some of these cuts were made without any public fanfare, like the administration’s decision to end DAWN. In other cases, agencies slipped the news into routine announcements. And occasionally, like when the White House mandated that questions about gender identity be removed from federal surveys, the administration touted the deletions as quelling “gender ideology extremism.”

Researchers told NOTUS that the federal government’s reasoning for terminating data collection is flawed. And in some cases, the Trump administration has run afoul of congressional mandates to produce data, including by failing to publish required reports on time and removing reports required by law.

“We as a nation will be in a real bind if we don’t have access to those primary data that only the federal government has the scope and the scale and the resources to produce,” Denice Ross, the former U.S. chief data scientist under the Biden administration, told NOTUS. “There’s just no replacement for the complete and fair collection of data that the federal government is in charge of.”

An Education Department spokesperson said in a statement that “NCES issued the Condition of Education in 2025” and “committed to updating indicators on a rolling basis.” The center is working with contractors to release updated data on education indicators by June, the statement said.

The Internal Revenue Service directed NOTUS to a note on its website stating that the status of applications for access to its data will be “re-evaluated at a later date.”

The Agriculture Department said in a statement to NOTUS that “the Federal government — through 11 other national surveys — continues to collect and report hunger data. Additionally, a growing number of State, local, and regional studies collect nearly identical data using modules developed by USDA.”

The White House, Department of Homeland Security, SAMHSA, Department of Justice and Bureau of Labor Statistics did not respond to requests for comment.

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Even in instances where the Trump administration has resumed data collection, researchers said lapses in information are making it hard to assess policy outcomes in areas like public health.

“We lag behind most other high-income countries in child mortality and maternal morbidity and mortality, particularly for vulnerable groups. The fact that we were not collecting these data is just incredibly egregious and damaging,” Kubale said.

The administration suggested in November 2025 that it would like to continue to fund the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, but researchers and policymakers are still struggling to advance their work.

A spokesperson for the Health and Human Services Department told NOTUS in a statement that “HHS is committed to optimizing maternal and infant health outcomes and will share PRAMS data at a later time.”

“It’s chaos right now. I don’t think I can overstate how big of a loss this is to the maternal and infant health community,” said Rita Hamad, an epidemiologist at Harvard who relies on the data and who leads a team focused on measuring how US social and economic policies affect health. “Not just scientists, but actual people who are on the ground trying to make decisions about where to allocate dollars, which maternal and infant health dollars are most effective.”

Laura Norton-Cruz, a social worker in Alaska who relies on PRAMS data for her work on mothers and pregnant people, is still grappling with the declining quality of the data.

Alaska restarted PRAMS data collection in July 2025 after an almost four-month pause due to the CDC layoffs. But “the quality of data is not what it’s supposed to be because so many of the legacy staff are gone,” Norton-Cruz said.

She has used PRAMS data to spearhead community projects like a breastfeeding support program for indigenous mothers in Alaska’s Northwest Arctic region, and to train health clinic employees in her region about how to respond to reports of domestic violence and reproductive coercion. Much of her work is backed by federal funding, and demonstrating the success of her initiatives with PRAMS data helps her retain that funding.

“It’s really important to show that that kind of thing works and it is effective, but if we don’t have that population level data, then it’s harder to make that case,” Norton-Cruz said.

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Much of the data that is still being collected is not being made available to the public.

In September 2025, nonprofit groups, large corporations and researchers lost access to once-public federal infrastructure data. It’s made it harder to track conditions at prisons, decide how to increase security in cities during large events and plan natural disaster responses, according to researchers, and state and local government employees who spoke about the loss of the data last year at a webinar.

“The feds will see one map, and the people delivering the water will see another,” said Adam Simmons, the executive director of the nonprofit Project Geospatial. “They’ve turned a living public utility into a clubhouse asset, and the public is currently running on fumes that will eventually run out.”

The data was the “informational backbone” of the country’s carceral facilities, among other things, said Nick Shapiro — an assistant professor and environmental researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles who used the Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data to study prisons and jails across the country. He added that it’s especially frustrating that the dataset is not accessible to track the prison facility expansion that’s come with the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement crackdown.

These gaps in federal data are threatening the effectiveness of future public policies, researchers said.

The creation of a special branch of the 988 suicide and crisis hotline for LGBTQ+ people stemmed from analyzing federal data, said Lindsey Dawson, the director for LGBTQ health policy at health care research nonprofit KFF.

Future policy interventions will be difficult to propose without data on sexual orientation and gender identity, she said — as will policies to address substance use issues.

“We’ve seen that certain communities of color, including American Indian Alaska Native people, tend to have higher rates of drug overuse. So just being able to research disparities in drug use and how they impact health as they relate to race and ethnicity will be significantly impacted if that data are not available,” said Drishti Pillai, the associate director for racial equity and health policy at KFF.

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Trump very publicly fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after the agency’s July 2025 jobs report did not reflect favorably on the administration, but changes to data-related staffing have otherwise been hard to measure.

In the few areas that can be tracked, the scale is significant.

The National Center for Education Statistics, housed under the Education Department, only had four employees as of September, according to an American Statistical Association report.

The Energy Information Administration lost about 40% of its staff and the Census Bureau lost 15% to 20% of its staff, exacerbating pre-Trump staffing gaps, according to the report. Many other agencies lost 10% to 30% of data-related staff.

“EIA has earned its reputation for reliable, timely energy data—a reputation that has been built on the collective expertise of our staff,” an EIA spokesperson said in a statement to NOTUS. “We remain committed to meeting the high standards we have set for ourselves, and we will not publish any data or analysis that doesn’t meet our standards of quality and independence.” The spokesperson also directed NOTUS to a video where EIA administrator Tristan Abbey said last month that “the ability to have new people in the future would be good” but added that he is not worried about current staffing levels.

The Census Bureau did not respond to a request for comment.

“These folks tend to be more senior … so that’s a real loss, and I don’t know how we get that back,” said Paul Schroeder, the executive director of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics.

The administration’s changes to data have sparked a number of community efforts to preserve as much of the disappearing information as possible.

But even a wealth of alternative data sources can’t measure up to the quality and scope of federal data, said Lynda Kellam, a co-founder of the Data Rescue Project, which has archived more than 1,000 data products in the past year from more than 80 government agencies. Kellam said she and others have been discussing the possibility of spearheading state-level data collection efforts to make up for some federal losses, but they’ve run into issues.

“How many states could you actually even get to participate? How many states could have the capacity to participate? There’s political reasons why some states wouldn’t want to participate, like Texas, or if there’s a smaller state like Rhode Island, would they even be able to do so?” she said.

The impact has been global: Foreign researchers are pivoting away from American federal data as part of a larger move away from American-led science.

At home, Ross, the former U.S. chief data scientist, said this could mean a nation less ready for any challenges ahead.

“This is just a basic governmental function,” Ross told NOTUS. “The founders knew that we needed good data to run our modern society, and if it just disappears, we are just going to be less prepared as a nation for whatever comes our way.”