Trump Has ‘Almost Completely’ Erased LGBTQ+ Data. Is Race Next?

Data scientists who’ve been watching the Trump administration systematically scrub LGBTQ+ Americans from government data have for months feared what could come next.

Then the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act.

Meghan Maury-Fox, a consultant for Data Index, which monitors federal data collection, said they started to worry about race and ethnicity data when the Supreme Court limited states’ ability to draw majority-minority districts.

Drawing election maps is one of many uses of the Census’ race and ethnicity data — but it’s the only function clearly required by law, said Maury-Fox.

“If Callais says we can’t use that data for that purpose, then there’s going to be much more heft behind the argument that we don’t need race and ethnicity data,” they said.

After retaking office, President Donald Trump quickly made it the government’s official policy to only “recognize” two sexes, directing agencies to stop asking for gender identity information. Since then, government agencies have been carefully erasing LGBTQ+ data. Now data researchers and experts worry that this same deletion process could play out for other types of information.

“I think that sexual orientation and gender identity data is a harbinger of things to come,” said Denice Ross, the U.S. chief data scientist in the Biden administration, who now helps run the Data Index.

“We could be looking at the dismantling of the detailed, disaggregated demographic characteristics that we really need to understand who’s being left behind or disproportionately harmed by federal policies, and even just societal changes like AI in the workforce, for example, or climate-fueled disasters,” she said. “As a society, we need visibility on how different groups of people are affected by changes so that we can make more informed decisions.”

As of March, agencies had deleted data elements on either gender identity or sexual orientation from over 360 government data collections, according to the Williams Institute, a research center on sexual orientation and gender identity law and policy at the UCLA School of Law.

That includes agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which disabled the option for transgender victims of violence to record their gender identity, despite the fact that transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime.

Maury-Fox said they started noticing formal justifications for why a government agency is collecting race and ethnicity data in regulatory documents — a practice that didn’t previously require explanation.

In April, the Administration for Children and Families, for example, specifically spelled out why its Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood community grant program would be collecting race and ethnicity data to ensure that the program reaches different target populations.

“The signals are that they’re coming for race and ethnicity data next,” said Meeta Anand, the senior director for Census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

The Trump administration has already begun reducing the government’s collection of race and ethnicity data.

The ACF began a process in April to remove information on race, ethnicity and sex from the data it collects on who uses the government’s program to help low-income households pay heating and cooling bills, saying that the demographic data isn’t required by statute.

The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program already has low enrollment, and those who administer it have long suspected that historically disadvantaged populations have a harder time applying to the program, said Cassandra Lovejoy, the policy and managing director at the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, which represents state LIHEAP directors.

But the government didn’t start tracking race, ethnicity and sex until a few years ago, and it still hasn’t released that data. If Lovejoy’s theory is correct, the data could reveal an irony: Populations with a greater need for LIHEAP use the program less.

“We can’t prove it because we don’t have the data on it,” said Lovejoy. “We were eagerly looking for this information.”

Last year, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management removed data on race and ethnicity from its public-facing dataset about the federal workforce, which includes over 2 million people, making it difficult to understand the impact of the Trump administration’s massive cuts and other changes to the government workforce on different groups of people.

OPM also typically surveys the government workforce annually. (It didn’t conduct the survey at all last year, despite a congressional mandate to do so.)

Now, some pages in reports about past surveys are blank. The agency redacted sections on diversity, equity, inclusion and even accessibility.

Demographic datasets that included information on the sexual orientation and gender identity of federal employees have also been scrubbed.

OPM has also removed the ability to download public data files associated with the survey, an option that was still available earlier this spring, according to the Wayback Machine. A spokesperson for the agency said that the data was “taken down in accordance with the DEI EO.”

Rob Shriver, a former acting head of OPM who now works at Democracy Forward, told NOTUS that pinning the removal of federal workforce data on DEI is a “fig leaf.”

“They know their workforce policies would lead to the lowest [survey] scores in history, so they hid from it,” he said.

The Office of Management and Budget has repeatedly delayed the implementation deadlines for new race and ethnicity statistical standards for government data, which OMB rolled out 2024. To Anand, that’s another sign that data is under threat.

Years in the making, the updated guidelines were meant to improve the quality of data by making changes like adding a category for Middle Eastern or North African people, so that they didn’t have to report themselves as “white.”

Some agencies have moved to use the new standards in their surveys and forms, but the rollout has been delayed in others.

The Census Bureau had been planning on using those new standards next year for its annual demographic survey of the United States. But the bureau later pivoted, saying it would be relying on the old, 1997-era questions due to the Trump administration’s deadline-implementation delay, according to public notices from the agency.

Asked about data deletions and the future of the updated race and ethnicity standards, White House spokeswoman Allison Schuster told NOTUS in a statement that Trump has “restored merit and efficiency.”

“DEI ran rampant during the Biden Administration, and Americans ultimately paid the cost of these destructive policies with a restricted labor pool, higher operational costs, and workforce inefficiencies,” said Schuster. “The Trump Administration will always promote equal treatment under the law for every American, regardless of race or ethnicity — and will hold its contractors to the same standard.”

To Ross, all of these changes look like “a broader attempt to remove any data that might reveal that there are disparities in our nation.”

When the Trump administration reversed protections for transgender government employees on his second day back in office, the Williams Institute estimated that it would affect nearly 14,000 transgender federal workers.

The removal of government data now makes it more difficult to measure the impact of the administration’s policies on LGBTQ+ federal employees, said Lauren Bouton, a policy fellow and research analyst at the Williams Institute.

The removal of LGBTQ+ data has been efficient and fast, said Maury-Fox. “I think gender identity data is almost completely gone from the federal government.”

The government only recently started collecting data on gender identity and sexual orientation, while race and ethnicity data has been collected for decades. Now, “we’re already seeing that loss,” they said.