cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/50808662
Health data appears to be most affected by administration’s attempt to wipe findings that don’t align with its priorities, tracker shows
A database of federal law enforcement officer misconduct records. A survey measuring physical, sexual and emotional violence against children and youth. Real-time pollution readings collected by air quality monitors from US embassies around the world.
These are among the hundreds of federal datasets that the Trump administration has taken down or altered as part of its aggressive campaign to wipe all mentions of data findings that do not align with the administration’s priorities.
Over the past year and a half, at least 28 federal datasets have been deleted and another 338 data collections have been modified, according to an online tracker released last week from dataindex.us, a group of data policy experts, researchers and developers that formed last year to monitor changes to government data.
“We’re at a very vulnerable point as a nation,” said Denice Ross, former US chief data scientist under the Biden administration and a cofounder of dataindex.us. “We’re facing a future where we are not going to have the information that we need to make decisions that will save lives and benefit American communities.”
Well yeah I’m more than aware that many of the programs that were shut down mid studies, could have an insane amount of work that can’t just be paused and picked back up in the middle, only talking about the data sets that are being explicitly deleted or changed, of which I can’t imagine there’s not enough version control and redundancy in the government that shouldn’t make it possible to return a data set to the exact form it was on an exact day.