Trump administration’s data deletions set off ‘a mad scramble,’ researcher says

NEW YORK — Researchers are in what one described as “a mad scramble” to sort out what public data the Trump administration has deleted from government websites and electronic publications. “You go looking for something and it’s just not there,” said Amy O’Hara, a Georgetown University researcher who is president of the Association of Public Data Users. The committee, chartered by Congress to advise the CDC director, asked the agency’s acting director, Susan Monarez, for an explanation about why it had cut off access to datasets “that allow people across the country to understand the health of their communities.” The panel had yet to receive a response, said committee member Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a former federal health official who is now a health policy expert at Johns Hopkins University. On Monday, for instance, when a query was made to access certain data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s most comprehensive survey of American life, users got a response that said the area was “unavailable due to maintenance.” The CDC’s official public portal for health data, data.cdc.gov, was taken down entirely on Friday but went back up over the weekend, albeit with a yellow ribbon at the top saying: “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.” The agency’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey data was restored too, but with at least one of the gender columns missing and its data documentation removed. “Taxpayers paid to collect those data, to analyze those data, and to make them public for people to use,” explained Abigail Norris Turner, an Ohio State University medical researcher who is the association’s president.