A Trump Administration Playbook: No Data, No Problem

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/climate/trump-federal-data-climate-change-health.html

https://archive.ph/Tn5mB

A Trump Administration Playbook: No Data, No Problem
A pattern of getting rid of statistics has emerged that echoes the president’s first term, when he suggested if the nation stopped testing for Covid, it would have few cases.
By Maxine Joselow
Sept. 18, 2025

When the Trump administration said last week that it would stop requiring thousands of industrial facilities to report their planet-warming pollution, the move fit a growing pattern: If data points to a problem, stop collecting the data.

At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, experts are no longer tracking the most expensive extreme weather events, those that cause at least $1 billion in damage.

At NASA, Trump officials want to decommission two powerful satellites that provide precise measurements of the greenhouse gases that are driving climate change.

And at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, layoffs have gutted a division that maintains statistics on car crashes, gun violence and homicides, among other things.

The consequences of these moves could be far-reaching, experts said, since the government cannot address a problem if it cannot quantify the issue in the first place.

“When we don’t measure things, it makes it much harder to claim that there is a problem and that the government has some kind of responsibility to help alleviate it,” said Sarah Pralle, an associate professor of political science at Syracuse University.

“Measuring itself is a political act with political consequences,” Dr. Pralle said. “And clearly the Trump administration does not want to do anything to alleviate a problem like climate change.”

The recent moves echo an episode from President Trump’s first term, when federal statistics showed coronavirus cases surging in June 2020. “If we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any,” Mr. Trump said at the time.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/us/politics/trump-hunger-report-data.html

Trump Administration to Stop Measuring Food Insecurity
The move strips the government of its main gauge of hunger in America, and will impede efforts to track the impact of aid cuts.
By Jason DeParle
Sept. 20, 2025

Two months after pushing through Congress the largest food stamp cuts in the program’s history, the Trump administration has canceled the government’s annual report measuring household food insecurity.

The move by the Agriculture Department strips the government of its main gauge of Americans’ ability to access adequate meals, and will impede researchers’ efforts to track the coming cuts in nutritional aid.

The department’s report has been published every year for three decades, and grew in part out of battles in the 1980s over President Ronald Reagan’s statements disputing that the United States had a hunger problem.

The most recent report found that in 2023, 13.5 percent of households, with 47 million people, were food insecure, meaning that during some portion of the year, not every member of household had access to enough food for a healthy lifestyle.

The Agriculture Department report, Household Food Security in the United States, quantifies the share of households considered “food insecure” and “very low food secure,” a subset with a more severe designation of need that applied to 5.1 percent of households in 2023. It analyzes those categories by state, race and ethnicity. Rates are much higher among Black and Latino households than among white households.

The report also includes an age category, with data on children and the elderly.

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