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.”
Something that just confuses me… this stuff should be backed up right? shouldn’t this stuff be put in in a means that, a competent administration down the line can pull from backups.
It’s not just about backups. If you discontinue the collection of certain data or mess with the data itself before publication, the whole study might get useless. Take those long-term studies researching health outcomes over decades. If you mess with the data collection there, you can’t get clean data back after Trump is dead.
Yes it is backed up, but they went after those as well.
You’d hope so (especially backups by the public since all this ought to be public domain data), but the other problem is that the organizations collecting it are being destroyed so there will be discontinuities in it forever now.
normally yes which is why malicious but competent govs (like Harper’s in Canada) moved to destroy even the backups of the long gun registry they abolished
with the orange pedo, they are so mediocre, I’d expect the dta to survive if Americans get off their asses and put a stop to this regime sooner than later
