Erasing the Data: Trump’s War on All of Us
Blink and you’ll miss it.
The Trump administration has just canceled the nation’s most important survey of hunger in America, a study that has been the most reliable measure of food insecurity since the mid-1990s.
But this wasn’t just a tally of hunger; it was a map of the intersections of poverty. Economist Craig Gundersen, for example, used this dataset to uncover how food insecurity overlaps with disability, health status, and regional inequities. His work, along with that of countless other scholars and public health experts, underscored why the survey mattered: without the study, the nation loses a compass for gauging how its most vulnerable citizens are faring.
The cancellation comes on the heels of legislation signed by Trump over the summer that slashed funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and tightened work requirements. Now it will be harder to prove what those cuts mean for families. As Lindsey Smith Taillie, a nutrition professor at the University of North Carolina, warns:
“Why would you not want to measure it? I think the only reason why you wouldn’t measure it is if you were planning to cut food assistance, because it basically allows you to pretend like we don’t have this food insecurity problem.”
This isn’t policy as usual. This is policy by erasure.
The War on Data
The food insecurity survey is just the latest casualty in Trump’s broader assault on reality. Blink again, and you’ll notice entire datasets, websites, and offices have disappeared.
Over the past eight months, federal agencies have purged data, reshaped methodologies, and defunded core reporting tools. A few examples:
Census distortions designed to undercount immigrants and low-income households. In his first term, Trump pushed to add a citizenship question to the census — an effort widely understood as a bid to intimidate immigrant families and drive down participation. The Supreme Court blocked the move, but the damage was done: the political debate created a chilling effect. The Bureau later estimated it undercounted the Hispanic or Latino population by 4.99% and the Black or African American population by 3.30% in the 2020 Census.
Now, in Trump 2.0, the plan is even starker: exclude undocumented immigrants from the census count altogether. That single act would radically reshape congressional representation and strip billions in funding from communities already shortchanged.
Environmental rollbacks erased climate and justice data at record pace. In its first 100 days, Trump 2.0 made 70% more changes to government environmental websites than in his first administration. The targets were clear: environmental justice, climate change, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Within days of taking office, the White House’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool was removed, along with nine other agency tools that identified disadvantaged communities.
Just this month, the Environmental Protection Agency moved to end the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, which since 2010 has required thousands of coal plants, refineries, and industrial facilities to disclose their emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other heat-trapping gases. The program tracks data from roughly 8,000 of the nation’s largest polluters — data that has guided federal climate policy, fulfilled U.N. reporting obligations under the Paris Agreement, and even allowed local communities to monitor nearby facilities. Ending it would gut one of the federal government’s only reliable tools for measuring and reducing emissions.
This level of erasure of environmental justice information is unprecedented. Without these tools and sites, communities lose evidence of disproportionate pollution burdens, scientists lose vital climate data, and the public loses access to the information it needs to hold government accountable.
“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. Measuring itself is a political act with political consequences. And clearly the Trump administration does not want to do anything to alleviate a problem like climate change.”
— Sarah Pralle, Associate Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University, as quoted in the New York Times
Education data cuts hollowed out accountability. Under Trump’s direction, the Department of Education scaled back the Civil Rights Data Collection, making it harder to see how schools discipline students by race, disability status, or language background. Reports required under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) were delayed or narrowed. In practice, this means fewer windows into whether children with disabilities are receiving the supports federal law guarantees.
The rollbacks didn’t stop there. Understaffing and shifting priorities at the Office for Civil Rights slowed the release of key datasets on everything from sexual harassment to restraint and seclusion of students with special needs. Data on English-language learners was pared back, obscuring whether schools are meeting their obligation to educate immigrant and bilingual students. And while school boards spar over “critical race theory,” the federal government is quietly dismantling the very numbers that prove racial disparities exist in the first place.
These aren’t abstract shifts. Without this data, families cannot prove discrimination, advocates cannot press for enforcement, and Congress cannot measure whether billions in federal education dollars are reaching the children who need them most. The result is a classroom where inequity becomes invisible by design — and if you can’t count it, you can’t fix it.
Public health blind spots erased trusted medical information. Soon after Trump took office, federal health officials removed webpages and data on topics ranging from pregnancy risks to opioid-use disorder to the AIDS epidemic. The purge followed an executive order directing agencies to stop using the term “gender” in federal policies and documents, part of an effort the administration cast as ending “gender ideology.” Doctors and public health advocates called it government overreach.
“This was trusted health information that vanished in a blink of an eye — resources that, among other things, physicians rely on to manage patients’ health conditions and overall care,” said Dr. John Bramhall of the Washington State Medical Association, one of the lead plaintiffs in a lawsuit that forced the government to restore more than 100 sites.
But the data erasures go well beyond health websites. At the CDC, layoffs have gutted the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, which maintains statistics on car crashes, drownings, gun violence, and traumatic brain injuries. Trump’s budget would eliminate its funding altogether, threatening the National Violent Death Reporting System — a database used to design suicide prevention programs, evaluate law enforcement use of force, and identify where to intervene before tragedies occur.
Each of these cuts carries real consequences: physicians lose tools for patient care, scientists lose data to track crises, and communities lose the ability to push for prevention and accountability. While lawsuits have forced the restoration of some information, the larger pattern is clear — this administration is dismantling the very infrastructure that keeps the public safe.
Trump Logic: If the numbers don’t exist, the harm doesn’t either.
The Logic of Erasure
The logic of erasing data is as blunt as it is brutal.
If you don’t measure hunger, you can slash food aid with fewer headlines.
If you don’t count immigrants, you can strip their rights with less backlash.
If you don’t track pollution, you can greenlight corporate polluters without protest.
If you don’t monitor disability, you can cut services without consequence.
Data is the connective tissue between lived experience and collective action. It gives advocates evidence. It gives communities a voice. It gives policymakers the tools to make informed decisions. And it gives the public a gauge to hold those in power accountable.
Erasing data does not erase the problem. It erases the people.
Taking a Hammer to Shared Reality
Data holds up a mirror, offering an unflinching look at our own reality. At their best, numbers, surveys and datasets allow us to see how we’re doing, even when the reflection is uncomfortable. But distort them, and they become a funhouse mirror that warps truth to serve bad actors in power. Remove them, and we lose more than transparency — we lose the ability to govern, shape policy, and allocate resources from a shared reality.
The consequences are playing out like a train wreck in real time. Without food insecurity data, it will be harder to track the human toll of SNAP cuts. Without environmental reporting, communities will be slower to detect toxic exposure. Without census accuracy, representation and resources will skew even further away from those who need them most.
This isn’t a battle over spreadsheets; it’s a fight for a shared reality — and right now, reality itself is losing.
Protecting the People’s Data
The Trump administration can distort or delete datasets, but it doesn’t have a monopoly on data collection — and it doesn’t own our shared reality.
Independent researchers, nonprofits, journalists, and communities are building their own forms of data collection and public accountability. Initiatives like The Impact Project track how policy changes affect families in real time, producing state-by-state data on everything from tax credits to food assistance. Environmental watchdogs like the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative preserve disappearing climate and pollution data. Civic efforts such as the Data Rescue Project mobilize volunteers to archive vulnerable federal datasets, ensuring that even if government websites go dark, the underlying information remains publicly accessible.
Yet these efforts are underfunded, fragmented, and vulnerable to attack. A handful of civil society organizations cannot carry the burden of transparency for an entire nation.
What we need is a movement for data justice:
Protect independent data collection and make it publicly accessible.
Fund community-driven research that centers lived experience.
Demand transparency as a democratic right, not a bureaucratic luxury.
Build bridges between academic research, grassroots organizing, and policy change.
The Stakes
We live in an era of cascading, interconnected crises: hunger, climate change, inequality, democratic backsliding. None exists in isolation; each compounds the others. And in every case, data isn’t peripheral — it’s central. It’s how we know who is most at risk, which interventions are working, and where resources must go.
By dismantling data systems, the Trump administration isn’t just suppressing numbers. It’s dismantling our ability to respond to crisis itself.
At a human level, data signals who this country chooses to see, how they are seen — and therefore who is valued. Erase the numbers, and you erase people’s place in the national story.
Ultimately, this is about making inequity harder to see, harder to name, harder to fight.
That’s why this must be resisted — ferociously, collectively, and without delay. Because when the data disappears, so do the people. And when the people disappear from view, injustice doesn’t just thrive in the dark. It metastasizes.