The data nerds are fighting back.<\/p>\n
After watching data sets be altered or disappear from U.S. government websites<\/a> in unprecedented ways after President Donald Trump began his second term, an army of outside statisticians, demographers and computer scientists have joined forces to capture, preserve and share data sets, sometimes clandestinely.<\/p>\n Their goal is to make sure they are available in the future, believing that democracy suffers when policymakers don\u2019t have reliable data and that national statistics should be above partisan politics.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are such smart, passionate people who care deeply about not only the Census Bureau, but all the statistical agencies, and ensuring the integrity of the statistical system. And that gives me hope, even during these challenging times,\u201d Mary Jo Mitchell, director of government and public affairs for the research nonprofit the Population Association of America, said this week during an online public data-users conference.<\/p>\n The threats to the U.S. data infrastructure since January have come not only from the disappearance or modification of data related to gender, sexual orientation, health, climate change<\/a> and diversity, among other topics, but also from job cuts of workers and contractors who had been guardians of restricted-access data at statistical agencies, the data experts said.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are trillions of bytes of data files, and I can\u2019t even imagine how many public dollars were spent to collect those data. … But right now, they\u2019re sitting someplace that is inaccessible because there are no staff to appropriately manage those data,\u201d Jennifer Park, a study director for the Committee on National Statistics, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, said during the conference hosted by the Association of Public Data Users (APDU).<\/p>\n \u2018Gender\u2019 switched to \u2018sex\u2019<\/p>\n In February, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention\u2019s official public portal for health data, data.cdc.gov<\/a>, was taken down entirely but subsequently went back up. Around the same time, when a query was made to access certain public data from the U.S. Census Bureau\u2019s most comprehensive survey<\/a> of American life, users for several days got a response that said the area was \u201cunavailable due to maintenance\u201d before access was restored.<\/p>\n Researchers Janet Freilich and Aaron Kesselheim examined 232 federal public health data sets that had been modified in the first quarter of this year and found that almost half had been \u201csubstantially altered,\u201d with the majority having the word \u201cgender\u201d switched to \u201csex,\u201d they wrote<\/a> this month in The Lancet medical journal.<\/p>\n One of the most difficult tasks has been figuring out what\u2019s been changed since many of the alterations weren\u2019t recorded in documentation.<\/p>\n Beth Jarosz, senior program director at the Population Reference Bureau, thought she was in good shape since she had previously downloaded data she needed from the National Survey of Children\u2019s Health for a February conference where she was speaking, even though the data had become unavailable. But then she realized she had failed to download the questionnaire and later discovered that a question about discrimination based on gender or sexual identity had been removed.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the one thing my team didn\u2019t have,\u201d Jarosz said at this week\u2019s APDU conference. \u201cAnd they edited the questionnaire document, which should have been a historical record.\u201d<\/p>\n Among the groups that have formed this year to collect and preserve the federal data are the Federation of American Scientists\u2019 dataindex.com<\/a>, which monitors changes to federal data sets; the University of Chicago Library\u2019s Data Mirror<\/a> website, which backs up and hosts at-risk data sets; the Data Rescue Project<\/a>, which serves as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts; and the Federal Data Forum<\/a>, which shares information about what federal statistics have gone missing or been modified \u2014 a job also being done by the American Statistical Association.<\/a><\/p>\n The outside data warriors also are quietly reaching out to workers at statistical agencies and urging them to back up any data that is restricted from the public.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can\u2019t trust that this data is going to be here tomorrow,\u201d said Lena Bohman, a founding member of the Data Rescue Project.<\/p>\n Experts\u2019 committee unofficially revived<\/p>\n Separately, a group of outside experts has unofficially revived a long-running U.S. Census Bureau advisory committee that was killed by the Trump administration in March. <\/p>\n Census Bureau officials won\u2019t be attending the Census Scientific Advisory Committee meeting in September, since the Commerce Department, which oversees the agency, eliminated it. But the advisory committee will forward its recommendations to the bureau, and demographer Allison Plyer said she has heard that some agency officials are excited by the committee\u2019s re-emergence, even if it\u2019s outside official channels.<\/p>\n \u201cWe will send them recommendations but we don\u2019t expect them to respond since that would be frowned upon,\u201d said Plyer, chief demographer at The Data Center in New Orleans. \u201cThey just aren\u2019t getting any outside expertise … and they want expertise, which is understandable from nerds.\u201d<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n