The Trump administration won’t face the facts

Since Donald Trump took office last year, his administration’s actions have made hunger, teen suicide, tornadoes and other storms, and a wide range of diseases more likely to affect and harm you and your family. It is now more likely that infants will die early and unnecessarily, and that people will be sickened or killed by exposure to hazardous chemicals. The administration’s response to climate disasters will likely cost us, the taxpayers, more than it should, and airlines will know less about the dangerous storms that planes might encounter.

The Trump administration’s dangerous actions are widespread but they have one thing in common: They suppress or destroy data that Trump finds objectionable or inconvenient. “Save the Archives” is not exactly a slogan that captures the public imagination, but preserving data that the federal government has long collected and should keep collecting is essential to maintaining the role of science in our society—and to keeping you and your family safe.

A May 2026 article in the Guardian highlighted several examples of the kinds of critical information that the Trump administration has stopped collecting: infant mortality data, food insecurity numbers, hazardous chemical exposure rates, teen suicides, and the clean-up costs of climate disasters.

The problem, however, is not just the elimination of future data collection. An equally dangerous effort is underway to purge many historical databases analysts use to identify long-term trends—essential data on which to base future policy decisions. As noted in this BBC report, the Trump administration is seeking to rewrite history by erasing unpleasant facts, such as the inexorable rise in global warming, and by eliminating health-related databases tracking diseases and treatment effectiveness. The National Center for Atmospheric Research, which collects and disseminates weather data essential for airlines, emergency storm warnings, and agricultural planning, is in the process of being dismantled, as is a decade-old ocean observation system funded by the National Science Foundation to monitor marine ecosystems that impact weather and climate worldwide.

There are other forms of data archiving that are at risk as well. When the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) targeted so-called waste, fraud, and abuse across various federal agencies last year, they fired experts and defunded critical repositories that safeguard our nation (and the world) from disasters. One such threatened archive is the Department of Agriculture’s National Plant Germplasm System, founded in the late 19^th century to ensure that every plant species relevant to our food system is protected.

Not every database gets a thumbs down from the Trump administration. The Department of Homeland Security under DOGE consolidated data from various sources, including private information contained in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid records, to seek immigrants suspected of being in the United States illegally. And RFK Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, wants to bolster the Food and Drug Administration’s Adverse Events Reporting System in an effort to highlight the purported negative effects of vaccines.

As summarized in this recent video report, the Trump administration is accelerating these data suppression efforts in ways that are far-reaching, without considering the knock-on consequences that will put every sector of our economy, healthcare, and national security at risk. Last August, President Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a poorer than expected jobs report in July, an action undermining the credibility of future reports that are crucial for investors and businesses looking to expand. A recent survey of NIH grants that were terminated by the Trump administration last year found that they disproportionately affected women and under-represented minority scientists whose research was focused on the health of non-white and female patients, who have been long overlooked in clinical trials in medicine.

Data repositories are an essential part of the scientific ecosystem. To eliminate them is to render pointless the work done by many thousands of scientists over the decades—work that has up to now enhanced human existence by identifying trends that not only inform but allow us to predict. Without data about what has happened in the past, and is happening in the present, we are committed to navigating a perilous and uncertain future while flying blind.

This is far from the first time that American politicians have chosen willful blindless over informed decision-making. In 1996, Arkansas Congressman Jay Dickey introduced a last-minute amendment to an omnibus appropriations bill that prevented the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from collecting data on injuries and deaths related to guns and the National Institutes of Health from funding studies to determine who commits these acts of violence and why. That law was not overturned until 2018, leaving behind a 22-year gap in our knowledge about gun violence.

Fast-forward to June 15, 2020—as the Covid pandemic picked up speed and the US death toll rose above 110,000—President Trump said, “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.” This failure to face the facts appears to be his approach to any variety of information that might reflect poorly on his leadership.

An administration acting in the best interests of the American people should not hide from the facts but should acknowledge the reality of problems and seek ways to solve them without pretending that they don’t exist. Sadly, from the current administration we are seeing a retreat from the facts that diminishes our capacity to adapt, to plan, and to seek the best advice so that the public and private sectors of our society can make the right decisions for our citizens.