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💙 Amanda
Something unsettling is happening in the United States: data are dying.
Denice Ross has been counting the bodies. A former US chief data scientist, she now runs the Data Policy Institute at the Federation of American Scientists. "Our lives are going to get demonstrably worse if this invisible infrastructure of data continues to crumble," she told me.
That infrastructure is easy to ignore. But it's crazy important. It's behind tornado warnings, food recalls and the real-time radar pilots use to dodge flocks of birds. It tells you tomorrow's weather, shapes how much federal funding a town gets, and tells hunting apps where the wildlife is.
Data like these are now under threat. Some have already been killed outright. Yet far more have been left to rot — still online, but no longer alive. Call them the dead and the undead.
The dead
Dead data were killed on purpose: collections ended, columns deleted, sometimes whole datasets pulled offline. Many were victims of President Trump's January 2025 executive orders on gender and on diversity, equity and inclusion because, as Ross puts it, the data "didn't align with administration priorities."
Records of the race and gender of the federal workforce were wiped. A 30-year count of how many Americans go hungry was cancelled. A database tracking the cost of the country's worst weather disasters was retired (though it has since been resurrected by a climate nonprofit). Air-quality readings from monitors at more than 80 US embassies and consulates were switched off.
Here, the US is in unflattering company. Since invading Ukraine in 2022, Russia has removed almost 600 datasets from government websites. Analysts say the secrecy helps the Kremlin hide the extent of its economic woes and the impact of sanctions. In 2019, India killed its national consumption survey after it showed household spending had fallen for the first time in more than four decades. And China has quietly stopped publishing tens of thousands of economic statistics, usually without explanation, often as its economy has struggled.
China publishes far fewer statistics than it once did
Annual number of economic indicators made available by China's National Bureau of Statistics.
But in the US, dead data aren't the biggest problem. “Usually the data don’t actually go away,” said Ross. “It’s just that they stop being updated.”
The undead
Ross calls them zombie data. From a distance, they look perfectly healthy: the dataset is still online, the downloads still work. But get closer and you’ll notice the last update was years ago, and another one probably isn’t coming.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has plenty. In April 2025, the sickle cell data program lost every staffer. It was the only federal effort tracking people with the disease over the long term. That same month, the federal team behind one of the country's main sources of data on the health of mothers and babies was sent home, too. So was the six-person team that publishes the success rates of the country's fertility clinics.
Zombies arise when there's no one left to look after the data. Last year, Trump's cuts shrank the federal workforce by about 12%. And the statistical agencies — the folks who produce the country's data — were hit particularly hard. Six of the 13 lost at least a third of their staff, and as of July 2026, fewer than half had permanent leaders.
Under Trump, staffing at US statistical agencies has plummeted
Change in headcounts, fiscal 2024 to July 2026. Agencies labelled by parent department.
Ross thinks most zombie datasets weren't targeted. "I think it’s mostly collateral damage, and that’s actually what scares me the most," she said.
The body count
So how bad is the situation? Well, it's hard to say.
Ross co-founded the Federal Data Terminations Tracker to find out. Today, it logs 38 terminated datasets and 337 removed data elements across more than 60 agencies. Health data have been hit the hardest.
Health data have been the most commonly affected category
Share of terminated or altered data collections, by topic.
But Ross is certain the tracker undercounts; finding and logging it all is a near-impossible task.
The biggest challenge: there's no baseline to compare against. "Under normal conditions, data have to change to stay relevant and stay high quality," Ross said. So, telling routine change from deliberate cuts, or a late release from a zombie, would require eyes on every single dataset. It's why, when she talks about the problem, she avoids precise counts.
"Sometimes you don't want the precision of the numbers that you give to misrepresent the actual visibility that we have on an issue," she said.
The next victim
While these losses can be particularly hard to measure, the next data death might be particularly hard to miss. In September, the Trump administration unveiled a plan to strip questions about race and ethnicity from the 2030 census, something the count has asked about since 1790. It would also rule out any questions on sexual orientation.
If that happens, the effects would ripple well beyond the census. New policies often hit some groups harder than others. Without the data, those differences disappear from view. “You can’t run a modern society like ours without demographic data, including race and ethnicity,” Ross said.
Killing the data, or leaving them to rot, doesn't make problems go away. It just makes them harder to see.
“We’ve been taking our data for granted for so long," Ross said, "and now it’s starting to crumble.”
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FROM ELSEWHERE
Here's what I found interesting, important or delightful this week:
The Devil You Know. This CBC podcast on the Satanic Panic is a sharp look at how moral panics spread, and who pays for them.
SimCity, but with paperwork. In Permit Pending, the city you build has to survive zoning hearings, neighbour objections and lawsuits. Maddening, just like real life.
Cozy-creepy. Two brothers lost in a strange forest try to find their way home in this 2014 animated miniseries. Over the Garden Wall is 10 short episodes of gentle, eerie folklore. I adore it, and watch it every autumn.
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Amanda Shendruk
Amanda Shendruk
Amanda Shendruk
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