Curating reality is an old political game, but Trump’s sweeping statistical purges are part of a broader attempt to reinvent “truth.”
The Trump administration is deleting taxpayer-funded data — information that Americans use to make sense of the world. In its absence, the president can paint the world as he pleases.
We don’t know the full universe of statistics that has gone missing, but the U.S. DOGE Service’s wrecking ball has already left behind a wasteland of 404 pages. All sorts of useful information has disappeared, including data on:
Some of this censorship has been challenged (and at least temporarily reversed) through litigation. Even so, DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, has continued its digital book-burning and is now blocking new data collection. For example, in recent weeks, DOGE has canceled contracts for scheduled data gathering at the Social Security Administration and Education Department, among other agencies.
Contrary to claims that these contract cancellations save money, in many cases the data have already been collected — but will never see the light of day, even if a new administration changes course. That’s because many contracts contain data deletion clauses.
Curating reality is an age-old political game. Politicians spin facts, cherry-pick and create “truth” through repetition. Statistical sleight of hand has long been part of that tool kit, as has burying inconvenient numbers. (In 1994, for instance, U.S. lawmakers blocked federal data collection on “green” gross domestic product.) But Trump’s statistical purges have been faster and more sweeping — picking off not just select factoids but entire troves of public information.
“Statistics provide a mirror to society,” said Andreas Georgiou, a Greek statistician who was criminally prosecuted in his home country after crunching accurate budget statistics during Greece’s debt crisis. “Sometimes these are uncomfortable peeks into reality.”
For Trump, the current reality can definitely be uncomfortable. After all, government data include lots of evidence that could frustrate his ambitions.
So, he developed a smoke-and-mirrors act:
He has repeated this trick again and again with other frustrating realities. Government data show new forms of bird flu transmission, which undercut his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda and promise to reduce egg prices. Federal statistics reflect heightened incidents of violence against trans people, whose very existence Trump has denied via an executive order. Databases show that sometimes law enforcement officers abuse their power, misconduct Trump would prefer to cover up. Plus, findings on which educational programs most effectively help special-needs children undercut Trump’s plans to cut education funding.
Each of these examples has now been blocked or removed from government websites. It’s the successful execution of an impulse Trump articulated back in June 2020, when the covid-19 pandemic was raging: “If we stop testing right now,” he said, “we’d have very few cases, if any.”
Obstructing access to such facts makes it more challenging for experts and regular voters alike to assess how politicians are serving the public.
Deleting data isn’t the only way to manipulate official statistics. Trump and his allies have also misrepresented or altered data. Here are a few examples:
1. Incorrect data
Witness DOGE’s bogus statistics on its supposed government savings. The administration counts as “savings” some canceled contracts that had already been paid in full. Some canceled expenses were created out of whole cloth, such as $50 million supposedly spent on sending condoms to Gaza.
2. Misrepresented data
One of Trump’s favorite charts on immigration is riddled with errors. For one, it does not show the number of immigrants entering the United States illegally, as he claims, but the number of people stopped at the U.S. border.
Similarly, when Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was recently asked how much DOGE funding cuts might reduce economic growth, he suggested that the agency might decide to change how economic growth is calculated so that the usual GDP report strips out government spending altogether. This would be an abrupt change to the standard GDP methodology that has been used around the world for nearly a century, but it would certainly make the DOGE cuts look less painful.
3. Altered data
When data doesn’t tell the story Trump wants, he fabricates it. In what became known as “Sharpiegate,” Trump notoriously altered a map of Hurricane Dorian’s path in 2019.
Likewise, before Jan. 30, a National Institutes of Health website documenting years of spending data included a category called “Workforce Diversity and Outreach.” That line item is now gone — even though the money was, indeed, spent.
Such actions are straight out of authoritarian leaders’ playbooks.
Research suggests that less democratic countries have been more likely to inflate their GDP growth rates and manipulate their covid-19 numbers. Statistical manipulation is also more common in countries that shun economic openness and democracy.
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin infamously executed statisticians who served up unwelcome numbers. His census chief Olimpiy Kvitkin was arrested and murdered by firing squad after the 1937 census revealed the bloc’s population to be millions smaller than Stalin had claimed. Those disseminating the inconvenient data were “enemies of the people,” state media declared at the time.
Recent data-suppression episodes have been less bloody but still disturbing. In 2013, the International Monetary Fund censured Argentina for not providing accurate inflation and GDP data. And as the Financial Times has documented, China began rapidly eliminating inconvenient data series after Xi Jinping became president in 2013. For instance, shortly after China’s youth unemployment rate hit an all-time high, the government statistics agency simply stopped publishing it.
To be clear, efforts to rewrite reality via statistical manipulation often don’t work. If anything, China’s data deletions reduced public confidence in the country’s economic stability. (No one hides good news, after all.)
The Trump team’s efforts to suppress nettlesome numbers have similarly eroded trust in U.S. data. Only about one-third of Americans trust that most or all of the statistics Trump cites are “reliable and accurate.”
Meanwhile, missing or untrustworthy data lead to worse decisions: Auto companies, for example, draw on dozens of federally administered datasets when devising new car models, how to price them, where to stock and market them and other key choices. Retailers need detailed information about local demographics, weather and modes of transit when deciding where to locate stores.
Doctors require up-to-date statistics about disease spread when diagnosing or treating patients. Families look at school test scores and local crime rates when deciding where to move. Politicians use census data when determining funding levels for important government programs.
And of course, voters need good data of all kinds when weighing whether to throw the bums out. Many of us take the existence of economic or public health stats for granted, without even thinking about who maintains them or what happens if they go away.
Fortunately, some outside institutions have been saving and archiving endangered federal data. The Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine, for instance, crawls sites around the internet and has become an invaluable resource for seeing what federal websites used to contain. Other organizations are archiving topic-specific data and research, such as on the environment or reproductive health.
These are critical but ultimately insufficient efforts. At best, they can preserve data already published. But they cannot update series already halted or purged, so that Americans can keep tabs on how economic, health, demographic or educational metrics are faring under a new administration. Some private companies may step in to offer their own substitutes (on prices, for example), but private companies still rely on government statistics to calibrate their own numbers. Much of the most critical information about the state of our union can be collected only by the state itself.
Americans might be stuck with whatever Trump chooses to share with us, or not.
Illustrations by Michelle Kondrich.