Money Talks: The Disappearing Databases
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Hello and welcome to Money Talks from Slate Money, the program where we talk to the smartest, most brilliant, most astute and generally most fabulous people on the planet about interesting and important things that are going on.

And I went down that list and I thought to myself, who do I know who ticks all of those boxes? And obviously top of the list was Lizzie O'Leary. So I'm Felix Hammond of Axios. Lizzie, who are you? I'm Lizzie O'Leary and I'm the host of What Next TBD at Slate. And I would always like you to be my hype person. That was an amazing intro. Yeah.

Lizzie, you are a longstanding business journalist. You have worked for Bloombergs and places like that. Yep. You are a fantastic general interest podcast host, but you nerd out with the best of them. And this is why we want you on this show. Thanks.

Because this is your opportunity, Lizzie, to nerd out. And in one of the great pieces of Slate nerdery that I've seen in a while, you nerded out on slate.com with an article headlined, Unfortunately, the economy runs on the data Trump is trying to delete. I would love to just expand on this a little bit in this conversation. What? Trump is deleting data? What? Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

So since I believe January 31st, though some of it might predate that, lots and lots of government data and websites have gone offline. Different places have been cataloging what has been taken down and when and where and why. But

Wired did one analysis showing that more than 450 government domains went offline. The New York Times reported that more than 8,000 U.S. government web pages went offline. And within that, there are also specific data sets that went offline that...

Researchers, doctors, economists, public health people, epidemiologists and just regular old Americans rely on to do their work and, you know, to do things like save lives. So it's it's it's one of those things that sounds dorky and actually is a pretty big deal.

So what we're talking about here is data and statistics. And there was a big revolution in the 20th century where basically governments around the world, and specifically the government of the United States, took it upon themselves to just measure what was happening in their country. Because if you don't know what's happening in your country, then doing any kind of policy, anything becomes way more difficult. And so you want accurate data on that. And

Tell me, like up until a few weeks ago, how good was the American government at measuring America?

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say the best in the world. And I want to break this out into two different categories. We can say economic data and then everything else. And that's a little misleading in that everything else also has a big economic impact, but there is stuff that is strictly economic data. And as of this moment, and I'm caveating that heavily because these things are changing all the time, the economic data has not been changed.

touched in as much as we know. But there are other things that

like the way teens act, chronic disease data, information on foreign aid, on where different places, for example, might be particularly sensitive to carcinogenic chemicals and how that interacts with different populations. Like that stuff is gone or was taken down. There have been a lot of lawsuits to try to keep this stuff up. But we're talking about

Lots and lots of granular numbers that influence a lot of things. At one point, census.gov went offline. And when you think about kind of the underlying numbers that dictate so much in how American policy and how the American economy runs, you don't.

need to measure people. That's like the most fundamental thing. You could be talking about, you know, how much money goes to a congressional district. You could be talking about immigration. You could be talking about congressional redistricting. All of those things actually track back to how many people live there in the first place. And so it was very scary to a lot of people when census.gov went down and when a lot of census data sets were removed.

So I think there are three different things, well, a million different things to worry about here. But let's break it down in the first instance to three. Number one is all of this data that we have been relying on and looking at and searching and downloading seems to have disappeared for some reason or another. And we're worried that we won't have access to it anymore. Yep.

Number two, even if we have archives of the data and we still manage to know where we were up until now, there's a concern that the data sets won't continue to be updated and that a whole bunch of time series that went up to 2025 will basically stop in 2025 and we won't have good data, reliable data going forwards. And then concern three, which is

Probably the most common, but also maybe the least likely concern in terms of whether it actually transpires, is that the data will continue to come out post-2025, but

but it will be less reliable and we won't be able to trust it as much for various reasons. And I think that last one gets into this larger question of confidence, which, as you know, is this diaphanous economic concern that is also incredibly important. So in terms of those three, which ones are you, how do they compare in terms of how worried you are about them? Okay, so let's take the first buck.

bucket. And there I think we can broadly say that's a lot of health data, environmental data, foreign aid data. A lot of those things were taken off to comply with administration orders around sex and gender and diversity and foreign aid. And some of that is like how an agency really broadly interprets that mandate. Like, you know, you can go through and remove for the keyword bias, but sometimes the keyword bias is in there because it's

talking about statistical bias. So like this isn't the most surgical strike, if you want to put it that way. Then you have private researchers, academics, people at the Internet Archive trying to back this stuff up so that they have some baseline, which to see like how are things going to get measured in the future if they are going to get measured in the future? Because sometimes stuff goes down between administrations.

The Trump administration took a lot of environmental climate focused stuff offline in their first go round. And then the Biden folks put it back up because people were still kind of tracking in the interim. This is a much, much, much bigger association.

assault and reworking of how this data faces the public. I mean, I talked to a reporter at 404 Media. They're very good. They were actually tracking the government code base in GitHub so they could see the changes being made to the GitHub commits. It's a way of thinking about the code and watching it be reflected in real time in terms of what was available to the public. So I think that second part's a question mark.

The third part, and this I think is the part that most strictly kind of falls into the slate money bucket, is the question of the 13 statistical agencies across the U.S. government that collect economic data. The Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Energy Information Administration, the Fed, etc.

This stuff is one of the reasons that we have such a robust and trusted economy, because countries around the world look at it and private companies within the United States. And there's like a very interesting economic paper from 2019 that looks at the number and kinds of companies

private enterprises that rely very specifically on government data. So are you worried about the trustworthiness of economic data or even non-economic data? I am. I mean, not so much in that I think someone is going to go in there and juke the stats, because I think there are enough market participants that

they can see that, right? Like if the jobs numbers suddenly come out and they bear absolutely no relationship to what a bunch of private forecasters have thought they should be, I kind of feel like that's one where there are enough like traders and economists and people like you who would look at that and say like, that doesn't make any sense. Like something's going on here. But then the question is, okay, if something like that were to happen, then

And do people just start to feel less confident about relying on any number from the government on any sense of like, what is the price of oil or what are the unemployment numbers? And so you just get into like a very squishy place. I will come out and say that I have had less faith in oil.

government statistics over the past four or five years, basically since the pandemic. Tell me why. Things like establishment surveys. Most government data is collated through surveys. You literally have government employees running around

With physical or virtual clipboards asking people questions, and then people answer the questions like, you know, were you paid this week? How many people did you pay this week? How much did they earn? This kind of thing. And one thing that happened with the pandemic was that the response rates on those surveys went down substantially, and they've never really recovered.

And the lower the response rate, obviously, the less accurate the number. But also, you start running the risk that the people who don't respond are basically significantly different from the people who do respond. And you might be missing something quite important.

And the statistical agencies, you know, the BLS and the Census Bureau and people like that are well aware of this problem. And so in order to address the problem, what they've been doing is they've been, you know, sending the surveys out to more people. And they've basically kind of to a certain degree been throwing money at the problem. And they're like, if we try and make the surveys bigger and bigger and bigger, the net will retain the accuracy that we've held ourselves to.

But that's not very Trumpian. No, I mean, that's also like you are presenting reasonable concerns about kind of how broadly a measure includes everyone in it, not saying like, I don't like the way that unemployment rate looks. Let's fiddle with it. Right, exactly. But I guess my point is that even if you don't think that Trumpists are going to fiddle with the numbers, you

You can absolutely believe that Elon Musk is going to be saying, like, why do we need so many people doing so many surveys of so many people? This is, you know, a government expense that is not necessary. And let's cut it and let's slash the budgets for the BLS and the Census Bureau. And that will directly hit the reliability of those surveys. Yes. So when I was writing that piece, I talked to Jed Kolko, who's an economist here.

He was the Commerce Department's undersecretary for economic affairs in the Biden administration. And one of the things he left me with was a quote basically saying there are many ways to undermine public trust and data, depriving federal agencies of money, encouraging their staff to quit. These are all ways that could end up undermining public trust and data.

So there's a broad sort of vague, vibey fear that the government won't take its statistical obligations as seriously as it has done up until now. How will we know, I guess is the next question, whether and how that begins to reverberate in the economy? Or will we just not know? I don't know how we'll know. We'll know if...

a bunch of economists from the Bureau of Labor Statistics lose their jobs, we would know that. But I think that the rest of this might be a little more difficult to quantify.

And lest we sound as if we think government data and data collection is perfect, it's not. That's certainly true. The BLS, among others, definitely has problems. You have outlined, I think, one of the biggest ones in terms of talking about the household survey. But it helps, I think, to have a baseline. And that is what sort of consistent government measurement with relatively the same tools have provided us.

over a long amount of time. We need to take a quick break, but when we come back, we will talk about whether this is all a cunning plan by Elon Musk.

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Okay, so here's my best attempt at slate pitching the silver lining to this. I'm not sure that I believe this, but I'm going to do my best.

There are a bunch of private sector statistical data sets out there. I think there's this thing called the Million Prices Project, which just tracks prices online via Google. There's the ADP, it's this payrolls provider which does its own version of the jobs report that comes out every month. And instead of being based on a relatively small number of surveys which people have to fill out, it actually is just based on the data

real actual money that real people are being paid because so many people get paid by ADP. It's this big sort of data provider. If you have a physical paycheck, that's a very good chance that that physical paycheck will say ADP on it somewhere. And these sort of parallel statistical data sets have not really gained a huge amount of traction

in the sort of economist world, because people have historically just trusted the government, and they think the government is the gold standard. And they just assume that the government data is better than the private sector data, whether or not they have any particularly good empirical reason to believe that. And so maybe,

if the government data starts looking a little bit less reliable, people will treat it with a bit more skepticism and also start comparing it to things which have been sitting in front of their face the whole time, which might have been more reliable all along. And we could actually get people, you know, using a sort of mosaic theory of data and saying, well, according to this, this, and according to this, that, and we'll piece together a

more accurate picture of the American economy by looking at a lot of different places rather than just trusting a single one source of truth. I appreciate your slate pitch. I think there is a universe and a set of users for whom that might absolutely be true. If you have a Bloomberg terminal, if you work for a big bank, and if you can pay for the access to all of those things, yeah, I think you can do that.

What is interesting to me is like, OK, well, let's say you sell cars. You were looking at auto sales and consumer credit and CPI and disposable income and employment and unemployment and GDP and interest rates and inventories.

Do you have the money to pay for access to private databases? Will it give you the fine grain analysis you need about the county and the state where you are working? Like, that's where I don't know. And this always I find kind of interesting because it's like, right, if we're trying to do this encourage small business thing, right?

those are big costs. Those are big costs that go into measuring and planning and thinking about, you know, how to run a business. Yeah, I'm not for a minute suggesting that I would love to privatize the entire statistical structure of the United States, but I do think that

That is one way that we might wind up going. I think it might be doable for some people. I should mention as well that a lot of the reason why people overwhelmingly concentrate on the official payrolls report rather than the ADP report is not because they just assume it is much, much more accurate and reliable.

but because they assume that that's the thing that the Federal Reserve is looking at when it's making monetary policy decisions. And so they're like, what I actually care about is what the Fed does more than I care about what the actual numbers are. And so this is therefore what I'm going to look at because that's what they're looking at.

So maybe the next time Jay Powell gets a press conference, Axios will ask him, are you thinking of spending more time looking at private sector data rather than just the BLS data? And if he starts saying yes, then maybe that will start changing that as well. Okay, so I want to really nerd out here for a second if I can. Oh, I love it. I love it. I love it. Okay, so the jobs report we just had, released in February, but has a January data, also has...

The annual benchmark revisions. I know. I know. I love this. And they were big. It was like half a million, right? Yeah, they were big. And like, so this is a place where you basically have the U.S. statistical agencies like trying to correct for population changes. So they're taking the payroll survey of employers. They're taking the household survey of people. And they're also taking census data and

I'm grossly simplifying. Also, I'm not an economist. Squish it all together and come up with a theoretically more accurate picture of the overall labor force in the country. And they do that once a year. And it is wonky. But one of the things that happened in this most recent one was like one of the census data sets that was supposed to be a part of that calculation was not online for the public on the day of that.

You know, this data was available in other places because lots of people archived it. But it was one of those things where you're like, oh, right, all these agencies share and they're interdependent. And it comes back to what you're saying about the Fed, where the Fed, it is independent, but it also relies on inputs from a bunch of different government data around the country. What's that wonderful Jenny Holzer tourism? Everything is delicately interconnected. It's data turtles all the way down. So.

So where does that leave us? Like, I guess right now at the beginning of the Trump administration and with a whole bunch of like Elon chaos going on, it's kind of impossible to tell whether this is a full blown assault on the public good of reliable statistical data or whether it's a

you know, unintended casualty of some script kitty taking a bunch of things offline. And at some point when the grownups like get into their seats, they'll bring it back up and we'll be back to normal.

And I think that's a big question mark right now. I do think that there maybe isn't like a full understanding of what that might mean in the market. Like there's an interesting World Bank paper from 2014 that talks about some unicorn valuation companies that like built their business model on the back of open public data. Waze and Zillow, right, are two of them. And so they're just a bunch of assumptions that I think the private sector has made about the public sector.

And there's a fundamental disruption to the guts of that. And we don't know yet how drastic and how long term that's going to be. You know what my favorite example of a U.S.-funded public good is? It is data, but it's a very special kind of data. It is the GPS system.

Yeah. Every single time you look at your phone and it tells you where you are on the map, you are using American satellites that are basically giving you that information for free. And it began as a project in the Defense Department. Yeah.

And now, you know, a million different apps make lots of money from basically using that information for free. And I'm sure Elon Musk's Tesla's use that information as do all other modern auto infotainment systems. And you do start to worry when a bunch of people are coming into the government with sledgehammers that they're going to break a bunch of stuff that just is really important infrastructure. And yeah,

As you have written, there's almost nothing which is more important infrastructure than the edifice of reliable statistical data. I don't want to sound like a tinfoil hat crackpot, but you could take that further and say, well, if that goes away, then what are you supposed to rely on? Oh, gosh, do you know anyone who has about 6,000 private satellites? Hmm. Yeah, that's terrifying. Is he that cunning?

I don't know, man. Maybe. I don't know. Ask Sam Altman. I have no idea. There you go. Next time I talk to Sam Altman, I'll be like, so does Elon Musk want to like

privatize GPS basically and sell it all from Starlink instead. There does seem to be no limit to the man's power, hungriness, and ambition. I'm trying to think about how to say this carefully. There are things that I have reported on in the past two weeks that would have been unimaginable to me a month ago. And

You know, I think that is the state of affairs. Yeah, I've literally lost track of the number of things that were unimaginable that now people are talking about. Oh, should we just expel 2 million Palestinians? Like these things just, you can't even get your brain around it. It's so outlandish. And yet somehow people are talking about it with a straight face. Lizzie, thank you for coming on and making us all, you know, scared and depressed and

We will come to you next time for martini recipes. That sounds great. I mean, I'm more of a tequila person, but sure. Maybe we'll just polish off a bottle of tequila. That'll do. If there's not a tariff.

You know what? If there's a tariff, we will polish off a bottle of tequila and then that'll be tax revenue as well. And so we are helping to run the government and maybe some of that tax revenue will go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And by getting drunk, we are actually helping the BLS. All right, I'll take it.

Lizzie O'Leary, thanks very much for coming on Money Talks. Thanks as well to Jessamyn Mollie and Shana Roth for producing. And we'll be back on Saturday with a regular Slate Money.

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