Why Trump’s Data Purge is a Digital Book Burning
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I want you to imagine that you just had a baby. You're in the hospital, delighted and exhausted, welcoming a wonderful new little person into the world. But your baby has mysterious symptoms, maybe ones the pediatricians aren't familiar with. And that is where Jeremy Prokop comes in. I'm a data science advisor for a Midwest hospital system. I also am an associate professor at one of the universities in the Midwest as well.

Jeremy's job is to use data to try to figure out what is going on and how to help your baby. So, you know, about one in 14 individuals has a rare disease. And so we'll go in and we'll do a genetic sequencing on the patient and then start saying, what is that? Sometimes we get lucky and the answer sits right there. Sometimes it's way more complex. And that can mean checking against data and reports from the Centers for Disease Control or the National Institutes of Health.

If I can connect a patient here to a patient that might be sitting in another country, but they have the same genetic mutation, we can connect the dots and really help that patient find a treatment because maybe that other patient had a treatment already. And how much of that data comes from the federal government?

I would say most of it comes from the federal government at some level. Some of the data might be sitting in databases like the CDC or NIH runs what we call the NCBI, which houses just petabytes of data that we can access. And then turn that information into action.

But right now, a number of websites and data sets from the CDC and NIH are offline, along with data across the government. They were taken down or modified to comply with President Trump's executive orders around gender and diversity. According to one analysis by The New York Times, 8,000 government web pages were taken offline since January 31st.

Other information went offline and has now reappeared. At one point, the main census website was inaccessible. You know, a lot of the CDC things came back, but there are still pieces of it, especially around HIV and gender aspects that still aren't there. And so are we ever going to get access to that data again? These are not just academic concerns. They affect real people right now.

I look at the rare disease community and where we've been able to go over the last 10 years. It used to be, you know, 10 years for a diagnosis. Now we can do that in two to three days because of data. But if we start getting restricted or we have issues with sharing that, most of that data gets shared by NIH. That's in NIH's budget. If we stop paying those bills to share data, we're taking 10 steps back in human health. Today on the show, what happens when government data disappears?

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It's not unusual for some websites or data to go down when presidential power changes hands. In President Trump's first term, the administration removed data from websites about climate change and the environment. The Biden administration then restored much of that.

But in this second Trump term, the data deletions have been turbocharged, gutting information across a wide variety of agencies. One way we know this is because the government has been changing many of its websites on GitHub, an open source code repository that's generally public for anyone to read. I called up Jason Kebler, a co-founder of 404 Media, to explain it all.

One of the features of GitHub is that it tracks all changes. They're called commits. Any new change is cataloged on this website. We were able to see that at the General Services Administration, which has been part of

like an ancillary part of Doge, kind of. It's been taken over by Musk acolytes. There's been like widespread purging of anything having to do with diversity, equity, inclusion, but then also things like changes to government AI policies to remove references to things like implicit bias, things like that. NASA and NOAA have also had, you know,

big changes to not just its websites, but also some papers that have been published. The National Institutes of Health and the Center for Disease Control have had entire agencies' websites purged, and the agencies themselves have been shut down as well. And so this is a widespread government effort to, I mean, destroy anything that they perceive to be

associated with DEI or woke or the left or the previous administration. And so there is really some malicious intent here beyond just like normal variants. I think one of the things that is very interesting

interesting about your reporting and is very specific to what you all do is that you are tracking the changes in GitHub, that this is not just me noticing that census.gov went offline, but that you all were able to look at the code base and see a project called, and tell me if I'm describing this right, Remove DEI. I wonder if you could

Explain how that works. Explain the guts of what you're seeing on GitHub. Yeah, I mean, a lot of this...

strikes me as like the banality of evil, forgive me, but that's, that's what it strikes me as because you see these government coders. And in the case of this remove DEI thing that you just referenced that that was in regards to a health and human services database administered by Headstart, which is this big government program to get children ready for school. And

there were all of these discussions about how to pull that database into compliance with Trump's executive orders. And you have these government contractors discussing exactly how to get rid of it, writing specific tools to make sure that every last instance of the word inclusion is removed or making sure that things like

the word equity are changed to the word fair, things like that. And because of the way that GitHub works, you can see them discussing this. You can see the specific code that is being changed to do this. And in this database, there was like a constant, like, which is a coding...

It's a thing that you use in code to define a specific type of data that you're going to have. And an entire constant that had been set up about marginalized communities was deleted. And that really struck me just seeing it, seeing the actual code that did this was very affecting for me. Do you know who is writing that code? I do. It's, I mean, it's,

People at this government contractor called Ad Hoc LLC, and they have millions of dollars of government contracts. They run a bunch of different government agencies. It actually was spun up in the aftermath of the healthcare.gov debacle to make government websites work better. And I mean, I was able to identify the specific coders who did this and, you

I decided not to identify them in my article because they were very low level people. And I just don't know what they have going on in their lives and sort of like whether they felt like they had the ability to push back or not. But I think I've talked to a lot of federal employees over the last few weeks. And that is a situation that a lot of federal employees find themselves in where they're being asked to do things that they maybe morally don't agree with.

But at the same time, the government is trying to push these people out. And so they are trying to make this mental calculus about, do I comply with these orders? Do I resist these orders and get fired, which is what they want to happen, you know, with this sort of like large scale buyout offer that's been going out. There's just a lot of people doing like mental gymnastics about where their line is, I guess I would say.

Well, one of the things that has been a through line in your reporting and in many of the other stories about government data sets and government websites going down is the keywords that have been zeroed in on. And this is, we should explain to listeners, agencies or staff trying to comply with the president's executive orders on diversity, on sex and gender, on

and on climate, and there are some others as well. And so I wonder when you look at the changes to the code base and you look at the keywords that are being zeroed in on, what you can see in terms of how the websites are actually changing? Yeah, I mean, that's a cool thing.

well cool for me as a reporter pretty pretty scary otherwise but um you can there's like a one-to-one correlation between the code that i'm seeing on github and the live websites so i can go and look at the changes look at how it was made and then go check out the live website in the case of websites that have been altered versus fully deleted and see like okay

indigenous people has been removed from this website. Like that term has been removed. There's been a lot of removal of accessibility language in government websites, which is very upsetting. For people with disabilities? People with disabilities and also people who are blind or low vision, you know, sort of like descriptions of things have been removed because it's not just DEI, it's

It's D-E-I-A that they're going after and the A in that is accessibility. And so there's that stuff. I haven't even published on this yet, but I got a screenshot from FEMA workers where they basically have this table of

previous terms that they were supposed to use and the replacements of what they're supposed to use. So instead of saying non-citizen or migrant, they're supposed to say alien. Instead of saying integration, they're supposed to say assimilation, things like that. And this particular worker described it as the most 1984 thing that they've ever gotten. And this is happening all across the government. When we come back, what happens to society when data disappears?

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At the time of this recording, some of the government's datasets have been restored after public outcry. At the CDC, the Atlas Plus tool, which monitors infections like HIV or hepatitis, went offline but then came back. So did the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, which tracks threats to teen health.

But what isn't immediately clear is whether and how much these data sets might have been altered. In the past, like the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, NASA, NOAA, etc., have been looked at as these authoritative sources of information where you could go and find out, like, what does this vaccine do? What does it mean for me and my family? And then you can make an informed decision on it.

And that stuff is gone by and large, and it's going to continue to be purged. But I think it's like the federal government has done an incredible amount of work

on all sorts of health and science things over the course of decades. And a lot of that is disappearing off of the internet where it's easily accessible. And let's spit that out a little bit because you might be listening to this interview and you say, that's okay by me. The government doesn't need to invest lots of money in all these data sets. After all, there are universities, there are private research labs. If you're coming at it from that standpoint, what would you say to that?

What would you say to the relationship between public federal data and the furthering of science, the furthering of technology, and more information? Do we need to have federal data sets? Yeah, I mean, well, first and foremost, they're deleting things we've already spent money on. And so, you know, there's been...

Obviously, billions of dollars invested in creating these data sets and they already exist and they're useful and these resources already exist and they're useful. People are using them. Whether the federal government should be doing this type of thing, I mean, I personally believe that yes, they should be because, you know, investment in science, investment in health is

pays for itself over time in terms of better outcomes for society and humanity. And I think that the U.S. government has been this kind of bastion of science for many, many, many decades. Like one of the reasons that the

language that is used in science is English and not German is because of huge government investment in science during World War II and prior to that as well. And that benefits the United States, not just, like that benefits American companies, that benefits American people, it benefits American soft power, hard power, any way you want to slice it. It's like these things have made America a dominant force in the world. And

stepping back from that and becoming a less reliable source of information creates this big gap for someone else to step in. Earlier this week, I talked to a former Undersecretary of Commerce about the economic data sets that are produced by a lot of the different government entities. And one of the things that he pointed to was the amount of private industry that actually depends on this stuff.

When you have been reporting and talk to people who use government data sets, who rely on government websites, what have they told you about their ability to do their work now? So far, I've been talking largely to people within the federal government who are really alarmed that this is happening. People are very scared. People feel like first, they come for the websites. Second, they come for the employees. Third, they, you know,

create a monolithic

group think more or less. But you're absolutely right that industry in the United States and in the world relies on U.S. government data sets, the reliability of things like unemployment numbers. These things are very closely held. Things like economic indicators are very closely held. And then when they're published, they move the market instantly and in a big, big way. And

People are not just worried about whether this data is accurate, but I think they're increasingly worried about an administration that has a lot of people with government contracts in it beyond just Elon Musk, but especially with Elon Musk and what could be done with access to that data. Some of these websites and data sets that we've talked about have come back online, as you mentioned, or...

researchers, archivists are trying to move them to different places. Can you tell me a little bit about that effort and whether you think it will be successful? Yeah. So I think it is extremely important to note that a lot of these data sets, a lot of these government websites are disappearing.

But archivists, academics, hobby data hoarders have known that this was going to happen for a long time. And not just because of President Trump, but because this happens to some extent in any administration. And so there is this cross-university effort called the End of Term Archive that for the last, I don't know, like 20 years has been creating these snapshots of the federal government's web presence online.

uh between government administrations and so this is not something that they woke up the day trump was inaugurated and said oh my god we have to go save this this is something that they plan on doing for years that they're constantly scraping the federal government's websites and data sets for um like the the silver lining here is that the dot gov web presence is some of the most archived

parts of the internet as a whole. And so many of these data sets are not gone forever. They've been saved by these archivists, by these projects, but they become a lot less accessible. I think that what we saw after Donald Trump's first term is that a lot of the data sets that were deleted were reinstated within a few days of Biden taking office. And so

If Democrats are to win in four years, a lot of these data sets will go back online. I'm sure of it. And the way that they'll go back online is they'll turn to some of these archivists and say, hey, can you give us this data so that we can republish it? So these efforts are really important. They're very serious efforts. It's not people just taking screenshots of government data. It's like universities saving hundreds of terabytes of government data in a systematic way. And

I'm very thankful that these people are doing it because a lot of them are like nonprofit efforts and volunteer efforts and things like that. I think it can be hard for people who are not looking at these sites, are not thinking about this all the time, to extrapolate outwards to the risks that might be posed by removing data from the public view. Is there, in your opinion,

and according to your reporting, a risk for democracy when this stuff goes down? I think there's a risk for democracy. I think especially because this time we're seeing it's a very ideological purge of information. And I think that in the past, we have thought of groups like the NIH, like NOAA, like NASA as being somewhat immune to this.

whatever party is in power, especially somewhere like NASA that works on timescales of decades that necessarily transcend presidential administrations. And if their data, their projects, their websites are being constantly altered, it really brings into question how authoritative these agencies and their data can be. And I think that

It does degrade democracy in a lot of ways that might not be visible right away, but in the long term are really scary. What happens when you can't rely on numbers or when you look at a website and don't know if what the government is telling you is true? Well, we live in a capitalist society, right? That's like very obsessed with...

the stability of the United States and being able to make investments based on information and get a return on that investment. And just through like a purely cynical perspective, it's like so much of what undergirds the stock market relies on things like job numbers, inflation numbers, economic indicators, things like that. And companies are spending trillions of dollars based on the idea that

you know, these numbers are real and if they are not real or if they're disappearing, if they're not accessible, that's going to change how companies act. And I think that it raises a lot of questions about the stability of our economic system, the stability of our nation, the stability of our democracy, et cetera. Um, I mean, you can like sort of extrapolate from there. I, I've seen a lot of things in the last few weeks that I never thought I would have seen. Uh,

But the idea that some of these, especially like economic numbers, could be messed with or might not be reliable, which I don't think is necessarily off the table, is something I never thought I would even think about. And now we're thinking about it. And that's scary, I think. Jason Kebler, thank you so much for your reporting and for coming on to talk about it. Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Jason Kebler is a co-founder of 404 Media. Jeremy Prokop is a data scientist in the Midwest. And that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Evan Campbell and Patrick Fort. Our show is edited by Elena Schwartz. TBD is part of the larger What Next family. And if you like what you heard, the number one best way to support our work is to join Slate Plus. You get all your Slate podcasts ad-free and

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