Trump’s data wrecking ball has echoes of Greek tragedy 

Oedipus wrecks our map

Since taking office, the Trump administration has systematically neutered the government’s ability to collect and publish objective data about the economy and the climate. Almost immediately after the inauguration, a large set of government websites went dark, including the main Census homepage and several pages at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Park Service. Mentions of environmental justice, or trans people, or the accomplishments of disfavored populations, were scrubbed from the public record.

Some of the most ham-handed moves appeared as transparent efforts to disguise the administration’s economic performance. In March, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick floated the idea of changing how GDP was calculated to exclude government spending. Staffing cuts reduced the sample collection areas used to calculate inflation data. And, in August, Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the day it reported exceptionally weak job numbers. He posted to his Truth Social site: “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” The firing prompted an outcry among economists and others who rely on BLS data, who universally pointed out the futility of shooting the messenger. But the director did not regain her job, and the nominee to replace her appeared notably compliant.

Someone on a diet might tinker with their bathroom scales to get better results, but we don’t expect the doctor’s office to do the same. And yet that’s where we are. Facts on climate, health, and the economy were systematically erased. Bit by bit, America’s government data collection was being undermined.

The longest government shutdown on record, which lasted from 1 October to mid-November, demonstrated what might happen in the near-total absence of reliable data. The New York Times reported that the shutdown had “hobbled the nation’s statistical agencies and created the longest economic data blackout in history.” What is the unemployment rate? How high is inflation? Nobody really knew, and it was hard to get a consistent read from the chorus of alternative indicators. “ADP, a payroll processing firm, reported that employment at private companies fell in September but rebounded modestly in October. An alternative measure from Revelio Labs, a labor market data firm, showed the opposite.”

While the Fed exercised caution in the fog of this data blackout, Trump was triumphant. In early November, he crowed, “Our energy costs are way down, our groceries are way down, everything is way down. And the press doesn’t report it. We had the worst inflation in the history of our country. Now we have virtually no inflation at all … so the affordability is much better with the Republicans.” With no authoritative data to contradict him, why not declare victory? After all, this was the man who said at a news conference during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic: “Think of this: If we didn’t do testing, instead of testing over 40 million people, if we did half the testing, we would have half the cases.”

A large part of the population was already skeptical of so-called facts. In 2024, most Republicans believed that unemployment had gone up or stayed the same during Biden’s presidency (it had actually dropped by almost half) and that the stock market had stayed flat or gone down (it had actually risen by 20%). Anyone with a smartphone could verify the stock market’s performance in a couple of clicks – and yet they did not.

The reality-based community meets ‘alternative facts’

If you abandon the collection of systematic data, the truth can become simply a battle of narratives. In our increasingly intermediated information environment, where a small handful of tech companies have disproportionate control over access to information, this may not end well.

Journalist Ron Suskind described a 2002 conversation with an aide to President George W Bush about the naivete of believing in facts:

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”

Notably, this interview took place well before the advent of social media and the expansive arsenal of AI tools for fabricating reality. Traditional media are increasingly consolidating in the hands of a few billionaires: the same people and families who control the biggest tech companies often control important news outlets (Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post), broadcasters (David Ellison and CBS), and social media platforms (Elon Musk and X; Larry Ellison and TikTok). In the absence of grounding in accountable public data sources, inflation, unemployment, and carbon dioxide concentrations can be whatever the broligarchs want.

Notably, public facts and private facts are held in very different regard. The data conveyed to the outside world may be rife with “alternative facts”, but data used to control the population is precise. A top priority of DOGE was to stitch together massive federal datasets to enable excruciatingly detailed profiles of every citizen – medical, tax, employment, social security, and more – an agenda that Palantir appears to be making good on.

The infrastructure for government data collection and dissemination has not been entirely dismantled yet, although, as the Times noted, “Some economists worry that the shutdown has done longer-term damage to a statistical system already strained by shrinking budgets and staff turnover,” and about one-third of senior leadership positions at the BLS are vacant. The jobs might not be that inviting at this point. If accurate reporting can get one purged, we might find ourselves in the land of Stalin, where the brilliant success of the five-year plans was visible in propaganda posters and lectures across the land – if not on the ground.