Why Impartial Government Reporting Is Vital

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📝 usncan Note: Why Impartial Government Reporting Is Vital

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In 1822, James Madison warned that, “A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both.” Madison’s America, with less than 10 million people, was a simple society with limited government.

Two centuries later, 330 million Americans benefit from a government that now has extraordinary capacities to gather and disseminate information. It produces more than 300,000 taxpayer-funded data sets, many mandated by law. These reports provide basic economic data, predict storms, disseminate information on public health, and catalogue scientific and medical discoveries. They record data relating to climate change, provide information to protect consumers, and assess how other governments treat women and human rights more broadly.

The government’s capacity to produce these reports has long benefited from bipartisan support. Thousands of government experts have been recruited and given the resources they need to produce these reports without political interference.

Until now. Since President Trump returned to the White House in January, his administration has launched a systematic assault on this unique system of impartial reporting. Piece by piece, they are dismantling this foundation of popular information – an attack on truth itself that now seriously undermines our democracy.

The Economic Data Foundation Under Attack

Consider recent changes at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Created in 1884 as the Bureau of Labor, it is the principal U.S. government fact-finding agency tasked with collecting, analyzing, and disseminating essential statistical data on labor and employment. It publishes monthly data on inflation, employment, unemployment and compensation, and measures productivity quarterly. All of this data is produced by a large nonpartisan staff. BLS reports aid the financial markets, businesses, and policymakers who rely on them to make a wide range of critical decisions. This reliance is based on a commonly held view that BLS reporting is the product of painstaking attention to detail, insulated from political pressure.

Ignoring the BLS’s track record and reputation, on August 1, President Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer. He did so hours after the bureau published a downward revision in its reports on job creation, a routine reporting exercise. He accused McEntarfer of producing “faked” job numbers. On Truth Social, he wrote, “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” On August 11, Trump nominated EJ Antoni, the chief economist of the Heritage Foundation’s Center on the Federal Budget, to replace McEntarfer.

Politicizing BLS statistics invites skepticism from markets, erodes investor confidence, and is likely to lead to tangible economic harms.

Environmental and Climate Information Disappearing

The assault extends to environmental reporting. An August report from the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) concludes that “the Trump administration has significantly altered the federal environmental information landscape as information about environmental justice and climate change have been rewritten and deleted.” EDGI describes itself as a research collaborative and network of diverse professionals promoting evidence-based policy-making and public interest science that advances environmental transparency.

The organization’s report concludes, “The swift removal of public information at odds with the Trump administration’s viewpoints demonstrates the need for more comprehensive and binding policies to protect the integrity of federal information and, ultimately, to protect American democracy.”

Gutting Human Rights Documentation

In the realm of international diplomacy, on August 12, the State Department issued a drastically pared-back version of its annual Human Rights Reports. It removed large sections focused on corruption, fair elections, gender-based violence, and restrictions on civil society.

As Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor from 2009 to 2012, I oversaw the production of these reports, which involved tens of thousands of hours of careful fact-gathering and analysis by foreign service officers and other professionals. First published in 1977, these reports were mandated with a simple but uncompromising goal: gather the best available information from U.S. embassies, NGOs, journalists, and survivors; verify it through rigorous review; and publish it without political interference.

For almost 50 years, these reports have formed the evidentiary backbone for US congressional deliberations on foreign aid and trade. Diplomats used them to raise concerns directly with foreign governments; human rights defenders cited them to press for change; journalists and researchers mined them for credible, government-verified information. They have also been an invaluable resource for global corporations in assessing where to do business.

Selectively Chosen Health Data

The administration’s assault on objective reporting has also extended to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other agencies reporting on public health issues. The Kaiser Family Foundation tracks health-related federal data that the Trump administration has taken offline. While some sites went dark only temporarily, they reappeared with content about diversity or gender issues deleted. Court orders required the administration to reinstate other sites, which now display disclaimers declaring “this page does not reflect reality.”

Among the court-reinstated resources is the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, the nation’s premier system of health-related telephone surveys used to track state and local health objectives, plan health programs, and implement disease prevention strategies. Other government sites remain unpublished, including one that provided data about PEPFAR, the vital global HIV/AIDS program, and another that provided data to help policymakers and public health professionals make informed decisions about health policy and resource distribution.

The Suppression of Disaster-Related Information
The data purge has extended to disaster preparation, even as the Trump administration plans to scale down the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index, which provides data used for disaster planning, response, and recovery, was only reinstated after a court order. It now carries a disclaimer condemning “gender ideology” and expressing official administration rejection of the site’s contents.

The administration has also threatened weather and climate data essential for disaster preparedness. A Pentagon decision to stop sharing satellite data crucial to hurricane forecasters was reversed in late July only after widespread protest.

The independent and thorough nature of reporting by these and many other federal agencies is what has made their assessments so valuable to communities preparing for and responding to natural disasters.

The Stakes: Democracy, Economy, Domestic Health and Global Leadership

In each of these areas, what is at stake is much bigger than any single report or official website. It is the principle that facts gathered through transparent, professional processes should be shielded from political manipulation. That principle is essential to effective governance. Without it, policy becomes guesswork, public debate becomes untethered from reality, and the credibility that gives the United States influence in the world begins to crumble.

Good decisions depend on good information. That is true whether the decision concerns setting interest rates in Washington, shaping climate policies, or responding to repression in a foreign capital. For decades, experts in the United States government have worked to earn a reputation for producing clear-eyed, reliable reports on many issues. That reputation is a form of power and should not be squandered.

The erosion of trust in government data creates a cascade of problems: financial markets lose confidence in economic indicators, businesses struggle to make informed decisions, scientists cannot track environmental changes effectively, and America’s moral authority in international affairs diminishes. When government becomes unreliable as a source of factual information, the entire ecosystem of democratic decision-making suffers.

Protecting the independence of our fact-gathering institutions is not optional. It is essential to our democracy – as Madison warned two centuries ago – but also to our economy, and to our leadership in the world. The information infrastructure and the trust and credibility that took generations to build can be destroyed in months – if we let that happen.