America’s Statistical System Is Breaking Down
Canceled surveys, missing datasets and staffing cuts are leaving the US with growing blind spots — and weakening trust in official numbers.
Illustration: Joonho B Ko for Bloomberg
Data geeks spent most of 2025 worrying that President Donald Trump would cook the books on America’s most important numbers. The bigger threat turned out to be that he wouldn’t count them in the first place.
Surveys that monitor food security, police misconduct and how schools are supporting post-pandemic learning recovery have been canceled. Data collection has been suspended for emerging substance abuse trends as well as more than 15% of the sample of the nation’s most popular inflation index. Information about maternal and infant mortality in the US is no longer aggregated up to the national level, forcing doctors and researchers to scavenge across the states to gather it. And there’s no knowing whether databases on critical infrastructure for disaster planning, or maps that identify communities disproportionately affected by environmental hazards, will ever come back.