Data nerds are banding together to preserve government information under attack by the Trump administration

After President Trump took office, data sets on US government websites began to disappear or were altered, prompting an army of statisticians, demographers, and computer scientists to join forces to capture, preserve, and share the data. Their goal is to ensure the data remains available for future use, as they believe democracy suffers when policymakers lack reliable data. The threats to the US data infrastructure include the disappearance or modification of data related to gender, sexual orientation, health, climate change, and diversity, as well as job cuts of workers who managed restricted-access data. Experts are concerned that trillions of bytes of data files are now inaccessible due to lack of staff to manage them. In February, the CDC's public portal for health data was taken down, and the US Census Bureau's survey of American life was temporarily unavailable. Researchers found that almost half of 232 federal public health data sets modified in the first quarter of the year had been substantially altered, with many changes not recorded in documentation. A group of outside experts has formed to collect and preserve federal data, including the Federation of American Scientists' dataindex.com and the University of Chicago Library's Data Mirror website. These "data warriors" are also quietly reaching out to workers at statistical agencies to back up restricted data, as they cannot trust that the data will be available tomorrow. Separately, a group of experts has unofficially revived a long-running US Census Bureau advisory committee that was killed by the Trump administration, and will forward recommendations to the bureau despite not being officially recognized. The experts believe that national statistics should be above partisan politics and are working to ensure the integrity of the statistical system.