Trump’s Data Cuts Could Leave Nonprofits ‘Flying Blind’

In January, the Trump administration gutted the National Center for Education Statistics, leaving just three staff, freezing data collection, and halting reports on student achievement, school funding, and college completion.

In April, following an executive order limiting how agencies collect information on sexual orientation and gender identity, the Bureau of Justice Statistics dropped those questions from the National Crime Victimization Survey, erasing one of the few national measures of violence against LGBTQ people.

By September, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it would end its 30-year-old Household Food Security Report, and the Environmental Protection Agency moved to scrap its Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, which had long required major polluters to disclose emissions.

These are just a few of what experts say is a growing wave of federal data losses under the second Trump administration — part of a broader unraveling of the information infrastructure that nonprofits and philanthropies rely on to identify needs, measure results, and make informed investments.

Estimated federal spending on statistical activities totaled about $8 billion in 2023, or roughly half a percent of the federal budget, according to a report from the American Statistical Association.

“It’s catastrophic for many nonprofits, and for some it’s a disaster,” said John G. McNutt, an emeritus professor at the University of Delaware who studies nonprofits and technology. Without trusted national statistics, he warned, organizations are left “shooting in the dark.”

As federal data vanishes or loses credibility, systems of accountability and evaluation will likely begin to crumble. In reaction, a growing group of grant makers are supporting alliances of nonprofits, universities, and civic technologists to track data loss, archive federal information, and create independent public dashboards. Veteran funders such as the Robert Wood Johnson and Annie E. Casey foundations are being joined by newcomers alarmed by the scale of recent losses.

“In this moment when there’s so many things that feel like a crisis, we’re still seeing hundreds of funders showing up for this issue” of data loss, said Meghan Maury-Fox, project director of Funders for the Future of Public Data, a collaborative housed at the New Venture Fund, a grant-making intermediary that oversees more than 100 projects. “Data is like the roads we drive on; it’s infrastructure for everything we do.”

Adds Leslie Boissiere, vice president of external affairs at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, one of the Funders for the Future of Public Data: “When data is weakened, we’re all flying blind.”

Political Pushback

Some of the data loss is overtly political. When the USDA canceled its Food Security report, the agency said it “failed to present anything more than subjective, liberal fodder.”

The report’s loss alarmed anti-hunger groups like Food Research & Action Center (FRAC), which called it a critical tool to understand who is going hungry and why.

“It gives us a national baseline and helps guide our efforts,” Jordan Baker, a spokesperson for FRAC, said. “Without it, we won’t be able to know what’s working and what’s causing harm.”

The nonprofit’s work in the 1980s led to the Community Childhood Hunger Identification Project, the first comprehensive national study of childhood hunger. That research laid the foundation for USDA and Census Bureau food-security reporting and helped launch decades of advocacy to expand federal nutrition programs, according to the nonprofit.

Now, FRAC is urging its national network to press Congress to demand the report’s reinstatement. In the meantime, it’s relying on Census Bureau poverty data, like the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which tracks how benefits such as SNAP and school meals reduce hardship, to keep monitoring hunger trends.

Shrunken Agencies and Data Gaps

While some of the studies being suspended and data being removed from public access have been tied to Trump’s policy preferences — like defunding clean energy and denying non-binary gender identities — the losses are compounded by hollowed-out agencies struggling to maintain even basic datasets, said Amy O’Hara, who directs Georgetown University’s Federal Statistical Research Data Center and leads the Association of Public Data Users. Attrition and budget cuts have left fewer staff to update websites or run surveys, she said.

Advocates and researchers say they’ve lost visibility into data on drug use, maternal mortality, flood risk, and wildfire costs as agencies cut staff and shutter surveys.

“It’s making people recognize the degree to which they were using federal data, even if they weren’t thinking about it,” O’Hara said. “The nice thing about federal data infrastructure was that it let you compare apples to apples across the country. Without it, you’re left with a hodgepodge of standards.”

She advises nonprofits to take stock of which public data sources are most critical to their work. “If they have greater awareness about the types of federal data they’ve been consuming,” she said, “they can make sure they’re protecting that information moving forward.”

Emergency Data Rescue

After Inauguration Day, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation moved quickly to make emergency grants to rescue and archive endangered datasets and set up alternative places where people could access them. The foundation has committed $55 million this year to data infrastructure and rescue efforts.

Alonzo Plough, the foundation’s chief science officer and vice president for research, evaluation, and learning, described the administration’s actions as “an all-out assault on information.”

More recently, Plough said the foundation has shifted its approach from data rescue to helping states and cities build parallel data systems to fill the federal void. Their grantees include the Northeast States Collaborative and the West Coast Health Alliance, which pool public-health data, and the Big Cities Health Coalition, a group of health departments in 35 major U.S. cities working to expand local health-equity dashboards that track more than 100 indicators of health.

“We can kind of keep these data systems on life support,” he said, “but there’s no way in the world philanthropic funding will ever create a long-term alternative to what should be a federal function.”

Plough hopes stopgap projects will underscore how vital public data are to everyday life. “No one expected that something as fundamental as the scientific information and evidence we need to keep America healthy would be as threatened as it is now,” he said. “Funders need to think about this not as some research abstraction but as a fundamental driver of democracy. When scientifically valid data are eliminated or replaced by myths and disinformation, the very fiber of freedom of information is threatened.”

Philanthropic Collaboratives

Launched in September, Funders for the Future of Public Data is aiming to be a limited-time collaborative. Its mission is to help funders identify and support grantees, raise a pooled fund to back projects that aren’t getting individual foundation support, and coordinate with other philanthropic networks like the Data Funders Collaborative, the Portfolio to Protect Science, and the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Impact Funders Forum.

Early grantees include: DataIndex.us, which uses machine learning to track federal dataset changes; the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, which has made government and academic data publicly available for more than 60 years; and the Data Rescue Project, a new volunteer-led effort to preserve endangered datasets.

O’Hara, a former senior executive at the U.S. Census Bureau, said that while these data rescue efforts are promising, they focus on open datasets. Restricted data held by the Census Bureau, the Social Security Administration, the IRS, and the Department of Health and Human Services, for example, are not included. “We learned so much about our society by using these full-population datasets,” she said.

Reliable public data, particularly from the Census Bureau, has always been central to the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s mission to improve the well-being of children and families.

Since 1990, the foundation has published the Kids Count Data Book, which explores how American childhood experience has changed over time around the country. It draws primarily on data from the prior year to help communities, advocates, and policy makers “operate from the same shared set of facts” when deciding where to invest and what’s working, said Boissiere, the foundation’s vice president of external affairs. For years, Annie E. Casey has supported efforts to ensure a reliable Census count.

So far, the foundation has not faced barriers accessing the data it relies on, but Boissiere said they’re increasingly focused on preserving public data and educating others about its importance. The foundation has contributed $200,000 to Funders for the Future of Public Data’s pooled fund.

That collaborative is also exploring ways to defend against future harm to the federal data ecosystem through litigation and advocacy, said Maury-Fox, the project director. She said they’ve had conversations with groups like Democracy Forward, the public interest legal organization that has repeatedly challenged the administration in court.

Data losses have already prompted legal action. In recent months, coalitions of nonprofits — including the Union of Concerned Scientists, Sierra Club, and Environmental Integrity Project — have sued the administration over the removal of environmental and public-health datasets, arguing that the actions violate transparency and record-keeping laws. Other advocacy groups, such as Doctors for America, have challenged the takedown of federal health data and web pages, warning that the gaps hinder their ability to protect patients and advance evidence-based policy.

Some funders are calling for a longer-term role. Karuna Sridharan Chibber, program officer at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, wrote in a recent blog post for the Center for Effective Philanthropy that funders must think beyond rescuing individual datasets. She urged philanthropy to “save, strengthen, and rebuild public data systems so they remain resilient, accessible, and grounded in community needs.”