Scores of government statisticians are gone, leaving data at risk, report says

The ranks of U.S. government statisticians were hollowed out last year due to layoffs and buyouts. That, coupled with dwindling funding and attacks on their independence, have endangered the data used to make informed decisions on everything from the country’s economy to its demographics, according to a new report from outside experts released Wednesday.

One agency lost 95% of its staff, while others lost about a quarter to more than a third, due to government downsizing this year during the first months of President Donald Trump’s term, according to the report released by the American Statistical Association. In addition to veteran employees with deep institutional knowledge, some of the reductions have affected new hires intended to infuse new blood into the agencies, the annual report said.

“Things are getting worse,” Nancy Potok, former chief U.S. statistician during the first Trump administration and who was part of the team that produced the report, said Wednesday. “It’s kind of a fall off the cliff there and into a really dire situation.”

The administration’s Office of Management and Budget, which houses the chief U.S. statistician who coordinates the data collection system, did not respond Wednesday morning to an email inquiry about the report.

However, when asked last month about concerns about the politicization of statistical agencies, Mark Calabria, named chief statistician of the United States in July, said: “Everything in government is rooted in politics and is rooted in accountability. »

“So these kinds of debates about independence and accountability, these are to some extent oranges and apples,” Calabria said during a forum at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. “What you want to do is make sure the data gives you the right answer.”

In the first months of the second Trump administration, thousands of federal workers were fired as part of efforts by the White House and its Department of Government Effectiveness. The White House also offered a “deferred resignation” proposal in exchange for financial incentives, such as months of paid leave, to nearly all federal employees who chose to leave their jobs. He also decided to fire probationary employees – those who have typically been on the job for less than a year and have not yet been granted civil service protection.

“The statistical system still works, but the threats are very serious,” said Beth Jarosz, vice president of the Association of Public Data Users, who was not involved in the report. “There are staff reductions, contracted services that have been reduced. We’re seeing that in the cancellation of data products, reduction in data collection on things like consumer prices.”

The team behind the report noted that it had a “scarcity of information” on the detailed impacts of the reductions because agencies were unwilling to provide it “perhaps out of caution or because they are not authorized to communicate with outside entities.”

The hardest hit agency was the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the U.S. Department of Education, which lost 95% of its staff. The agency tracks educational trends in an effort to improve outcomes, and staffing losses disrupted most of its data collection earlier in the year, according to the report. Many external contracts have since been reinstated, but with reduced scope, the report said.

Staff at the Social Security Administration’s Office of Research, Evaluation and Statistics have been cut by almost half. The cuts eliminated, among other things, research on retirement and disability, the report said.

The Energy Information Administration, the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, and the National Agricultural Statistics Service each lost between 25 and 40 percent of their staff. The cuts resulted in the interruption or delay of energy sector reporting and the cancellation of a farmworker survey and some state-specific agricultural reports.

The nation’s largest statistical agency, the US Census Bureau, has lost at least 15% of its staff this year, according to the report.

In addition to staff cuts, some obstacles to the political independence of statistical agencies were removed this year. The Trump administration made unsubstantiated claims that the data was biased; removed the heads of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics; failed to fill key management vacancies; and appointed political appointees from other jobs to fill leadership positions held by career civil servants, the report said.

“These actions undermine public confidence in federal statistics,” the report said.

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