In late January, critical government data sets used by health researchers and economists disappeared from government websites in response to executive orders and memoranda from President Trump’s administration. Though some of those tools came back online, the purge sparked a data downloading frenzy among researchers and academics worried about the future of federal statistics. 

David Van Riper, director of spatial analysis at IPUMS, an organization at the University of Minnesota focused on making government data easier for the public to use, spoke with “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal about the importance of government statistics. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. 

Kai Ryssdal: This will sound like a silly question, but I don’t really think it is. Why does what you do matter?

David Van Riper: So, I think of Federal Statistical data sets like an X-ray. They provide information about the population throughout the U.S., diving all the way down to individual neighborhoods. You know, thinking of it as an X-ray, we can really hone in on various parts of the body and figure out what’s going on in our communities.

Ryssdal: Okay, so given that the state of play here with access to federal data is in flux — it does seem like some of the data has come back — some of it, maybe not. My question is, was there a moment in the last three and a half, four weeks when you woke up and said, “Oh, shoot, this is bad?”

Van Riper:  Yeah. So I went to bed on Thursday, January 30, kind of thinking that the next day was going to be a kind of a regular work day and I woke up on the 31st and got to my office and started looking at Slack and social media, and started to realize that, “Oh, a lot of the Centers of Disease Control data are not available anymore.” And started to realize that, “Oh, this could become a problem for people who rely on these data to carry out their day-to-day jobs.”

Ryssdal: Say more about those problems.

Van Riper: Yeah, so you know, a lot of people have built workflows. They kind of build these data sets into their day-to-day operations. They’re continually going to federal statistical websites to look up documentation, to download data files, and all of a sudden those were no longer accessible. And if you didn’t have those data sets downloaded to your local computing system, you started to get real nervous about how you were going to access those data, potentially long time into the future. 

Ryssdal: You and your colleagues, in point of fact, actually spent some frenzied moments there in sort of late January, early February, downloading basically everything you could.

Van Riper: We did. We wanted to make sure that we had all of the data and documentation, especially that we needed for our particular data products. We were also, you know, getting inquiries from groups around the country asking us if we had grabbed, you know, data set X or data set Y, and we were in communication with other organizations and people who were also kind of grabbing and downloading as much data as they could.

Ryssdal: We don’t know what’s going to happen with federal data. The management of it right now is chaotic at best. And I guess that leads to this question, what happens if, in six weeks, somebody flips a switch and this data just vaporizes and never comes back?

Van Riper: I think the research community has done a lot of work in the last, you know, three weeks to download as much data as they could as it’s come back online. Right now it’s mostly we’re going through a process of documenting who has what data. Going forward, though, if federal statistical products are delayed or are no longer provided, if they’re canceled, it’s going to be like we’ve taken that X-ray machine away from a doctor. We’re not going to know what’s going on in communities and being able to measure whether or not specific policies are having the expected impact, you know, those, those statistical data sets are really fundamental for that measurement.

Ryssdal: So it’s, you know, it’s interesting. I went to your website, and I went to the mission statement, and the first sentence in the mission statement is, “democratizes access to the world’s social and economic data for current and future generations.” That seems unobjectionable. And I guess I wonder, as a guy now who’s been doing this for decades, right? What do you make of this current moment?

Van Riper: Um, I think it’s definitely concerning, right? I think we’ve never seen such a widespread removal of public access to data that you know should be made available to the public. You know, it’s all paid for by our tax dollars, and without that public data, you really have to rely on other channels of communication, which might be biased or which might be, you know, telling you a story they want you to hear. But we as a population aren’t allowed to see the data to make our own assessments of what’s going on.