Trump Administration's Draft Budget Raises New Concerns About Data Collection

President Trump has made no secret of his disdain for many of the traditional data points used to represent the health and prosperity of the country. The budgetary process offers an opportunity to match words with action.

March 9, 2017, 2pm PST | James Brasuell | @CasualBrasuell

The U.S. Department of Agriculture conducts the Census of Agriculture every five years to complete a count of U.S. farms and ranches and the people who operate them.

U.S. Department of Agriculture

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According to an article by Dwyer Gunn, the Trump Administration's recently proposed budget draft has inspired a new round of concern about the future of statistics and data collection.

Among the data collecting and analyzing activities of the federal government of direct and critical need to planners is the American Community Survey, the annual survey conducted by the Census Bureau.

An article by Clare Malone from December 2016 also laid out the concerns, before the inauguration, of President Trump's well documented aversion to the institutions that collect and analyze statistics and data at the federal level.

As an indication of the scientific, and bi-partisan, concern over the Trump Administration's potential threat to data and statistics, Gunn reports that the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute held an event earlier this month titled "The Vital Role of Government Statistics: Strengthening Research, Governance, and Innovation." According to Dwyer, "[the] event was, in short, a full-throated, deeply passionate, bipartisan defense of the value and importance of government statistics."

Full Story:

Cutting Spending on Statistics Won’t Save the Budget

Published on Tuesday, March 7, 2017 in Pacific Standard