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

The ranks of U.S. government statisticians have shrunk last year due to layoffs and buyouts. Put at risk by reduced funding and attacks on their independence data used to make informed decisions It’s about everything from the nation’s economy to demographics, according to a new report by outside experts released Wednesday.

One agency lost 95% of its staff as government downsized this year during President Donald Trump’s first months in office, while others dropped by nearly a quarter to more than a third, according to the report released by the American Statistical Association. In addition to experienced employees with deep institutional knowledge, some cuts also affect new hires aimed at injecting new blood into agencies, the annual report said.

“Things are getting much worse,” Nancy Potok, a former chief statistician of the United States during the first Trump administration who was on the team that prepared the report, said Wednesday. “It’s like falling off a cliff there and it’s in a really bad 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 to an emailed inquiry about the report Wednesday morning.

But when asked last month about concerns that statistical agencies were becoming politicized, Mark Calabria, appointed chief US statistician in July, said: “Everything in government is involved in politics and accountability.”

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

In the early months of the second Trump administration, thousands of federal government employees were shown the door as part of the White House and its efforts. Department of Public Efficiency. The White House also offered “deferred resignation” offers to nearly all federal employees who choose to leave their jobs in exchange for financial incentives such as months of paid leave. It has also moved to lay off probationary employees, who typically have been on the job for less than a year and have not yet received civil service protections.

“The statistics system is still working, but the threats are very serious,” said Beth Jarosz, vice president of the Public Data Users Association, who was not involved in the report. “There are staff cuts, reductions in contracted services. We see this manifested in cancellations of data products, reductions in data collection on issues such as consumer prices.”

The team behind the report said they had a “shortage of information” about the detailed impacts of the cuts, as institutions were unable to provide them “perhaps out of an abundance of caution or because they were not allowed to communicate with external organisations.”

The institution most affected by this situation was the US Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, which lost 95% of its staff. The agency tracks training trends in an effort to improve outcomes, and staff losses halted much of its data collection early in the year, according to the report. The report notes that many external contracts have since been restarted, but their scope has been reduced.

The workforce of the Social Security Institution Research, Evaluation and Statistics Department has decreased by almost half. The cuts eliminate retirement and disability research, among other things, the report says.

The Energy Information Administration, the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, and the National Agricultural Statistics Service each lost 25% to 40% of their staff. The outages led to the suspension or postponement of reports on the energy sector, the cancellation of a survey of farmers and the cancellation of some state-specific agriculture reports.

The U.S. Census Bureau, the nation’s largest statistical agency, 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 institutions were also removed this year. The Trump administration made false claims about biased data; fired the heads of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics; failed to fill key leadership positions; Political appointees working in other jobs were made to fill leadership positions held by career civil servants, according to the report.

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

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