Straws in the Wind - Part 60

From the LA Times: After watching data sets be altered or disappear from U.S. government websites in unprecedented ways after President Trump began his second term, an army of outside statisticians, demographers and computer scientists have joined forces to capture, preserve and share data sets, sometimes clandestinely. Their goal is to make sure they are available in the future, believing that democracy suffers when policymakers don’t have reliable data and that national statistics should be above partisan politics.

“There are such smart, passionate people who care deeply about not only the Census Bureau, but all the statistical agencies, and ensuring the integrity of the statistical system. And that gives me hope, even during these challenging times,” Mary Jo Mitchell, director of government and public affairs for the research nonprofit the Population Assn. of America, said this week during an online public data-users conference...

“There are trillions of bytes of data files, and I can’t even imagine how many public dollars were spent to collect those data. ... But right now, they’re sitting someplace that is inaccessible because there are no staff to appropriately manage those data,” Jennifer Park, a study director for the Committee on National Statistics, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, said during the conference hosted by the Assn. of Public Data Users (APDU)...

Full story at https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-07-24/why-are-data-nerds-racing-to-save-us-government-statistics.