The Guardian – “The Trump administration is deleting government data. From infant deaths to hunger, here are five ways it’s hurting Americans This information was used to understand the problems Americans face. The consequences of its erasure, experts warn, could affect generations to come. When we think of what governments do, we think of everything from building highways to waging war. What they also do is capture the world in the form of information. The US government may be the foremost producer of information in the world. For decades, federal agencies have gathered data on everything from climate risk to the rising cost of childcare. It is information funded by taxes, and that belongs to the American people. This data is often how the government decides what to do: what is a problem, what is a policy priority, what should be funded. It tells the story of America. But over the past year, the Trump administration has been altering and removing decades’ worth of datasets as part of a sweeping campaign targeting so-called “woke programs”, “racial equity”, “gender ideology” and “climate extremism”. This censorship has affected not just datasets, but also a wide swath of federal resources: tools that helped the public access data, ongoing surveys and, perhaps most concerning, the agency staff that made it all possible. Experts warn that Trump’s destruction of the country’s data infrastructure will have lasting impacts on all aspects of life – whether it’s the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to extreme weather, public health departments’ monitoring of harmful new drugs in their communities or how food banks get meals to hungry families. “Federal data touch every corner of American lives,” said Denice Ross, former US chief data scientist under the Biden administration who is now director of federal data policy at the Federation of American Scientists. She also helps run America’s Data Index, a group that monitors changes to federal data. When data disappears, she said, “we might not know or be able to connect the dots for why our lives are getting harder – but our lives will get harder”. Here are five ways Americans will be affected by deleted data…”