NextGov/FCW: “Days after President Donald Trump took office again in January, thousands of government pages with critical data were taken down as agencies rushed to comply with executive orders targeting diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, as well as what the administration calls “gender ideology.” That day activated a community, said Denice Ross, the government’s former chief data scientist during the Biden administration. She called it “the big takedown,” and since then, she’s been trying to track changes to government data moving forward. Ross, who’s now a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, is one of the people behind America’s Data Index, an attempt to get a better view of changes across the government data ecosystem. She’s also collaborating with Chris Dick, who formerly worked in the U.S. Census Bureau before founding a data science consulting company.  “The way that I think about the Data Index is really as a way for us … to have like the weather forecast, if you will, of the landscape of federal data,” said Dick. “That’s the aspirational goal.” It’s a big one. Some of those purged pages have come back online or are set to, in part due to lawsuits, but it’s difficult to get a complete picture of the state of the federal government’s data. And even as pages have come back online, questions have lingered about what changes, if anything, happened to datasets when they were down. Dick and Ross are using automation — and when that doesn’t work, good old-fashioned research — to try to track changes across key datasets. Those changes go beyond the availability of government data alone, but also what data the government collects and how it does so.  One of their methods is cataloguing information collection requests published in the Federal Register, generally submitted when agencies make, modify or renew data collections. For those requests that are open to comment, the duo is encouraging people to submit details on how and why the data are important. Their site and newsletter point to the National Violent Death Reporting System at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, which the agency is currently taking comments on as part of a revision request for the database, which policymakers use to tailor violence prevention efforts…”