On May 7, 2026, The Guardian published an interactive investigation by Amy Qin documenting that the Trump administration has been altering and removing decades' worth of federal datasets across multiple agencies as part of a sweeping campaign targeting what the administration calls 'woke programs,' 'racial equity,' 'gender ideology,' and 'climate extremism.' The investigation focused on five concrete examples; the broader scope, per the reporting, is wider.
Federal data is the substrate on which government policy depends. It funds entitlement decisions, drives FEMA disaster response, lets public health departments monitor outbreaks of harmful drugs, lets food banks find hungry families, lets parents look up whether they live near chemical plants. Denice Ross, former U.S. chief data scientist under Biden and now director of federal data policy at the Federation of American Scientists: 'Federal data touch every corner of American lives. We might not know or be able to connect the dots for why our lives are getting harder — but our lives will get harder.'
The Guardian's five documented examples include:
**1. EPA Risk Management Program (RMP) tool — taken down April 2025.** The tool let any American type a zip code and see the roughly 12,000 facilities that store hazardous, cancer-causing chemicals near them. Latino, Black, and low-income communities disproportionately live closer to these plants. The only remaining way to access the information: drive to one of several dozen EPA reading rooms across the country to examine paper records. Nalleli Hidalgo (Tejas, Houston environmental justice group): 'Another layer of protection for environmental justice communities was taken down when they took away the RMP tool.' Maya Nye (Coming Clean): the removal was particularly concerning because 'we haven't figured out how to prevent chemical disasters and people are still experiencing them.' The U.S. averages one chemical accident every two days.
**2. CDC PRAMS (Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System).** Tracks experiences before, during, and after pregnancy to help reduce maternal and infant deaths.
**3. CDC public health databases.** A separate Union of Concerned Scientists analysis from April 2025 found 46% of CDC public health databases had stopped updating or been taken offline entirely — affecting disease surveillance for measles, whooping cough, HIV, tuberculosis, hepatitis, STIs, and the Vaccines for Children tracking system. The WONDER mortality database stopped publishing new data after February 2025.
**4. FEMA disaster response data.**
**5. Drug-monitoring data for emerging street drugs.**
America's Data Index, run by Ross's group, monitors the deletions. The campaign is the operational substrate behind several of the recent stories already in this tracker: the FDA blocking publication of vaccine safety studies (May 5), the CDC blocking the COVID-vaccine-cuts-hospitalizations-55% study (April), the firing of all 17 ACIP advisory committee members, and the elimination of 6 vaccines from CDC recommendations. The Guardian piece is the first comprehensive synthesis treating the deletions as a single coordinated campaign rather than agency-by-agency incidents.
By August 2026 the scale was measurable. A tracker published by dataindex.us, a group of data policy experts, researchers and developers formed to monitor changes to government data, counted at least 28 federal datasets deleted outright and another 338 modified over roughly 18 months, close to 400 in total, spanning more than 60 agencies and covering the environment, labor, law enforcement and other areas.
Health data absorbed the most, about 40 percent of the tracked changes. A recurring pattern is the removal of questions about gender identity, tied to the executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” Several CDC surveys dropped those questions. The effect is not that the data is reported differently but that the population stops being counted at all, which forecloses future analysis rather than merely changing the current picture.