Voices from the Data Community: How 2025 Has Impacted Public Data Users
"Since the start of 2025, federal statistical agencies have faced staff reductions, program cuts, data purges, and the longest government shutdown in American history. To understand how these disruptions are affecting the researchers, analysts, advocates, and planners who rely on public data every day, SSRS — through the EMERGE Initiative — conducted a landmark survey of more than 500 federal data users across academia, government, nonprofits, and the private sector.
"The EMERGE Initiative seeks to provide reliable, publicly accessible data, serving as a crucial resource for state administrators, researchers, policymakers, journalists, and the American public, thereby upholding the principles of transparency and evidence-based governance. The initial task of the EMERGE Initiative will be to convene a meeting of stakeholders – both producers and users of these data – to conduct a thorough review of the emerging data gaps and recommend steps for remediation."
The report is available for download here. (See a previous DCSS news item from February announcing this survey.)
The Value of Reliable Statistics
By Nicholas Bloom, Erica L. Groshen, Duncan Hobbs & Michael R. Strain. NBER Working Paper 35135. DOI 10.3386/w35135. Issue Date: April 2026.
"On August 1, 2025, President Trump fired the head of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and claimed that the agency’s data were “rigged.” In the aftermath, measures of economic policy uncertainty rose sharply, consistent with the idea that reduced trust in official data increases uncertainty for investors, businesses, and households. We use an event-study design to estimate the effect of the firing on policy uncertainty, and then map that increase in uncertainty into implied macroeconomic outcomes. This yields a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the marginal value of public trust in official statistics. Our baseline estimate implies that preserving trust in the integrity and quality of official statistics generates economic benefits of about $25 for every $1 spent on the agency’s budget."
