BREAKINGVIEWS-Disappearing US data dims economic outlook

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

By Robert Cyran

NEW YORK, Feb 7 (Reuters Breakingviews) - The modern economy relies on facts and figures, many of them supplied by the U.S. government. It’s why President Donald Trump’s chaotic purge of some data and the temporary disappearance of other information from official websites is cause for so much concern beyond just any politically or ideologically motivated distortions.

Every industry counts on the collecting and tabulating done by federal agencies in some way. Oil producers like Exxon Mobil XOM.N rely on Energy Information Administration forecasts, investors respond to monthly job reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and advertisers design marketing campaigns based on Census data. Large-language artificial intelligence models are being fed all of it.

Big Data also keeps getting bigger in significance. Businesses especially dependent on government-produced statistics, such as consultants and scientists, accounted for some $750 billion of revenue in 2022, about twice as much as a decade earlier, according to an analysis conducted by the Department of Commerce. The growth far outpaces that of the underlying economy, implying such companies contribute even more – roughly 3% – to national output.

When information like National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration figures broken down by Census tract vanishes, it does more than satisfy climate-change deniers. It makes it harder for insurers, for example, to model wildfire exposure risks, and could lead to less coverage or higher premiums.

The government gathers facts like rainfall and wind speeds because it’s more efficient to make it available to all. The private sector can, and does, conduct some of the same work, but also limits access to the findings to obtain a competitive edge. Shrinking the shared benefit creates an economic loss for society. It’s why most U.S. weather forecasts are based on NOAA data.

Trust, reliability and breadth are also factors. Take the official monthly jobs report, the latest of which was released on Friday. The comparable corporate version, the ADP National Employment Report, doesn’t track public-sector workforces.

Following the erasure of federal health website pages on subjects ranging from gay rights to HIV at Trump’s behest, Democrats are seeking an investigation into whether Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has illegal access to data. Senator Patty Murray expressed concern that Musk might scrub jobs numbers and unions have sued to prevent it. The president routinely accused the jobs agency of lying in the past.

If government data becomes less available, trusted or dependable, then “garbage in” will increasingly become the norm. And as every computer scientist knows, that inevitably leads to garbage out.

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CONTEXT NEWS

A unit of Harvard University’s Law Library said on February 6 that it was releasing an archive of 311,000 government data sets harvested in 2024 and 2025, aiming to protect public information at a time when President Donald Trump’s administration is removing some of it from official websites.

Democrats on the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability on February 7 called for an investigation into possible national security breaches and privacy violations posed by the Department of Government Efficiency, a quasi-governmental organization run by Elon Musk that aims to cut federal spending.

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations sued on February 5 to block DOGE’s access to the Labor Department’s information systems. The union claimed that access would give Musk information about investigations into his company and threaten the independence and autonomy of the DOL’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.