Trump can’t avoid facts

The administration is rejecting rational governance altogether, favouring instinct and preference over evidence

- HANNAH BLOCH-WEHBA

‘The Trump administration has identified a key weapon in its campaign to remake the federal government: Information control.

Shortly after taking office, it ordered federal health agencies to freeze their communications with the public. The government promptly scrubbed many of its websites of data about climate change, public health, foreign aid and education. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) slashed federal data-gathering activities, and the president fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a middling July jobs report.

‘As a scholar of information law and policy, I see a dangerous transformation: Instead of using data to determine how to govern, the administration is manipulating, ignoring and even jettisoning data altogether. Those who balk at the administration’s wishful thinking about reality face threats to fall in line or leave, as Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook and now the CDC director, Susan Monarez, have all experienced.

‘The administration has clearly embraced the strategic cultivation of uncertainty and ignorance. It is not just trying to trim the fat from its statistical agencies, which were already underfunded before President Trump took office. Nor is it simply trying to spin the available data to its political advantage. Instead, it is turning away from the government's responsibilities as a steward of information by minimising, cherry-picking, misusing and sometimes even destroying data.

The idea that government ought to make decisions using evidence and hard data is a cornerstone of our political order. The Administrative Procedure Act, for example, proscribes “arbitrary” or “capricious” agency decisions. And the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 requires agencies to develop data and evidence to support their policymaking, Those laws reflect our expectation that the government will make rational judgements.