The Trump Administration Is Laying the Groundwork for a Full Takeover of Federal Data

The moment Donald Trump began his second term, researchers and independent citizens suited up for the war on data. They scrambled to preserve diversity, public health, and climate change-related government reports and webpages. They tracked the impacts of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) funding cuts and federal job loss in real time. They put out calls about the importance of independent statisticians publishing some of the most relied-upon data in the world. Nearly eight months after inauguration, the abstract picture of how the Trump White House laid the groundwork to overhaul federal data collection is becoming clear.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told a group of federal statisticians that the independence of their work was “nonsense,” during a town hall for Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis employees on Tuesday.

The comments were first reported by Government Executive, which obtained a recording of Lutnick’s address to the group.

“As best as humanly possible with as many tools as possible, get the right answer,” Lutnick reportedly said. “So independence is nonsense. Okay, accuracy is the only word that matters.”

Lutnick’s language could become the framework for a new precedent for federal data collection: a definition of “accuracy” that is wholly dependent on what makes Trump look good.

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