[Alec MacGillis at ProPublica]

The statistics that help us navigate our world are under thread:

"Every year, year after year, workers in agencies that many of us have never heard of have been amassing the statistics that undergird decision-making at all levels of government and inform the judgments of business leaders, school administrators and medical providers nationwide.

The survival of that data is now in doubt, as a result of the Department of Government Efficiency’s comprehensive assault on the federal bureaucracy."

Perhaps because:

"Looked at one way, the war on measurement has an obvious potential motivation: making it harder for critics to gauge fallout resulting from Trump administration layoffs, deregulation or other shifts in policy."

Many of these teams aren't coming back. So the question becomes: who will conduct these measurements in their place? How will we get this information now? As the piece notes, even if we do put our ability to measure back together, there will now always be a gap, which will make identifying and understanding trends a great deal harder.

#Democracy

[Link]