Trump’s silent purge: The dark plot to erase America’s memory

President Donald Trump aboard Air Force One on Tuesday, December 9, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley/Flickr)

Right-wing media outlets, from Fox News to Breitbart to Newsmax, often echo the Trump administration's talking points. And according to Guardian reporters Amy Qin and Flávio Pessoa, Donald Trump officials have another way to push their agenda: purging federal government data that doesn't reflect their messaging.

In The Guardian, Qin and Pessoa explain, "A database of federal law enforcement officer misconduct records. A survey measuring physical, sexual and emotional violence against children and youth. Real-time pollution readings collected by air quality monitors from U.S. embassies around the world. These are among the hundreds of federal datasets that the Trump administration has taken down or altered as part of its aggressive campaign to wipe all mentions of data findings that do not align with the administration’s priorities."

Federal data that doesn't reflect a MAGA viewpoint, according to Qin and Pessoa, is being targeted for deletion by the Trump administration.

"Over the past year and a half," the Guardian reporters explain, "at least 28 federal datasets have been deleted and another 338 data collections have been modified, according to an online tracker released last week from DataIndex.us, a group of data policy experts, researchers and developers that formed last year to monitor changes to government data…. The tracker includes detailed information about deleted or altered datasets from more than 60 federal agencies that span the environment, labor, law enforcement and other topics. But datasets on health appear to be the most affected by the Trump administration's crackdown, comprising about 40 percent of the total number of terminated or altered data collections tracked by DataIndex.us."

One of the people who is sounding the alarm is Denice Ross, a co-founder of DataIndex.us and a former chief data scientist under ex-President Joe Biden.

Ross told The Guardian, "We're at a very vulnerable point as a nation. We're facing a future where we are not going to have the information that we need to make decisions that will save lives and benefit American communities."

According to Qin and Pessoa, health datasets used by the federal government no longer collection information on gay and transgender people.

University of Connecticut professor Thomas Babor, known for his expertise on public health and addiction, told The Guardian, "These data are critical for identifying emerging epidemics and what parts of the population are most vulnerable to different types of health conditions. We need to know what direction the trend is going, whether it's the beginning of an end; we need to learn from prior episodes of epidemics and how they were responded to and what impact the responses had. Taking down, even temporarily, some of the most important surveys that we have, especially for comparative purposes, is like we're erasing our institutional memory for public health."

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