New Political Strategy: Don’t Gather Embarrassing Statistics In The First Place
Donald Trump gave us an interesting example of his current political strategy during his first administration. At a news conference early during the Covid pandemic, he said:
“Think of this, if we didn’t do testing, instead of testing over 40 million people, if we did half the testing we would have half the cases. If we did another, you cut that in half, we would have, yet again, half of that.”
If this had been true, we could have eliminated Covid by simply stopping all testing for it!
Unfortunately, this is not how things work. Even ostriches, falsely accused of burying their heads in sand to hide from dangers or avoid problems, know better than this.
Nevertheless, the current Trump administration is trying to eliminate government programs which gather embarrassing statistics that contradict his claims about what is going on in the world. An interesting example is the 2025 announcement that the government will no longer be publishing annual reports on the extent of “food insecurity” (a polite expression for hunger) in the United States.
Hunger is expected to increase substantially thanks to the huge cuts to the federal SNAP (“food stamp”) program under the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill passed by Congress. Embarrassment could avoided either by rescinding the cuts, or by not publishing the embarrassing data. The latter strategy is cheaper.
The Trump administration tried to turn off and remove some 900 ocean monitoring stations gathering critical environmental data under the Ocean Observatories Initiative. The stations had already been paid for, so getting rid of them would have wasted a good investment.
Fortunately, strong bi-partisan Senate criticism forced the National Science Foundation to back off and continue operating the stations.
It is easy to see why an administration led by a president who claims that global warming is a “hoax” would want to stop collecting facts about the oceans (covering a majority of the earth’s surface) that contradict that claim.
The administration is also trying to eliminate other government installations that measure environmental changes. For example it is trying to defund and close an observatory on a high mountain in Hawaii, the Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory, that measures atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Not content to halt the gathering of statistics, the administration is also attempting to keep embarrassing statistics that have already been gathered from public scrutiny. It has been removing thousands of pages of this information from government websites. The Union of Concerned Scientists reported already in 2025 that:
“Cancelled surveys, suppressed publications, hidden data: the Trump administration is continuing to hack and slash its way through the entire enterprise of science within the federal government. Between January 20th to September 30th of this year, there have been 506 attacks on science. (We broadly define attacks on science as actions, statements, or decisions that undermine, co-opt, or ignore science in the federal government.)”
If Americans do not want to emulate the hypothetical ostrich and allow our collective heads to be buried in the Trump administration’s sand, we must implore Congress to stop the disappearance of important scientific data and the failure to collect it in the first place.
Our motto should not be “ignorance is bliss.” Instead, it should be “veritas vos liberabit”-- the truth shall make you free. (John 8:32)
Or perhaps more colorfully, as the sign at the “Animal House” campus proclaimed, “Knowledge is good!”