No data, just vibes

There's been a real rollback of one of the US government's most fundamental tasks: gathering data. Vox correspondents Dylan Scott and Umair Irfan take a look at what a future with less data means for climate and health care in the US. Guests: Vox correspondent Umair Irfan and Vox senior correspondent Dylan Scott For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 1:16Speaker 02

  This is Unexplainable. I'm Meredith Hodenot. Lead used to be everywhere. It was in the air, pumped out of industrial smokestacks and cars burning leaded gasoline. It was in the water, lining municipal water pipes. Lead was in the ground soil. It was painted onto walls. It was glazed onto dinner plates. And so in 1976, the CDC surveyed thousands of Americans across the country to see just how much of that lead was in people's blood.

• 1:50Speaker 03

  And obviously, that's like really labor-intensive work. You've got to like go out in the field to a nationally representative sample, do this blood testing.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  Dylan Scott reports on health for Vox.

• 2:02Speaker 03

  And what this survey reported back was that like blood lead levels were much higher than people had assumed and had reached a really concerning threshold.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  This survey in the 70s was a wake-up call. It led to decades of bans, regulations, and emissions controls.

• 2:21Speaker 03

  We've gotten to a place where it's like, you know, there's, there is still lead poisoning in the US, but it's, we're in a completely different reality than we were 30, 40, 50 years ago, and that was made possible by the survey data.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  Data. Going out into the world and collecting information on what's actually happening through surveys and blood tests, but also monitors, sensors, experiments. Data is the bedrock of good science, so it can profoundly impact our everyday lives. But over the last year, Dylan, covering public health, and Umera Phan, covering science and the environment, they've seen the systems we rely on to collect good data get eroded away.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Hello, Dylan. Hello, Umer. You guys report for Vox's health, science, and climate team. And so we're coming up on a year into the second Trump administration, a year that has totally transformed scientific research in this country. And I wanted to dig in with you. Like, when I think of the federal government, I don't necessarily think, oh, yeah, so crucial for gathering basic data, I guess, like beyond the census or something. But like, can you lay out how important the federal government is in this role?

• 3:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I cover healthcare. And something to your point, Meredith, that I think I knew in the back of my mind, but did not fully appreciate until this past year, is that the federal government is like the biggest public health pollster that we have. Like, the federal government, you know, is the only one that has the resources to go ask tens of thousands of Americans about all kinds of stuff, whether it's like, do you smoke? What do you eat? Are you obese? Do you have a substance abuse problem? Things like that, to just keep our finger on the pulse of what's happening in this country and with people's health.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  Umer, where does the federal government play a role for climate science and data gathering?

• 4:30Speaker 04

  Well, the federal government has a lot of resources. There are almost no private institutions that can launch satellites at the scale that the US federal government can do. There are almost no networks of sensors, of weather monitors, of weather balloons that can cope with what the US federal government does. So without this, we have a much more murky picture of what's going on in the country.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  Umer, there's a lot of overlap between people's health and the environments that they live in. Tell me about the changes at the EPA and how that's making it harder to understand those connections.

• 5:08Speaker 04

  Well, the EPA's Office of Research and Development, like their mission was to provide a scientific basis for regulations. EPA, when it issues a rule, it has to draw on real-world data. And so they actually conduct tests on animals and they use sample data from the environment and they collect a lot of information and study human physiology to see if they can unpack the mechanism behind which something like non-stick coatings on your frying pans affect your health, or whether some of these additives to plastics can be endocrine disruptors. They measure that, they validate that with testing, and then they issue a regulation based on that. And over the past year, we've seen the Office of Research and Development, it was shuttered.

• 5:52Speaker 04

  And without this, the United States is now functioning without one of the most robust and best institutions that was doing this kind of work.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Wow. Looking kind of wider to the big climate picture here, how has this year impacted what we know about how the climate is changing?

• 6:12Speaker 04

  Well, we've seen a pretty conspicuous effort across the government to diminish climate change as an issue of public concern. Project 2025, which was this guidebook put together by the Heritage Foundation for the incoming Trump administration, they pretty directly said that they wanted to eradicate climate change references from everywhere across government, literally deleting the words "climate change" in some cases and in others, taking Web pages offline or putting them behind several other layers and making them less publicly facing. One of the recent, more recent proposals from the Trump administration was to shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research. And the reason why was cited by the White House Budget Director, Russ Vought, was that

• 6:57Speaker 04

  this institution, NCAR, was one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country. So this is a pretty deliberate effort to stop data collection, to stop scientific research around the climate because it conflicts with their ideology.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  Dylan, how have you seen this play out in health research?

• 7:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's a couple of different ways. So first of all, there's just sort of what data is being collected. So, you know, with some of these surveys, it remains to be seen because some of these run on like an annual, biannual basis, or maybe only coming up here in 2026 on the first time that they'll be performed under this new Trump administration. But like one obvious area of concern is that the administration just won't collect data related to LGBTQ plus people. We're going to have a much fuzzier picture into what's happening with those folks and their health. But then in addition to that, we have seen layoffs at some of the teams that are responsible for collecting this information, like with the National Survey on Drug Use and Health,

• 7:59Speaker 03

  which has been sort of our benchmark data point on things like opioid overdose deaths. And then you also have medical research grants. NIH, they provide funding to outside academics who are investigating all kinds of medical and science, scientific questions. So this is a really important function, and that's another area where we've seen cuts. We've seen sort of changes to how institutions and investigators are able to use the money that they receive from the NIH, which could also limit just ultimately their ability to perform their work. Honestly, this is the kind of thing where The impact is not going to be clear to us, I think, for a long time. Like with a survey, if that data gets collected or it doesn't, like, we're going to find that out pretty fast.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  And yes, it creates some disruptions and, and obviously limits our ability to see into these problems. But like, that's pretty clear cut, a very obvious result. But when we're talking about-

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Like, we know what we don't know there.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  Exactly. But when we're talking about scaling back NIH funding and like, the ability to both investigate some of these more niche problems, as well as importantly, like, test interventions, I mean, new medications, trying to figure out how to actually treat and fix the health problems that we're identifying, like, yeah, those are the things that, as you put it, Meredith, we won't know what we missed out on. And yet, like, it seems clear, given what we know about what leads to breakthrough medical treatments, that we're going to miss out on something as a result of these cuts.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Hmm. How will this lack of data, lack of knowledge, start showing up in everyday people's lives?

• 9:36Speaker 03

  It's a good question. I mean, it will, it will be the kind of thing that is probably invisible to people a lot. It may not be obvious to people immediately, and they might even be tempted to think, like, so what's, what's the big deal? Like, I'm not noticing anything different in my life. I mean, this is a prediction, and those are always dangerous. But I imagine there are going to be, like, health problems, health trends that, that crop up, that we're going to look back and think, like, we could have gotten on this sooner, and we could have, like, you know, started coming up with an intervention more quickly. And so I do wonder with this data collection stuff, like, it may not show up for five to 10 years, what the consequences really will be.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  And then it may take sort of another generation to really appreciate, like, you know what? Really robust data collection by the federal government is a really important thing for the government to do.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, it, it sounds like the idea is that, like, our blind spots are getting bigger. And because those blind spots are getting bigger, we are more likely to get blindsided.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  And have to deal with problems when they're much, much larger.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 10:44Speaker 04

  And to pick up on one of Dylan's points, I mean, I think one of the most immediate and pernicious effects of this is going to be trust, the lack of trust in government. If you don't trust your weather forecast, are you going to believe when they issue an evacuation warning for a hurricane in your community? And, and I think that can be pretty dangerous and, and have very far-reaching consequences.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  So the data is disappearing, but the real world is still out there. Can we get back on track? That's after the break.

• 11:18Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 11:25Noam Hassenfeld?

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  I get in here to the kitchen and I got a brand new Sonos Play right here on the counter. I can open the fridge, grab a seltzer.

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  And yeah, I didn't miss a second. And I can make each speaker louder or softer in the Sonos app, or if I'm using AirPlay, so I can make it louder in the kitchen without blasting whoever is still in the living room. It's all just easy and it sounds amazing. These speakers are crisp. They've got great bass and I'm especially impressed with the new Sonos Play. It packs this like truly awesome sound in a much smaller size. So I don't know if I want to head outside for a minute. It's super easy and yeah, pretty nice out. Visit sonos.com and build your system.

• 12:51Noam Hassenfeld?

  Sonos, love the sound, feel the system.

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• 14:53Speaker 07

  What do you want from me? You want the numbers, Mason. That's all we've ever wanted.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  Is there any chance of getting back on track?

• 15:03Speaker 04

  There are some groups that are working to try to salvage government data. There are archiving government websites and trying to take public data sets and download them and save them for other people to use. But again, there's, in terms of the collection of the data itself, nothing really rivals the US federal government. So while there are researchers and institutions that are privately trying to fill in the gaps,

• 15:27Speaker 04

  it's always going to be a stopgap measure compared to what the US government as a whole can do.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. Dylan, are we faded to a whole generation of scientific papers with an asterix after 2026?

• 15:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I do think it's worth keeping in mind a couple of things. You know, like when a lot of the CDC data was getting scrapped, deleted in the early days of the Trump administration, there was a very concerted effort by outside research groups to basically download all the backlogs, everything that had been published online before, to at least kind of preserve the historical archive of the information that's been collected thus far. You know, going forward, it does seem inevitable that we'll be collecting less data and the reliability of that data might be more doubtful than it was in the past. An asterix on every research paper that cites it might be appropriate.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  I do think something that that remains to be seen is how much can sort of the nonprofit and academic sectors step up to try to fill this gap, you know, where it is like survey data, like you're just calling people up and asking questions. And so I don't think it's that like we're gonna be completely closed off to understanding what's happening with people's health. There's going to be additional friction. It's just going to be harder, you know, it just adds additional obstacles to good public health.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Dylan, you mentioned private sources that might be able to piece together that information. Umar, I'm curious, in climate, are there other sources we could pull together? And what would that look like?

• 17:01Speaker 04

  Sure, there are definitely private companies that are starting to get into this space as well, like private weather forecasting is actually an emerging industry. And in fact, that has actually been one of the other challenges here because basically some of these private companies want to sell their forecasts as a product.

• 17:20Speaker 04

  When the government is offering weather and climate data for free, that really undermines their product. And so there's actually been a push from some of these private companies to take some of this publicly available government weather data offline, or have it pass through these private entities before it can be in a forecast. And that means that some of this publicly available information that we normally get for free could end up behind a paywall. Now, with climate change being a global issue, yes, there's global level monitoring of this issue. There's satellites launched by other countries that track CO2 from the air, but the United States has an important role here because it leads the way. Like, the US has been at the forefront of satellite monitoring of things like greenhouse gases. And the Trump administration has explicitly said that they want

• 18:05Speaker 04

  to shut down satellites that have CO2 monitoring capabilities, and they want to take CO2 monitoring instruments out of the next generation of satellites. The whole world is going to be losing an important measurement tool. Some other countries and companies may try to step up there, but again, they'll be scrambling to catch up to a very robust system that the United States has made.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  Right. So how is this impacting your jobs as reporters?

• 18:32Speaker 04

  I mean, as Dylan was saying, it adds a lot of friction. I mean, there used to be like central places where I could reliably go to to find basic facts. Like oftentimes when I'm reporting a story, I just need to look up a specific number. Like, like one recent example was just that, you know, NOAA used to have this database of disasters in a given year whose damage tolls were greater than a billion dollars. They called this the billion-dollar disaster database. And it was just a good way for me to just to kind of get a snapshot of just what were some of the costliest disasters in a given year.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 18:59Speaker 04

  But they took that database offline. They said the last year of data collection was 2024. They did not collect any data for 2025. There's no reporting of that. So if I wanted to find out what was the most expensive disaster last year, I kind of have to do an archival search. I have to go through the news reports. I have to go to insurance companies and ask them, you know, where were the largest payouts over the past year? I'm not entirely sure how to answer that question. I thought initially it was the Los Angeles wildfires we saw, but now I have to double check and I don't have this one easy reference anymore. And it's just going to add more time and energy that I would have to expend on reporting just to answer that basic question.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:38Speaker 04

  And without that, where, again, having to caveat and add lots of different qualifications to everything that we cite, and oftentimes, we can't make as robust conclusions about what we're reporting on.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  What do you think we won't know in the future that we might have if we had this data?

• 19:57Speaker 03

  So, something that just happened here is the federal government has told states that they can stop reporting childhood vaccination data for kids and mothers covered by Medicaid, which is a huge, that's more than 40% of births are covered by Medicaid. So, we're talking about like an enormous sample. And so, one question, the obvious question that I have is like, what, what is the consequence of the federal government rolling back its, its vaccine recommendations? And that, the answer to that question is going to be harder to figure out because at the same time, the federal government is going to stop collecting data that could provide us with the answers.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  Could you tell me a little bit about like the ideological resistance to numbers themselves? Like the, what seems to be the motivations behind the erosion of this data collection system?

• 20:50Speaker 03

  Meredith, so you just want us to unpack all of the problems with American society today?

• 20:54Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, you know, casual, just, you know.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  Easy peasy.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  I mean, I think there's a couple of things that factor into this. One is obviously just the complete overhaul of the information ecosystem. And there are now sort of seemingly limitless sources of information. And it's not that hard to find information that aligns with what you would prefer to believe. And so, if the official sources... Are not aligning with your priors, you can find somebody else and that obviously there then sows distrust in the official sources of information. And frankly, Meredith, I honestly don't know how that bell gets unrung. But yeah, I think we're in a middle of a really heady and long term

• 21:43Speaker 03

  change and story and it's hard to know exactly where it's going. But it has been a sort of surreal experience to watch how much people's relationships to, you know, experts, institutional authorities in general, the kind of data and science that we I think would all like to undergird good public policy. Like that relationship has really frayed. And again, how it gets repaired, I'm not totally sure.

• 22:14Speaker 04

  I think one point worth making is that people often think of data as this completely objective, apolitical, bloodless thing. And it's not. There's a lot of political decisions and value judgments that go into data collection. Right. And this has been discussed long before the Trump administration. What's changed now with the Trump administration is that they've acknowledged an imperfect picture and their solution is to not look at the picture at all. Rather than refining, improving the resolution, filling in the blanks, they've decided that they're going to paint a completely alternative picture or just say that no picture is valid or that all pictures are equally valid. That's kind of the situation that we're in right now. Yeah.

• 22:55Speaker 04

  And so it's that ideological framing of that context around these, this data collection that that seems to be the most significant and the most potentially detrimental for our understanding of this. That if you reach a conclusion first and then look backwards for the numbers that will support you, very likely you'll find those numbers. But that's not how you do science. I mean, you have to look at the numbers first and then see the patterns that emerge. But there's a lot of motivated reasoning going on here. And that's why this, I think, this current pattern of data, lack of collection, this, this sort of pushback on the numbers and trying to erode how we measure the world is so important and so troubling.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  Dylan, Umer, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Really appreciate it.

• 23:44Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 23:45Speaker 04

  My pleasure.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  This episode was produced by me, Amy Padula. Editing from Meredith Hodnot and Sally Helm. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala and music from Noam Hassenfeld. Melissa Hirsch checked the facts. Julia Longoria and Jorge Just are our editorial directors. And Joanna Solotaroff has the cutest little dog named Mo. And Bird Pinkerton sprinted out of Plati's hole. Someone, anyone, Plati needs help. And also, on that note, does anyone have any idea who Eric Flaptin is? And where can I find him?

• 24:35Speaker 02

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• 25:18Speaker 02

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