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Three years ago, Sebastian Majstorovic, a German historian and data scientist, embarked on a striking rescue mission. After Russia invaded Ukraine, he co-created a 1,000-strong network of fellow nerds — two-thirds of them American — to rescue Ukraine’s digital records.
Majstorovic, who is of Bosnian heritage, was partly inspired by how citizens in Sarajevo bravely saved books, under gunfire, from their national library when it was burned in 1992. “Records matter,” he tells me. “They should not be destroyed.”
Quite so. And now he has dusted off that playbook for an unexpected new mission — in the US. Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, his administration has unleashed a startling assault on parts of America’s statistical base, through budget cuts, negligence, culture wars and more.
Majstorovic has co-founded the Data Rescue Project to work with other networks such as the Research Data Access and Preservation Association in a bid to salvage that information. “American [volunteers] helped us before with Ukraine so I feel a duty to return the favour,” he explains.
It is an ironic historical twist. In the late 20th century, the US government frequently extolled the importance of having a credible, transparent statistical ecosystem to uphold civic values (including democracy), protect against authoritarianism and underpin commerce and capital markets.
But during Trump’s first term in office, his team undermined the Census Bureau’s independence — horrifying some government officials. This time around the assault is far worse: in recent months data on issues ranging from the census to Covid-19 to climate trends, has completely or temporarily disappeared, or been partly obscured.
Funding cuts are further undermining data collection on labour markets and inflation, prompting alarm from Wall Street economists and statisticians. Meanwhile, Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill features proposed budget cuts that could shatter — if not shutter — the Office of Financial Reporting, an agency created after the 2008 financial crisis to track stability risks. This could in turn accidentally sabotage the so-called SOFR index that replaced Libor as a lending benchmark.
And why? The question is sparking heated debate — and conspiracy theories. Trump officials tell me they want to reform the data ecosystem to adapt to a fast-changing world. That is not a crazy idea: America’s statistics have shortcomings, as laid out in a powerful forthcoming book, The Mismeasurement of America, from Gene Ludwig, a former top financial regulator, and The Measure of Progress from the economist Diane Coyle.
But what is depressing is the seeming lack of any reform strategy; the only unifying feature seems to be a purge of symbols hated by the Maga right, such as climate change or diversity.
Thus, rightly or wrongly, many statisticians blame clumsy vandalism by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or even a desire by some Trump advisers to crush civic society. Some also fear that private sector tech elites want the data in their own hands, although there is no hard evidence of this. However, recent reports around the White House’s increased use of Palantir for government work, or efforts by Elon Musk’s team to download Treasury data, have fuelled such fears.
Either way, it is crystal clear that if the data is impaired, it would not just undermine science and civic life but commerce, too. It is an extraordinarily bad idea to undermine, say, the department tracking weather as hurricane season approaches, or to defang the OFR as financial stability risks rise.
Hence the mission embraced by Majstorovic and hundreds of others, inside and outside America. Their volunteer grassroots network began spontaneously capturing threatened data this spring. Now they are trying to co-ordinate their efforts to create “shadow” or “mirror” databases of historical series and so preserve them.
Their Data Rescue tracker shows that threatened series linked to the Centers for Disease Control, Bureau of Labor Statistics, National Hurricane Center, Geological survey and Consumer Finance Protection Bureau have already been turned into publicly available “shadow” series. Work is under way on many more.
This is not a magic wand against vandalism: some data is missing and the network’s resources are constrained. Majstorovic is currently fundraising to rent enough cloud storage to download data sets from various agencies, which have not been preserved yet due to their enormous size.
But, however imperfect, such efforts are important. One reason is that the US needs good statistics — as I fervently hope the Trump team will eventually recognise. Indeed, tiny policy shifts have recently occurred: some patent data threatened by budget cuts earlier this year was temporarily reprieved following protests, says Matt Marx, a Cornell professor.
The other reason it matters, though, is that it shows people quietly fighting to defend core civic values, inside and outside America. “We are saying don’t just wail — pick something to do with your skills,” says one scientist. Hooray for the heroic, (mostly) hidden nerds.
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