The new look for federal agencies?

Interviews with leading US government statisticians, reported in The Guardian this morning, raise alarms about the availability and integrity of public statistics under the Trump administration. We rely on federal statistical agencies for data to help guide and evaluate policy on virtually every aspect of American life: basic population data, employment, poverty, health metrics, the environment, and more.

The Trump administration, though, is already threatening the integrity of this process. They have frozen hiring and funding for agencies that collect and analyze data; they have blocked communication of analysis results to the public; and they have questioned the validity of existing summaries.

As a statistician with more than 50 years of experience working with federal data and federal statisticians, I am horrified at the idea of putting ideologues in charge of statistics. Here are a few of the lurking pitfalls. No formulas.