An apparent attempt by the U.S. Census Bureau to follow an executive order by President Trump targeting gender identity led to the public losing access for days to certain key statistics.
Close to two weeks after users first noticed many parts of the bureau's website — like those of other agencies — had gone dark, the federal government's largest statistical agency has yet to make any public statement about the disappearing data and research, at least some of which now appears to be restored.
The lack of an official explanation from the bureau — known for producing closely monitored indicators about the U.S. population and economy — is raising concerns among data users about threats to public trust in the agency and its independence from political interference, as Elon Musk's team within the Trump administration known as the Department of Government Efficiency seek data access at multiple agencies, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
How "data censorship" came to the Census Bureau
Before coming back, the bureau's homepage went offline on Jan. 31.
But even prior to that, an NPR analysis found at least four webpages related to the bureau's efforts to produce data on people's gender identity and sexual orientation were inaccessible as of Jan. 30, the day after the Office of Personnel Management put out guidance on how agencies should carry out Trump's Jan. 20 executive order.
The bureau has for years been researching and testing how to generate more comprehensive statistics about LGBTQ+ people that could be used to fight against discrimination, including when enforcing civil rights laws.
Still, OPM's instructions included taking down "all outward facing media (websites, social media accounts, etc.)," as well as any "final or pending documents, directives, orders, regulations, materials, forms, communications, statements, and plans," that promote "gender ideology" — a phrase often used by opponents of transgender rights to claim that people cannot identify with a gender that doesn't match the sex they were assigned at birth.
For days after the Jan. 31 deadline to comply with the OPM guidance, data users trying to access one of the bureau's main data-sharing platforms — which also contains statistics not related to gender identity — were met with an error message saying they had no "permission to access" the data.
Inside the bureau, employees in multiple directorates, including the one tasked with preparing for the next national head count in 2030, could not access an internal platform for sharing files and information over multiple days last week, according to two employees who asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation. The lockout left many workers with no choice but to put regular assignments on pause.
The bureau's public information office has not responded to NPR's multiple requests for comment.
The disruptions to data access have drawn public outcries from organizations that rely on government statistics.
On Tuesday, more than 230 groups led by the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, the American Statistical Association and the Population Association of America released a letter calling on Congress to "demand the complete restoration of any federal data that have been removed" and work with the Trump administration to "prevent any future purge or removal of data from federal agency websites and portals."
"Removing access to taxpayer funded public data from the public domain is unethical and contrary to the principle that these data are for the public and public good," the Association of Public Data Users said in a separate statement. "It also sets a dangerous precedent that any administration could withhold public data for any reason."
It can also be considered as a kind of censorship, says Karthick Ramakrishnan, the founder and executive director of AAPI Data, a research and policy organization focused on producing data that better reflects Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities.
"If we resist government censorship when it comes to speech, and these surveys represent the voices of Americans at the time when the data were collected, then why are we censoring the voices of Americans?" says Ramakrishnan, who is also one of the bureau's advisory committee members whose bios were recently removed from the agency's website. "I think that's something that we need to sit with pretty deeply — with what it means to live in a period of data censorship."
The dangers of deleted data, including those for protecting transgender rights
It's not clear if any data tables ended up getting permanently deleted in the bureau's scramble to get in line with Trump's executive order targeting gender identity.
That's a possibility that federal employees would want to avoid, warns Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer under former President George W. Bush.
"Which records are publicized, which records are not — there's a lot of administrative discretion on that. But the idea of just simply going in and deleting a record, it's just not a good road to go down," Painter explains. That's because, he says, "in a large range of circumstances, destruction of a government record can be a criminal offense."
Many data users and transgender rights advocates are particularly concerned about any deletion or ending of public access to the gender identity data produced by the Census Bureau and other federal agencies.
In a public letter, Democratic Reps. Mark Takano of California, Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Gerry Connolly of Virginia called for OPM's acting director to "immediately cease implementation" of Trump's Executive Order 14168, which says the federal government no longer recognizes gender identity.
The lawmakers say that if the government cannot acknowledge that transgender people exist, "it is impossible for the federal government to adequately address and collect data on hate crimes against the transgender community, pursuant to the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act."
OPM's communications office has not responded to a request for comment.
In response to the bureau and other agencies cutting off public access to government statistics, some researchers, librarians and other volunteers have stepped up efforts to preserve the disappearing data on non-government servers.
"I've been heartened to see the response of researchers and others that have sort of jumped into action to try to meet the moment and save these kinds of data sets and webpages," says Caroline Medina, policy director for the Institute for Health Research & Policy at Whitman-Walker, which focuses on health care for LGBTQ+ people and people living with HIV. "I know there is a broader effort to sort of identify what has been removed and to figure out creative ways for eventually rehosting."
Still, Nancy Bates, a former senior researcher for survey methodology who retired from the bureau in 2020, says any pause on the bureau's efforts to come up with better ways of asking about people's gender identity would be devastating to science.
"I would see it as basically erasing decades — and I mean that literally — decades of work," says Bates, who is currently the vice chair of the bureau's 2030 Census Advisory Committee. "The federal workforce was very slow to embrace measuring, first of all, sexual orientation and then more recently, gender identity. And so great strides have been made in coming up with very tested and reliable, valid measures for this construct. So this executive order, at least in terms of gender identity, basically wipes out that research."
The first Trump administration put up earlier obstacles to this research when it stalled plans to add questions about gender identity, as well as sexual orientation, to an annual bureau survey, which helps guide trillions in federal funding and is used to produce population estimates for communities across the country.
"If you don't measure that, then it basically just becomes unknowable and the population is basically erased," Bates says.
Have information you want to share about the Census Bureau or across the federal government? Hansi Lo Wang is available via the encrypted messaging app Signal (hansi.01).
Edited by Benjamin Swasey
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