We fully understand the point our acquaintance made, but worry about what we see as a growing inclination to distrust or dismiss data when it potentially disrupts policy or political plans. If data doesn’t conform with expectations, further analysis is always welcome to determine why. But to ignore the message, bury it out of public view or reject it out of hand only undermines the effort to see what’s really working in government and what’s not.
Recently we, like many others, were appalled at the decision of President Donald Trump to reject the latest jobs data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, claiming that the BLS had rigged the numbers for political purposes and going so far as to fire BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfe. The data showed that the country had added only 73,000 jobs in July, a surprisingly low number. In addition, the BLS had revised May and June numbers to reflect 258,000 fewer jobs than had originally been reported.
Alarmingly, we’re picking up vibes that this kind of thinking is not constrained to the current administration in Washington, D.C., but may be symptomatic of an alarming trend: If you don’t like the data, then deny it or destroy it.
One example that springs to mind was the decision a couple of years ago, on the part of a number of states including Louisiana, Texas and Florida, to drop out of the Electronic Registration Information Center. ERIC is a nonpartisan system that was designed to help states keep their voter roles as accurate as possible. Part of the way it did this was to catch people who had moved between states and who had retained registrations in more than one.
The logic of the states that dropped out is that (without any evidence we can find) ERIC was designed to somehow benefit blue states over red, as the National Conference of State Legislatures reported then. But “states need to share data because there is no other way to tell if people are voting in multiple states; and that is happening, it is not a black swan event,” said J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Fund. “Unless you’re talking across state lines, there will be undetected violations of federal law that prohibit double voting in the same election.”
Meanwhile, although we can’t demonstrate causality here, it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that the city of Denver, which like many places has been beset by a homelessness problem, has released a new dashboard which “offers a broader scope but has less specific information, eliminating details about how long people were staying in shelters, and how many of them died or returned to homelessness afterward,” according to an article in Denverite.
As the article explains, “Critics used the data to hold the administration to account. But city officials say the old dashboard was confusing and hard to maintain.”
Perhaps. But it’s troublesome to us to read that the city’s new dashboard has also been altered to gather information about a larger number of city-funded efforts. This, in and of itself, is probably a good thing, but it’s also true that it will allow the city to proclaim that more people are getting help than the previous dashboard showed.
Back to President Trump. It’s our fear that when he blasts his own agency’s data he opens the door to a greater mistrust of data at all levels.
This kind of faith had already ebbed during the pandemic, when it felt like the numbers being offered up by the feds, states and local health departments were at odds with one another, leaving many to infer that you simply couldn’t trust any of it. What’s more, back then there were ample accusations that false data was being set forth by governments in order to support decisions about mask mandates.
With so many numbers being tossed around without any backing, it’s no wonder that there’s some good reasons to doubt every data point you come across. But the more the very notion grows that much of the data used by the states and localities is invalid, the less likely it is that residents will trust their work at all. And that’s clearly not good.
This commentary originally appeared on the authors’ website. Read the original here.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
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