Schiffer Dyack

Thanks so much for having me, Kai.

Yeah, absolutely.

So we had been getting a few tips from different folks working in various policy sectors, whether research on maternal mortality, research on food insecurity and hunger and so forth, talking about how a lot of the data that they relied on to do their jobs was suddenly missing or they had limited public access to it.

And so we started to get the sense that this was kind of a trend spread across the federal government.

And so what we really wanted to do was try and quantify it.

And what we found was that it was a lot more wide ranging than we thought.

The Trump administration, since taking office, has really made sweeping changes to federal government data, and it has reverberated through basically every sector of public life, as I mentioned.

Yeah.

So one of the first things that we kind of caught wind of was data on maternal mortality.

It's a CDC database called PRAMS that has been kind of the foundation of

maternal mortality research and infant mortality research for a number of years now.

The CDC doing reductions in force this past year laid off essentially the entire team that maintained PRAMS data in April.

And so collection of that data seized for quite a few months.

It's since gotten back up and running, but a lot of the folks we talked to told us how the delays in this data really affected their work and will continue to do so for a number of months.

And so it's reverberated to state health departments essentially across the country as well.

That's right.

A few of our sources told us that up to 3,000 datasets could be affected.

Our story was only able to really look at a fraction of these downstream effects.

And because of the changes in staffing that are kind of gradually coming back online, we won't be able to see the true impact of a lot of these changes until maybe even a few months or years down the line.

Yeah.