On his first day back in office, Donald Trump signed an executive order stating the only genders to be recognized by the federal government are male and female, according to NBC.
The Office of Personnel Management distributed a memo Jan. 29 ordering all federal government references to “gender ideology” be removed by 5 p.m. Friday, Jan. 31.
Public health websites, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, began to go blank and pronouns were erased from email signatures on Jan. 31, according to the Associated Press.
When this kind of data is taken away from journalists, researchers and the public, it can have big consequences for what we are able to learn, University of Wisconsin School of Journalism and Mass Communications professor Michael Wagner said.
“Being able to use public data to write stories that can hold the powerful to account is the lifeblood of good journalism and so journalists need to have access to public data to tell their audience how our leaders are using,” Wagner said. “And so to take these down and prevent journalists and researchers from using them, makes it a lot harder for us to hold power to account.”
Regarding possible ways to work around this new directive, both journalists and researchers can resort to internet archives, where older data can be found, Wagner said.
Although these solutions will be attainable in multiple fields of work, internet archives are inferior in comparison to having access to public government data, according to Wagner.
Researchers are concerned not only about the removal of existing data, but perhaps more concerned that the U.S. will stop gathering new data altogether as a result of this new memo, according to Salo.
“Immense amounts of research and practice depend on data gathered and made public by the U.S. federal government,” Salo said in an email statement to The Badger Herald. “I can’t think of any field where this isn’t true. Agriculture, healthcare, economics, finance and business, every social science, weather forecasting, education, technology, the disappearance of this data harms everything and everyone.”
For further updates, UW encourages visiting the Federal Relations page.
