INTERVIEW ‘‘
Rob Mackinlay is a journalist for Information Professional.
The importance of the US government’s statistics and data gathering system on the world cannot be overstated. Countries, researchers, scientists, students and the general public around the world use and rely on US government information and data. – James R. Jacobs
Vive La Resistance! Research takes on Trump
Librarians and researchers explain how they are working together to save government information threatened by the Trump administration.
DONALD Trump’s assault on anything that challenges his administration’s belief system has put librarians on the front line. Many are now working with researchers to save infor- mation before it is removed or destroyed, and want to make it accessible to the public and the research community again. In this article James R. Jacobs, US Government Information Librarian at Stanford University in California, explains the situation in the US and members of the core team at Safeguarding Research & Culture (SRC) – William Waites, University of Southampton, Ashley Gay (sysadmin of SRC), Henrik Schönemann, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, and Jez Cope, Data Services Lead at the British Library – provide a non-US perspective.
Often framed as protections for US citizens and corporations, Donald Trump’s executive orders have disrupted US government information including science and research in specific areas like climate change, diversity, equality and inclusion, but have impacted many more.
Executive Order 14168, for example, is framed as a protection for women and requires federal government departments to only recognise male and female and to remove materials and funding promoting “gender ideology”.
Climate science is affected by many executive orders including “Unleashing American Energy”, which cancelled research into the social cost of greenhouse gases, including human health effects, property damage, and disruption of energy systems.
Inside the US
So how bad is it? James R. Jacobs, Stanford Uni- versity, says: “I don’t know if I can quantify the data
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loss. There is a system-wide attack on science writ large. There have been specific datasets targeted for deletion… And there has been wholesale destruc- tion of the infrastructure of data collection through the blocking and/or complete cancellation of many billions of dollars in grant funding (
https://tinyurl.com/ funding-freeze), the firing of federal employees across the executive branch including the complete erasure of entire agencies and sub-agencies like USAID and CDC. It’s important to note the illegality of all of this; government data gathering is generally something that is required by specific laws and regulations.”
Global impact
Asked why these events matter outside the US, James says: “The importance of the US govern- ment’s statistics and data gathering system on the world cannot be overstated. Countries, researchers, scientists, students and the general public around the world use and rely on US government informa- tion and data. So the loss of staff across all of the federal data gathering agencies will be felt around the world for many years to come. One small anecdote to highlight this: last week, a researcher contacted me looking for data specific to Cambodia, including demographics and other variables down to the province/district level. The US Agency for Inter- national Development (USAID) had for many years collated these data. Because the Trump administra- tion shut down USAID and fired all of its staff, the data for all countries, not just for Cambodia, have been lost. Not only that, but IGO’s like the United Nations (UN) point to and rely on the USAID data on
data.un.org. So it’s clear that people and govern- ments around the world rely on the information and data produced by federal agencies.”
Rewired 2025
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