The Trump Administration’s War on Data Has Fresh Casualties

The federal government is littered with incomprehensible acronyms representing a host of divisions and agencies. But throughout the civil service there are departments with mission mandates that, while technical—and at times obscure— fulfill specific and frequently critical purposes. The great, lumbering gears of American bureaucracy spin on such offices, making them prime targets in President Donald Trump’s crusade to shrink the federal government. It may be hard to convey how much they matter until they’re under threat.

One such acronymic department is the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, or OPRE, an arm of the Administration of Children and Families, or ACF, which is housed within the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS. The OPRE conducts research and evaluation projects to study and assess a slew of ACF initiatives, including Head Start, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Health Profession Opportunity Grants, home visiting, and childcare and welfare programs. It also manages grants and contracts to research these areas, and provides clearinghouses for evidence on the effectiveness of ACF programs.

Earlier this month, an internal memo written by Assistant Secretary for Family Support Alex Adams and obtained by The New Republic announced that ACF would decentralize the work of the OPRE and transfer research responsibilities to the specific program offices overseeing child welfare, early childhood development, and family assistance. The functions of the chief data officer at OPRE would transfer to ACF’s Office of Administration, and implementation of the realignment plan would begin by mid-March.

OK, that’s a lot of jargon. Why does it actually matter if the ACF, a $70 billion agency, restructures operations for an office with a roughly $150 million budget? Critics of the change argue that placing responsibility for program research on the offices that oversee those initiatives could threaten the impartiality of the evidence, and threaten the future of current evaluation projects.

“Without a central support infrastructure to enable rigor and quality and validity and reliability, there can be a dramatic undermining of the types of research that [are] available,” said Nick Hart, the president and CEO of the Data Foundation, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for using open data to improve government functioning. The Data Foundation and the nonprofit organization Results for America released a statement revealing the memo’s existence and condemning it a few days after it was issued by Adams. The change has not yet been publicly announced.

OPRE research can be used to determine the efficacy of a program—so if the analysis is being conducted by the actual office administering it, Hart is concerned that the evaluators may be too close to the subject. He likened the situation to an Olympic figure skater being scored by their own coach.

“If you create too much gray room for people to judge or question the credibility of the product, it will certainly decay the evaluation function over time,” he continued.

Supporters of the work of OPRE note that it has worked closely with relevant program offices since its inception more than 30 years ago. But in an email to the youth policy–focused news outlet The Imprint, former OPRE leader Naomi Goldstein noted that “program offices typically aim to speak with one voice.”

There are arguments in favor of centralizing research under the program offices that oversee those initiatives. Emily Putnam-Hornstein, a researcher and professor of social work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said in an email that OPRE has a “tendency to oversell the findings from studies it funds.” She cited a recent OPRE report on the effects of home visiting, saying that it touted as significant “findings that were of absolutely no real-world significance.”

“Too many OPRE-funded projects pad the pockets of large research firms, while contributing little usable evidence. Agencies do not need more ‘toolkits,’ ‘conceptual framework briefs,’ ‘info sheets,’ and ‘checklists,’” said Putnam-Hornstein.

Some stakeholders have also raised the fear that future projects could be canceled, even though there is no current direct threat to current ongoing work, particularly after the Trump administration cut funding for 10 OPRE grants related to research on childcare and early childhood development last year.

This week, the Data Foundation was joined by dozens of other nonprofit organizations and research institutions as signatories in an open letter asking HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to halt the restructuring of OPRE, and ensure all ongoing projects are completed. The letter also asks for consultation with Congress, which did not direct the agency to undertake any reorganization.

“A decision of this magnitude, affecting an office with decades of institutional knowledge and hundreds of ongoing research and evaluation projects, warrants a deliberative process that engages those who depend on OPRE’s evidence and those who fund its activities through congressional appropriations,” the letter said.

The restructuring of the OPRE exists in the larger context of the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the federal government, by slashing funds and through mass federal layoffs. At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, thousands of employees have left the department since Trump took office. Reductions in the workforce for one particular department, the Office of Policy Development and Research, could leave the future of data collection at risk. PD&R provides market data that helps calculate area median income, which in turn is used to inform key federal housing programs, such as the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. It also collects data to establish fair-market rent, which provides a baseline for affordable housing programs.

“It’s very similar to OPRE, where there are certain standard things that are done, but they also commission studies; they also accept investigator-initiated projects; they do collaborative projects with researchers who have some funding, and the feds match it,” said Dennis Culhane, a social science researcher at the University of Pennsylvania and the co-director of the Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy initiative, about PD&R. “So there’s tremendous concern that those kinds of wheels in motion are not moving at the moment.”

These actions are also part of the administration’s effort to limit the collection of and access to data across the board. One recent casualty was a key annual report on household food insecurity. In September, the Department of Agriculture abruptly announced that it was terminating the report. This data has traditionally been used by federal, state, and local lawmakers to structure nutrition programs, and is relied upon by nonprofits serving food-insecure Americans. The USDA announcement came just two months after Congress passed a law that would dramatically cut federal funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Without information on food insecurity, it will be more difficult to see the impact of these changes to SNAP.

“We’re not going to be able to quantify the harm that is going to happen, because we’ve now lost this large piece of data, and there is no other data set and collection of data that reaches this far and this wide,” said Parker Gilkesson Davis, senior policy analyst for the Center on Law and Social Policy. “A lot of people are going to become invisible, and their plight is going to become invisible.… There will be people experiencing hunger in America, and we would have no idea, and no idea how to serve them.”

Then there is the potential loss of data that has already been collected. One research project estimates that the federal government has removed thousands of data sets and web pages from public access. Ongoing data collection is also up in the air: For example, the Trump administration has not yet released an annual survey on the state of homelessness in the United States for 2025, which is statutorily required for HUD to determine funding for homelessness programs nationwide. The Trump administration has argued that there is “no standard timeline” to release the report. Culhane said that the report is important for lawmakers to learn who is being particularly affected by homelessness, particularly given that the number of older Americans who are unhoused has increased in recent years.

“We need that level of detail to make suggestions to the Congress as to which populations we could be better serving—the elderly, for example, being one very important one,” said Culhane.

With federal data collection under siege, the private sector is simply unable to compensate for the breadth of research conducted by the federal government. Although nonprofit organizations and research institutions are able to undertake important projects, they themselves are often reliant on federal data sets. Moreover, these independent researchers lack the infrastructure that the federal government has to collect data on such a massive scale.

Which brings us back to the proposed restructuring of the OPRE. Hart noted that the office often contracts with research institutions, but the necessary funding and institutional support is coming from the federal government.

“They cannot replace in its entirety—and will never have the resources to replace in its entirety—the quality, the rigor, the breadth of data collection, the breadth of the population coverage that is available from the federal government,” said Hart.