Statisticians are voicing fears about the possibility that data will be manipulated to support whatever position the Trump administration may adopt, on everything from abortion to immigration to racial inequality.

And there’s another possibility that seniors should beware of: massaging the numbers to back unwelcome changes to the social safety net, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

The Guardian reported that a number of U.S. statisticians, including the outgoing head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the former chief statistician of the U.S., are afraid that the Trump administration might suppress or manipulate public statistics that “don’t fit his narrative of the truth.”

Katherine Wallman, chief statistician of the United States from 1992 to January 3 of this year, is just one of those raising the alarm that the administration may stop collecting and publishing data on a range of subjects essential to gaining an accurate picture of how well the country is doing.

In a Monday press conference, journalists were told by White House spokesman Sean Spicer that “[t]he president, he’s not focused on statistics as much as he is on whether or not the American people are doing better as a whole.” But, the article pointed out, “without statistics, measuring how ‘the American people are doing’ is simply a matter of opinion.”

There have already been moves by the administration to curtail any communication of publicly available data from the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Park Service, and the interior, agriculture and health departments. The reason most often given for such limits on communications is “simply the defunding of specific statistical programs,” the report said, adding, “This is already under way.”

It highlighted two Republican-sponsored bills that seek to halt data collection that studies racial segregation. The new bill, together titled the Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act of 2017, state that “no Federal funds may be used to design, build, maintain, utilize, or provide access to a Federal database of geospatial information on community racial disparities.”

It would be a simple enough matter to manipulate statistics, or simply stop collecting data, on such matters as how many seniors live below the poverty level, how many rely solely on Social Security for income during retirement or whether, if they’re still actively in the workforce, how many of them are “choosing” to work—as opposed to how many must work in order to keep the wolf from the door.

Ditto health statistics on how dependent seniors are on Medicare and Medicaid to keep them alive and healthy, how many people are insured under the Affordable Care Act and how many might stand to gain—or lose—coverage under any actions still to come on its repeal.

Statistics, or the lack thereof, could also blunt the pointed attacks on how much less women are paid than men, how much harder it is for them to save for retirement and how much more dependent they are on Social Security benefits than men.

They could also be used to change the scale on which Social Security benefits are calculated, or to support the case for raising the retirement age or eliminating some of the eligibility requirements for claiming benefits—or to make it appear that the system is going bankrupt.

Or it could simply become a matter of not releasing specific types of statistics.

While the article pointed out that the likelihood of statistical manipulation is mixed, since the business community “relies so heavily on accurate numbers,” it also said that there are “concerns about the increasing involvement of the private sector in public data collection.”

It cited Kenneth Prewitt, former director of the U.S. Census Bureau and currently professor of public affairs at Columbia University, who hypothesized “a scenario in which a private company was responsible for population counts and its methodology was not publicly available.”

Prewitt explained that such a company could “use less rigorous methods that could ‘count some people twice and others not at all.” This could affect everything from individual government programs to the drawing of legislative boundaries.

“What people do not understand,” Prewitt said in the article, is that “[i]f you control the denominator, you control everything.”

Instant Insights /

Statisticians fear Trump administration threat to data

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