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CDC data are disappearing

CDC data are disappearing

655 comments

·February 1, 2025

timhigins

Removing these records from the public internet could likely be considered illegal under the OPEN Government Data Act, 44 U.S.C. § 3506:

> (d) With respect to information dissemination, each agency shall— (3) provide adequate notice when initiating, substantially modifying, or terminating significant information dissemination products; (4) not, except where specifically authorized by statute— (A) establish an exclusive, restricted, or other distribution arrangement that interferes with timely and equitable availability of public information to the public; (B) restrict or regulate the use, resale, or redissemination of public information by the public

If these datasets were actually permanently deleted then the incident should be investigated by NARA [1]. The people responsible could be charged with a crime under 18 U.S.C. § 2071: > (b) Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. As used in this subsection, the term “office” does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States.

1. https://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/resources/unauthorized...

juujian

Damage done, mission accomplished... If you do something illegal and can get away with it relatively unscathed, then it isn't in practice illegal.

dataflow

Who would even prosecute? State attorneys general?

astrange

How do you know you've gotten away with it? That takes the rest of your life. (Well, statute of limitations.)

viraptor

It's going to be a couple months at most. If it's not punished immediately, it's practically legal with the current gov. And the next one will have way bigger things to unfuck than some missing documents.

thanhhaimai

The question becomes: Is this crime pardonable? If yes, how likely the current administration will pardon those people?

zellyn

Trump is just going to blanket pardon anyone involved.

ilrwbwrkhv

Lol I think anyone who thinks legal and illegal mean anything, has still not gotten the plot.

johnnyanmac

Courts are still fighting. Something are being overturned already (which is lightning quick). The moment we throw our hands up and give up is when the administration wins.

_y5hn

[dupe]

dataflow

Yeah that was basically my point with my earlier comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42905289

throw101010

If this was an order from the President as an official act, no scrutiny can be applied here in any court (broad immunity recently granted by the SCOTUS: absolute immunity for actions within his core constitutional powers and presumptive immunity for other official acts)... so good luck proving any wrongdoing without any evidence...

If you go after any of the underlings who executed such order, they are likely getting auto-pardonned by Trump if he gave the order (otherwise it will make it harder to find people to execute his "illegal" orders next). There is no such thing as illegal for this administration. Wake up.

achierius

That's not true. The restriction applies only to scrutiny of the President himself -- his agents still can be prosecuted.

chgs

His agents can be pardoned. He’s done that for thousands already.

trashtester

And he can pardon them, without even specifying what he pardons them for. Indeed, this seems to be becoming the the norm.

The US really needs to reign in the pardoning power. There are 3 areas in particular that need coverage (I'll cover pardons by the President, but the same might apply to Governors):

1) Most pardons come with a political cost, either for the president himself or his party. The main exception is just after an election, especially during the President's last term. This could be solved by outlawing pardons during the last 6 months of a term. At minimum, morally questionable pardons should come with such a cost.

2) All pardons should specificy specifically what actions and potential crimes they apply to. They do not specifically need to be admission of guilt (as they may be for gray zone behavior that could need protection against political prosecution by the next administration), but they do need to specify what actions or allegations they apply to.

3) Congress' ability to specifically contest pardons should be clarified. Specifically, congress should have the ability to contest a pardon, if the pardon is made from personal interest, seriously undermines the rule of law or national security.

Also, since the sitting president's party may controll the Speaker seat at the time, even the NEXT congress should have a chance to start proceedings. This requires that congress retains the right to do this even if the sitting president resigns before the term ends. (Since the new congress starts before the president's normal term ends).

Taken together, the above 3 points would ensure that IF a president is seen by the general public to abuse the pardon power, voters would get one chance at voting for representatives (and senators) that promise to "restore justice".

The time to introduce such a system would be now, while there's still outrage over Biden's pardons among Republicans. Democrats would also want to go along with this to prevent Trump from abusing the power in similar (or worse) ways near the end of his term. In fact, if they're sufficiently scared of this, they may even allow an opening to impeach Biden for potentially corrupt pardon's that were granted during the last weeks of his term.

This would allow Republicans to go after Fauci, Hunter, etc, in congress by impeaching Biden over those pardons, even now, even if they wouldn't actually be able to reach a guilty verdict in the Senate without significant Democrat support.

Still, being able to run this show may be so tempting to Trump and Republicans that they may be willing to make the new law effective immediately, while Democrats

consteval

Who, I'm assuming, can just be infinitely pardoned by the president because the president has absolute immunity.

johnnyanmac

>within his core constitutional powers

Well that's the part to challenge, no? As we've seen much too often, just because one ruling happens doesn't mean that later cases can't overturn that precedent.

I'd rather encourage and cheer on these powers because it's not like you and me are doing anything.

aurareturn

Side question: If Trump just pardons the people responsible, does it matter if it's illegal?

perihelions

I think Trump would fire any US Attorney who forces him to actually write a pardon. The clear expectation of federal prosecutors is that it's off-limits to criminally pursue Trump functionaries carrying out his orders.

He's fired 30+ AUSA's just *this week*, because they had previously prosecuted Trump allies.

johnnyanmac

I guess it's up to the states to sue the government then. Trump can't fire publicly elected state AG's.

If he's gonna try to privatize everything with "state's rights", we gotta use those state's powers against him. Using the rulebook he's bound by.

llamaimperative

I have a sneaking suspicion that pardons aren't going to mean much at the end of this term.

spencerflem

if the term ends ...

vkou

I'm afraid you're not going to get an answer that you're going to like.

breadwinner

Data is the ultimate Fact Check. This is a President that's adamantly opposed to fact checking [1] and has even coerced Facebook to drop fact checking. Of course they don't want data on government sites that disprove their "alternate facts".

[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4920827-60-minutes-tru...

SeptiumMMX

Well, fact-checking works if it's done impartially. So, if you want to fairly fact-check a political debate, each side should have their own team of researchers/fact-checkers being equally able to object to an argument made by the opposing party. Due process, sort of, kind of.

But I don't think I've ever seen that done actually. Usually, fact checkers are akin to Reddit moderators. Technically independent, but with one important twist. These are people that have a lot of free time and are willing to spend it doing unpaid (or underpaid) work. And that's a huge bias. Big enough to question impartiality, if you ask me.

mcmcmc

Having two parties with opposing biases and incentives doesn’t magically cancel out and become impartial. That’s the opposite of impartiality.

SeptiumMMX

That's the problem. Real humans in real world cannot be impartial and will always have biases. So if you expose the public to many different biased opinions and let them learn to recognize the biases and see past them, the "cumulative mindset" will be more objective and less prone to manipulation.

But if you let one biased group decide what the majority is allowed to see, the public opinion will inevitably align with the interests of that group, and won't be necessary beneficial to the public.

Have you noticed how in the past decade or two we have totally abandoned the pursuit of happiness through self-reliance and independence? How being depressed and outraged is normal, and is all but encouraged. This is all coming from the media actively shaping what gets into one's attention span and it will only be causing more and more misery with no end in sight.

And this comes down to a very simple formula. Media likes people who will create content for free. People who are willing to do are often unhappy and have a mindset that causes unhappiness. Media broadcasting their content (to their own profit, of course) is popularizing that mindset and making more people miserable. Bingo!

Clubber

>Having two parties with opposing biases and incentives doesn’t magically cancel out and become impartial. That’s the opposite of impartiality.

No, but it's close. It's similar to a courtroom where you have a plaintiff and a defendant. Each party plays a roll on each issue that is up to debate. They plead their side and ultimately the citizenry is the jury. Unfortunately, in the political arena there aren't any rules for speech like in a courtroom; perjury for example.

It's imperfect, but you won't ever find an impartial person or group, nor should you blindly take their word for it. It's an appeal to authority fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

roenxi

Although true, it isn't a very useful observation. "How do I find someone impartial to this matter?" is one of the great unsolved questions that the lawyers have to deal with. Up there with "what is true?".

If anything that is one of the big promises of AI systems. Maybe we can have adjudication that is both extremely intelligent and provably biased towards consistency, facts and evidence. SHA256sum-ed and torrented around for inspection. It'd be a game changer for fact checking instead of the highly falliable groups that we have right now.

theendisney4

One will have a strong tendency to leave the easily challanged out.

w0m

> Well, fact-checking works if it's done impartially. So, if you want to fairly fact-check a political debate, each side should have their own team of researchers/fact-checkers being equally able to object to an argument made by the opposing party. Due process, sort of, kind of.

IIRC, This is mostly what Facebook did after the 2016 election; put together a non affiliated board and made sure it was populated by all sides - Facebook itself had no/minimal control over what said board did/decided; but all decisions were public.

Zuck just gave in to 'community moderation' instead because "actual solutions" are considered a negative in today's political climate.

hackyhacky

The Trumpian opposition to fact checkers is not based on some principled disagreement of substance. Trump, and by extension Republicans, oppose fact checking because the facts are in contradiction to their goals. Trump himself exists in some post-modern environment where "facts" aren't real and all that matters is spin. He wants what he says to go unquestioned. That's why instead of having a debate about facts, supported by evidence, he simply seeks to remove facts from the discussion entirely.

eastbound

[flagged]

_heimdall

I don't believe that is a one party issue. Life is messy and politicians attempt to smooth that over with grandiose, but hollow, visions for the future and data points taken out of context to paint a picture.

It's a fundamental problem of scale, you either become so bogged down in details and nuance that you get nothing done or you lose so much context that your statements are false without a massive list of caveats.

neumann

Pretty confident that now that critical thinking has been thrown out the window and accountability has disappeared in political discourse this would just result in endless objections in any debate deliberately used to add noise and misdirect conversation.

I don't know what the solution is in today's climate, but I suspect it no longer matters. America is post-truth and he who controls the data and pathways to information (Murdoch, Meta, Google) directly influences a large percentage of the people.

worksonmine

> Pretty confident that now that critical thinking has been thrown out the window and accountability has disappeared in political discourse

Politicians and the media have always lied about big and small details. The difference is that social media has made it easier to dispute, and now we started noticing it more. Now that they can't gatekeep the information anymore they adopted the word "misinformation" to deal with the problem. "It may be true, but it's misinformation, trust us, we have your best interests in mind".

Remember the trusted news initiative from covid? That was an attempt to continue gatekeeping, anything from any other sources was considered false and unverified, and the global media all had the same talking points at the same time. It was terrifying to see how easy everyone conformed.

theendisney4

I like it, the legal system might be more suitable for putting the "truth" on trial than its current application.

It will cost a bunch of money but we get something out of it.

eastbound

The fact checkers’ own employer said that the fact checkers didn’t work because they were so heavily biased that the audience noticed it.

hackyhacky

Translation: the audience is so biased that they automatically reject facts in conflict with their biases.

valunord

Let's first work on eliminating political parties altogether, then let's work on eliminating bias.

gadflyinyoureye

I like this idea, but doubt it works. People naturally coalesce around ideas. That cohesion is then call a political party. The only way to get rid of parties is to get rid of freedom of organization.

chgs

The Republican Party has been eliminated, it’s been replaced by a dictator cult.

Interestingly increasing numbers of young people want this.

cle

> Data is the ultimate Fact Check.

This is wrong IMO. Data can be missing, incomplete, biased, skewed, and even just plain wrong. Cherry-picked data can be worse than no data.

The ultimate fact check is a scientific process of collecting data, modeling it, scrutinizing it and its methodology and the entities involved, contextualizing it, cross-checking, replicating, etc.

What media likes to call "fact checking" to me feels more motivated by punchy headlines and chyrons.

breadwinner

> Data can be missing, incomplete, biased, skewed, and even just plain wrong.

All true of course. The solution for that is more data, not less.

cle

Maybe. It needs to be the right data, and interpreted correctly. More of the wrong data isn't particularly helpful.

I think what I'm arguing is that just having data isn't good enough, and it's dangerous to accept data at face value. It needs to be the right data, and interpreted correctly.

_heimdall

Data is always lacking. More data may help you be more confident in your conclusion, but it will never be certain.

irrational

Fact checking is things like Republicans claiming that people in a certain town are eating cats and dogs or their are pedophiles in the basement of a certain pizza place. There isn't any need to model and scrutinize data to fact check the majority of nonsense Republicans spout.

xedrac

[flagged]

johnnyanmac

>What media likes to call "fact checking" to me feels more motivated by punchy headlines and chyrons.

True. It's a good thing media doesn't collect data on that case. Just interprets it to various levels of accuracy. Those who want a better interpretation can read the data itself and learn the mechanics behind it.

gopher_space

Similarly, everyone feels like a camera captures truth except the people who operate cameras for a living.

djfobbz

Data isn't the ultimate fact check - it's just numbers waiting to be twisted. Bias, bad sources, and cherry-picking turn 'facts' into fiction. Real fact-checking needs brains, not just bar graphs.

darth_avocado

> Data isn’t the ultimate fact check

But it is. Numbers can be twisted, but it they can easily be verified. Bias, bad sources and cherry picking can allow you to tell stories, but the data will allow you to verify those stories are indeed facts. Brain can’t really fact check things that don’t have any data.

_heimdall

Numbers alone will always lack context. You can absolutely verify where the numbers came from, weren't altered, and the math was done right. What you can't do is verify the numbers alone accurately portray what was happening in the real world, or what has happened in the real world since the snapshot of those numbers was taken.

Numbers are extremely useful, but numbers alone mean absolutely nothing.

tombert

I'm not sure I agree.

Even if the numbers are accurate, nearly any situation has a nearly infinite number of potential data points, and deciding which ones are relevant isn't as straightforward as people act like it is.

This is easy to see play out; you can look at the same stories being reported on both Fox News and MSNBC. Usually both sources' raw facts will be basically "correct" in the sense that they're not saying anything explicitly false, but there can be bias in determining which facts are actually useful or how they're categorized.

You can see how the reporting of the January 6th stuff varied between news outlets.

djfobbz

Disagree. Numbers don't exist in a vacuum - they are collected, framed, and interpreted by humans with biases, agendas, and limitations. Verification isn't just about checking numbers; it's about scrutinizing methodologies, sources, and context. Data can affirm falsehoods when selectively presented or measured poorly. Brains aren't secondary to fact-checking; they are the ultimate tool for discerning whether data reflects reality or is merely a well-dressed distortion.

listenallyall

Can data, or AI, tell me definitively who the MVP of the NFL was this season? Allen, Lamar, Saquon? The numbers certainly help when making comparisons, but they aren't the entire story, different people will come to different conclusions based on the exact same set of facts.

vasco

So one of the most important things to "fact check" in this election for me was the clear elder abuse of someone with advanced dementia.

How do you fact check that?

Because almost everyone has a grandparent and has seen what it looks like. When push comes to shove and you lie about something everyone can see and has such a visceral reaction to, it's hard to move past it.

And even seeing clear as day for months it kept being denied. If you can't solve for that, there's no point.

johnnyanmac

Meanwhile Biden has one bad day and everyone's saying "he's too old". While voting in the oldest president in history months later.

You can fact check it. No one wants to for whatever reason.

arunabha

But surely, the answer to 'data can be twisted' is not to remove the data? We have enough of a problem already with wilful misinformation.

Having the data is the first step towards a reasonable discussion. Otherwise, you have to resort to 'I feel ....' vs 'Based on this interpretation....'

I agree that the first kind of debate is already the dominant form today, however I think we can all agree that it's not been good for society overall.

_heimdall

This isn't a new problem unfortunately. Data and research during the pandemic response was being horribly mishandled, largely by the Democrats at the time.

This isn't a one party or one person problem. It sure seems like a problem more correlated with our government structure and/or climate, or authority structures themselves.

uncomplexity_

lol if you watch zuck's take on it his problem is the fact checkers ended up being biased.

hackyhacky

Maybe they are. The solution to this is to provide evidence in favor of your argument. That's how we used to resolve conflicting opinions: debates supported by evidence.

Now, instead, we're simply getting rid of any attempt to decide what is factual, and instead let demagogues decide for us what is fact and what is not, without any evidence at all. Since evidence is now superfluous, why waste government money by providing it?

_heimdall

I think the problem there is the powers granted to government rather than how today's people decide to wield it.

Facts are never really decided, things can always change if we learn something new or just consider what we know from a different angle.

The problem here is that anyone in charge can decide what they believe is fact and make very real, very impactful changes that they force on everyone else.

theGnuMe

The internet was designed to be robust in the event of nuclear war. Maybe it’s time for distributed data caches. Maybe we encode it all in crypto currency.

j-krieger

They sometimes are. If you're using a biased source to fact-check, you're just transitively applying that bias.

lucb1e

I do feel like there is a limit to how biased a source can be when it tries to be based in evidence, though. Nobody would disagree that 1+1=2, basic physics tells one that COVID is not spread by 5G towers, the climate has warmed enough that you can dump weather records into a spreadsheet and see the effect without needing to measure CO2 at all. That COVID causes disease and a warming climate causes more extreme weather is also rather easy to corroborate. Accepting the obvious is already a good starting point for deciding whether climate policy XYZ is good or not (combined with other basic facts and every party's proposals), but it seems to me that the current striving for unbiasedness leads to giving lunatics equal air time. Any amount of fact checking would at least remove this level of misinformedness

adamtaylor_13

Data is not the ultimate fact check. Data can be skewed in infinite ways to represent whatever you want.

worksonmine

During covid links to the CDC that could be used by vaccine skeptics were flagged on Facebook. There was an actual problem with the fact-checking and it was often judged by who benefited from the information rather than the truth behind the information.

null

[deleted]

JumpCrisscross

Going out on a bit of a limb here, but I’m guessing the data will find their way to xAI.

My hypothesis is Musk is following a South African playbook. That involves, in part, privatising the commons.

Hope to be proven wrong.

cmriversepi

I’m an epidemiology professor and I write a weekly “weather report” outbreaks [1]. These communication and data blackouts are coming at a bad time. We’re having an unusual flu season—activity has rebounded unexpectedly. I’ve been having to scramble for data, last week by visiting each state health department website. It’s really troubling and consequential.

[1] https://caitlinrivers.substack.com

pjc50

This is intentional. They're mad about the covid response, and want to prevent mask mandates or lockdowns at any cost. At any cost. Including suppressing information about bird flu for as long as possible.

repeekad

[flagged]

api

I’m curious about what will happen if they get to the parts of this Project 2025 like agenda that involves telling people to do things, or banning things people like.

We already see that abortion bans are unpopular. When they are put to a vote they lose, even in very red states.

How much more will people take? How will the Joe Rogan dudebro crowd react to banning porn? That’ll be interesting.

I’ve been predicting for years that it’s these guys — the Christian Nationalists / NatCons — who are going to mass confiscate guns. Would that be the third rail?

ocschwar

Reach out to the developer behind 91-DIVOC. That won't cover red states that go dark when and if they do, but it was invaluable to me during the covid pandemic.

dgacmu

I'm a CS professor who used to write and develop the software behind a daily and weekly Pennsylvania covid report. I get the pain here. It's a messy, incompatible jumble without the CDC.

Would you like me to see if there are some CS folks here to provide programming support to help with what you're doing?

I -hope- this is transient but I'm not holding my breath either.

(feel free to reach out at dga@cs.cmu.edu)

dgacmu

Relieved to see it's back online. Hopefully it remains reliable in both senses of the word.

cka

Definitely troubling. Not a replacement, but you might be interested in EHR derived communicable disease data available here:

https://www.epicresearch.org/data-tracker/communicable-disea...

Scottn1

Your Twitter was one of several I followed to get trusted information during most of Covid. Just wanted to say "Thanks".

perihelions

The scope of the scrubbing is broader that datasets. On /r/medicine they're reporting that some treatments guidelines for physicians (100 page+ PDF's) are disappearing, if they're adjacent to the topic of sex:

https://old.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/1iepzln/cdc_has_r... ("CDC has removed the pages with STI treatment and contraceptive guidelines (self.medicine)")

NelsonMinar

The CDC page on PrEP, a life-saving medicine to protect against HIV, has been removed. This will result in people dying. https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/prevention/prep.html

beefnugs

Isn't this a worthwhile kick in the pants?

No one who actually relies upon real raw data is just downloading a live snapshot from official government hosting on demand are they?

Proper data handling procedures is streaming updates, doing your own backups and archiving and sharing where possible and important. Not trusting the everlasting benevolence of whiplash politically controlled resources?

llamaimperative

> whiplash politically controlled resources

When was the last "whiplash" that did something this catastrophic?

Put blame where blame lies.

NelsonMinar

what are you on about? The page that was destroyed was consumer health information about a life-saving preventative medication.

NelsonMinar

Today in the New York Times: C.D.C. scientists ordered to withdraw studies that use terms such as ‘L.G.B.T.’ or ‘pregnant people.’

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/02/01/us/trump-tariffs-new...

phillipcarter

This is a blitzkrieg campaign designed to try and get Musk and his people as much control of the digital government as possible before the roadblocks (legal, systematic, etc.) make things too difficult for him. As it stands, his goal is likely a purge of the federal government akin to what he did with Twitter. And the resulting 80% drop in revenue by Twitter is a similar kind of outcome we can expect from his careless meddling.

computerthings

https://bsky.app/profile/altnps.bsky.social/post/3lh3dl3rkgc...

> Elon Musk staff has been caught installing hard drives inside the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Treasury Department, and the General Services Administration (GSA). His staff encountered resistance when demanding that Treasury officials grant access to systems managing the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to programs like Social Security and Medicare. Tensions escalated when Musk’s aides were discovered at OPM accessing systems, including a vast database known as the Enterprise Human Resources Integration (EHRI), which contains sensitive information such as dates of birth, Social Security numbers, performance appraisals, home addresses, pay grades, and length of service for government employees. In response to employees speaking out, Musk’s aides locked civil servants out of computer systems and offices, with reports of personal items being searched.

neumann

It is very plausible that he is also using it to get all the data he wants from this, not just to scrub it. It would make sense given his desire to compete on AGI that he can both scrub this data for public use and feed it to his own training sets.

phillipcarter

I don't think he cares a whole lot about xAI at the moment. He's busy being shadow president.

ryandrake

Except of course, instead of a company nobody cares about losing advertisers and money, lives are going to be lost. The stakes are higher when you start dismantling critical institutions and stuffing them full of loyal incompetents.

johnnyanmac

Still so stupid in my eyes. This isn't the public sector, you can't just lay off 80% of the government without a hell of a battle with all the representative powers of the US.

Government's already being sued over these actions this weekend. I just hope federal employees ignore all his actions. They don't work for him (and Trump can't fire most of them in retaliation)

foresto

Maybe useful to someone:

https://archive.org/details/20250128-cdc-datasets

"""

An archive of all CDC datasets uploaded to https://data.cdc.gov/browse before January 28th, 2025. Excludes corrupt datasets and data not publicly accessible.

Most datasets are accompanied by an additional file ending in -meta that includes the metadata associated with the data. Attachments referenced in these files can be found in the attachments/ folder.

If you would like to seed this data to improve its redundancy please do not use the auto generated torrent, as it is incomplete. Instead use the torrent file labeled "full-20250128-cdc-datasets-USETHIS.torrent"

"""

h0l0cube

This highlights why the Internet Archive is so important.

grumple

Thanks, that is useful. Are there any other efforts to archive all the data on government websites? I suppose we could crawl archive.org.

abracadaniel

It will only take an order making the data illegal to host to have it removed. More copies are critical.

59nadir

This means nothing if you host it on non-US servers. No one would take it seriously internationally.

Tyrubias

It’s terrifying that data US taxpayers paid for, collected and analyzed in the name of public health, can be removed on a whim. While there are a lot of efforts to archive said data, it would still make it unavailable to Americans who are not tech savvy. Unfortunately, that seems to be the idea, I think.

skykooler

Would the removed data be something that could be requested under FOIA?

qingcharles

I can answer this as a serial FOIA litigator.

If the data is still in the possession of the government (e.g. in backups, on paper) then it is FOIA-able.

I had a gov agency temporarily throw all the materials into a trash can when I requested them and argued that since they were sitting in a trash can they were not available under FOIA.

Diederich

> temporarily throw all the materials into a trash

Just curious, did they pull it out of the trash later on?

jeffgreco

Requires a law abiding administration.

refurb

It is terrifying. Especially since the Executive Order didn't require it.

Why is the CDC taking down data when it's not required to do so?

jimmydoe

majority of voters have made an ultimate choice. everything has to serve the choice. if you pay tax but don't or can't vote, sorry, it's your own problem.

jagged-chisel

Isn't this data already inaccessible to those who are not tech savvy? My grandma isn’t visiting any of the data download sites provided by the federal government. She doesn’t even know why she would, or even that such data is available. And if I provide it to her, she hasn’t the skills to do anything with it.

vharuck

A lot of federal money goes to state and local health programs. For example, consider mammograms. A state will be given a budget to spend on mammograms. The state doesn't do those screenings itself, so it solicits bids from several healthcare organizations. Those organizations create proposals with estimates of the number of residents eligible for free screening in their area, the burden of breast cancer among that group, and whether those potential patients fall into underserved or high risk demographics. All of that comes from high quality data published by the federal government. Those groups pull data from these online data sets.

Your grandma might have gotten free mammograms because of that data.

null

[deleted]

arunabha

Agreed that your grandma is unlikely to access the data directly, however that doesn't imply she is not affected by it's removal. As others have noted, professionals your grandma almost certainly depends upon(doctors for example) rely on the data.

rexpop

Luckily, we live in a society of specialists, and while you are laying bricks, public health orgs are generating reports and taking interviews and making these data accessible and meaningful to you.

So, yes, your grandma relies on a data "supply chain" but, nevertheless, it benefits her.

Gigachad

A lot of the user facing pages with general info about stuff like HIV has been deleted too.

talldayo

It's a bit like asking whether road signs are effective for Americans who can't read. The signs are there for the people that are using the road, and if you're not using the road you can safely ignore it.

whatshisface

It's also a bit like saying that medical school is an elitist institution that only benefits the medical class. :-)

Sakos

More like asking whether road signs are effective for Americans who are passengers in cars. No, it doesn't directly do her any good that they're technically accessible since she can't act on it, but it sure as hell affects her life that other people have access to the information provided by road signs.

seabass-labrax

I'm not sure the analogy works: roads were around long before writing, and there are still road users who can't read. That is why pedestrian crossing signals use lights in the shape of a person rather than written instructions.

Applejinx

That's why this is more of an attack on the Hacker News demographic, not Grandma.

If you had a real startup doing real things in healthcare, this is an intentional spoke in your wheels.

whatshisface

Grandma goes to the doctor.

null

[deleted]

sega_sai

An "interesting" consequence of these type of measures of stopping collecting or publishing data will be that soon it will be impossible to tell how much infant mortality, or number of cases of tuberculosis or similar changed with respect to last year. Maybe that is partially the goal.

watwut

Well, if your plan is to destroy governmental agencies while being in charge of them, it makes sense to destroy anything that might show you are causing harm first.

tremon

Yes, that may be part of the same playbook. Those pesky foreign viruses are taking our ill! We must stop that! Glory to the White Death!

angelgonzales

This is very similar to when the CDC stopped recording defensive gun use statistics! The pendulum is certainly swinging, on the other hand, I think we should retain data even if it doesn’t align with the current administration. I think it’s important that people should record data that they value, independent of governments, so they can maintain a source of truth throughout time. Articles from Axios, NYT and posts on X can change or be deleted, it’s important to take snapshots to go back and check for deltas.

kasey_junk

The Dickey amendment in 1996 made it extremely difficult to study gun violence at the federal level. That only started to change in 2013 and then was finally fixed in 2019.

This is one issue where there is no pendulum. The pro-gun lobby has owned censorship of gun research for a generation and is likely to keep it from being an active and honest research area.

dingnuts

[flagged]

nakajimayoshi

I’m not sorry, but the narrative that the 2nd amendment keeps the government in check is beyond naïve in the 21st century, its celebration of stupidity.

Perhaps in a world where armed combat between civilians and the military only involves muskets this holds true, but exactly how do you expect to “exert your second amendment rights” when a squad armed with M16s, grenade launchers, body armor, and night vision goggles shows up to your door? A 9mm pea shooter?

jeanlucas

Yeah, we need snapshots of the internet, not just the data

silverquiet

It seems to me that all uses of guns are defensive.

nickff

Assassination and suicide both seem non-defensive, unless you use a very broad definition of defense.

timewizard

Suicide is more common than homocide. By a factor of 2 to 1.

Murder is more common than self defense. By a factor of 10 to 1.

In all cases you are highly likely (>90%) to be on a first name basis with the person that kills you.

CalRobert

This is part of a broader rolling catastrophe. Musk is evidently seizing control of the Office of Personnel Management

https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2025-01-31/exclus...

Nasa took down their applied sciences page and is evidently scrubbing the data

https://www.reddit.com/r/gis/comments/1icqchv/why_is_the_nas...

(https://appliedsciences.nasa.gov/)

Lots of other data sets are disappearing too:

https://mashable.com/article/government-datasets-disappear-s...

There is active discussion of this at https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/

as well as at https://www.reddit.com/r/fednews/

hypeatei

I would just like to point out that Musk is the richest man in the world and is now directing critical areas of the U.S. government. Surely he doesn't have ulterior motives and is looking out for the average person?

duxup

As far as things like ending EV tax credits musk noted it would hurt his competitors more than him.

It’s all obvious corruption.

pclmulqdq

EV tax credits under the previous administration applied to almost every EV that wasn't a Tesla. They got Tesla its start, though, so the ladder must be pulled up.

Of course, carbon offsets are still a huge cash cow for Tesla, so Musk won't be eager to touch those.

nimbius

If you look back at Germany in the 19th century, nations like Prussia and Austria had this sort of power struggle between the merchant class and the nobility at the advent of steam power.

in this case the de-facto US nobility (rank-and-file career politicians) are being usurped by the bourgeouise (billionaires like Musk) at the advent of AI and tech by promising the working class a combination of culture war policy and relief from the very capitalist excess they themselves endorse. by reducing congress and senate to a simple debate team (conversely similar to the German National Asssembly) the tech-elite are able to seize power once reserved for the crown.

the question will be, after four years, will they abdicate their power or concentrate it?

marcosdumay

I laughed when those people self-identified as accelerationists... but holly shit! they knew what it means and were honest.

Historically, they are just a bunch of rich morons that got lucky, got power, and decided to stage a coup. This is not some enlightened movement trying to replace the social norms. It's just your run of the mill personal power switch, and the only notable things about it are it's on a country that has been extremely stable before, and those people are stupid enough to willfully destroy it.

NickC25

>the question will be, after four years, will they abdicate their power or concentrate it?

You honestly think that's a question?

Power corrupts. You saw Trump, who in 2016 said he'd get everything done so he'd see no need to run again, he'd have Made America Great Again. He then tried to rig the 2020 election so he could stay in power, despite saying "if I lose the election you'll never hear from me again", and 4 years later, here we are.

These people are here to entrench themselves permanently.

grumple

> the question will be, after four years, will they abdicate their power or concentrate it?

Musk, Thiel, and their friends clearly intend to consolidate power, and the people they associate with openly advocate for the creation of independent corporate fiefdoms with authoritarian control over society. There is no doubt at this point. These are not good people. They are oligarchs. They are the bitter nerds that just want power for themselves so they can be the bullies.

Tobu

> will they abdicate their power

Yeah, no. This is a coup and they are all in. They would not be this blatant about taking control illegally and fast if they expected to leave any institutions to still enforce the law against them.

Spooky23

> the question will be, after four years, will they abdicate their power or concentrate it?

Why would they? Once they come for the judges and replace them with “real Americans”, there’s no bottom.

null

[deleted]

belter

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives.

They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”

  ― George Orwell, 1984

SmirkingRevenge

Yea, these guys don't seem like the kind to do any abdicating, voluntarily.

A lot can happen in 4 years though. Maybe self-inflicted catastrophic wounds will drive down support for Trump enough where it becomes possible for R pols and oligarchs to abandon him. Or maybe they'll choose the dark path, and go farther into repressive authoritarianism to stay in power.

The problem for Musk et al is that they are concentrating power directly to Trump, not themselves. They're shackling themselves to the leopard and betting it will never eat their face.

renewedrebecca

I really hope you're being sarcastic.

southernplaces7

Sort of obvious sarcasm, no?

naruhodo

The tech oligarchs want to dismantle democracy, receive a gift of 0.5% of Federal land from Trump and establish their own democracy-free fiefdoms. [1]

The social support system in the US is being dismantled and when people can no longer afford to eat, the ensuing riots will provide the necessary trigger to declare martial law and suspend democracy completely.

[1] DARK GOTHIC MAGA: How Tech Billionaires Plan to Destroy America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no

canecty32

[dead]

somename9

Musk is not the richest man in the world. Those lists exclude royalty and other individuals who do not want the extra publicity. The Rothschilds are far richer.

hypeatei

> Those lists exclude royalty and other individuals who do not want the extra publicity

What individual(s)? You just mentioned a family and not an individual. Forbes lists Elon's net worth at $419 billion.

chinathrow

At this point, being a Musk supporter is nothing to be proud of.

bdcravens

I cancelled a Model 3 order and went with a different EV a few years ago. I was starting to soften my stance, and considering a Tesla for my next, but at this point, I have a hard time accepting the idea that buying one wouldn't send a message of implicit support.

beej71

Not just that, but I don't want my reputation tarnished.

Xunjin

Indeed it is, but maybe is time that we detach a person from their proposals. I wonder how that would be achieved.

justin66

Because why would you want to judge someone by the quality of their ideas?

watwut

First step would be to apologize to a trans woman for unleashing campaign of harassment for making a small ad for a beer and campaign to boycott that beer. You know, for making them first example of what you will do to those who do not sign to your gender idealogy.

eCa

So you are suggesting that all posts on news.ycombinator be anonymous?

Spooky23

This is the downside of the web.

Fortunately we have depository libraries, so some key stuff won’t be destroyed by these barbarians. https://www.gpo.gov/how-to-work-with-us/agency/services-for-...

diggan

> Musk is evidently seizing control of the Office of Personnel Management

Suddenly I feel out of the loop when it comes to US politics, how come Musk is suddenly seemingly seizing control of parts of the US government? I don't recall him being on any ballots or anything?

CalRobert

As it so happens he did not appear on any ballots. But Musk (his aides more specifically) have locked federal employees out of their own systems

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-aides-lock-government-...

Evidently set up an on-prem email server at the OPM to send out their emails asking disloyal employees to resign

https://gizmodo.com/federal-employees-sue-agency-over-new-em...

And is attempting to do the same at the US Treasury (edit: I meant to gain access to/control of, not the email server thing)

https://www.finance.senate.gov/chairmans-news/wyden-demands-...

The twitzkrieg seems to be working.

treis

[flagged]

Applejinx

The trouble is, to talk about WHY Musk is attempting to seize control of parts of the US government and why the Trump administration is attempting to censor mass quantities of data would be a political conversation.

Hacker News isn't designed for this. The point at which it becomes mass censorship that computer hackers (in their capacity as The Internet) might take an active role in routing around, is more or less this point: you're quite correct that this is worrying, but up to this point it's been a deeply political conversation and only as it becomes mass censorship and control by technological means, does it become really on-message for Hacker News.

CalRobert

Hacking includes systems, not just code, and what Musk is doing certainly counts as systems hacking I would say.

Hell, Captain Crunch didn't even use a computer.

MetaWhirledPeas

> to talk about WHY Musk is attempting to seize control of parts of the US government and why the Trump administration is attempting to censor mass quantities of data would be a political conversation.

In an attempt to keep it non-political: perhaps they (DOGE) are trying to put a "freeze" on the records while they consider who to fire. That would imply DOGE does not trust the people who have access to the records not to alter them in their favor. (Irony, since DOGE is demanding trust themselves.) You might not agree with that reason, but it is a reason.

dylan604

Not every person in the government is elected. Some positions are appointed. Not one judge from SCOTUS is elected. None of the members of the president's cabinet are elected. They are all Senate confirmed though, which is what's going on now with the current clown show. Somehow, Musk has created a role for himself where he even gets to bypass the Senate confirmation stage. That's the most disconcerting thing to me. Not that I think he wouldn't get confirmed, but the fact that he has this much power totally unchecked.

Ajedi32

> the fact that he has this much power totally unchecked.

I think this is just a symptom of the amount of power the office of the president has accumulated over the years. Musk has no authority on his own; he's acting on the authority of the president.

Due to the number of things Congress has delegated to the executive branch over the years, that's quite a lot of unchecked power indeed. But it's not Musk's power, it's the president's.

bongodongobob

The US is undergoing a fascist takeover basically.

nehal3m

You’re being downvoted but looking from the outside in, Gitmo being scaled up to house 30k people that the administration expects never to be able to repatriate, an unelected billionaire running around destroying institutions and a president actively starting trade wars and threatening occupation with allies looks an awful lot like it.

liontwist

[flagged]

libertarian1

Lmao. Nope. US is reclaiming the common sense

refurb

President add unelected civilians to their cabinet every election.

Did anyone elect Anthony Blinken? Janet Yellen? Lloyd Austin?

None of these people were elected yet have substantial power delegated through the President.

And while these people were approved by Senate vote, plenty of people in the Biden circle weren’t - Chief of Staff, members of the National Security Council, etc.

Dalewyn

Musk was appointed as the administrator of DOGE, itself a subordinate "temporary organization" under the United States DOGE Service (formerly the United States Digital Service).

All of this is happening within the Executive Office of the President, which is essentially fancyspeak to mean the government employees working the Executive Branch of the federal government. Those government employees serve at the pleasure of the President; Congress only has very limited influence (namely budgetary influences from the House and certain positions that require Senate confirmation).

So Musk, being appointed as a part of the Executive Branch, derives authority vested in the President of which Trump has delegated some to Musk for the purposes of implementing and enforcing DOGE policies.

Musk for his part also serves at the pleasure of the President, so whatever he does is ostensibly what Trump wants regardless of who actually does it.

vharuck

Most federal workers do not serve at the pleasure of the President, ever since the Pendleton Act in 1883:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Refo...

So remember, when Trump talks about the "deep state," he means workers hired through a merit system.

jazzyjackson

I'd be very surprised to find Musk went through the trouble of becoming an actual employee with a Salary. Are cabinet members very often volunteers?

Xunjin

The "defender of free speech" is censoring data? Who ever thought about it?

A lot of "woke" people warned it but several ignored as being "political speech" now we pay the consequences.

watwut

Only paranoid SJWs called Musk a right wing person and here we are, watching Musk fund extreme right clearly proving them wrong. Those SJW were doing this thing whole my life, seems to me. There was always outrage about them accusing an innocent person of bad stuff ... only to turn out they were actually right.

bmitc

How is this not all illegal? How are cease and resists not being put into place? An illegal immigrant, narcissist, billionaire, and many other things is taking over federal agencies and actively purging them for his own ideologies.

Maxious

Anything the president does is legal so says the supreme court

maeil

I'm surprised that this was not given more attention, despite how much it was given, it should have gotten orders of magnitudes more.

In the US, you can fly multiple planes into skyscrapers, rape three whole kindergartens, and lynch an entire race to extermination. As long as you then win the next election before you get convicted, you're in the clear.

This is the United States of America.

Vulgar examples? The bare minimum necessary to make people remotely feel the severity in their bones. Problem is that no one dares to say them out loud in fear of their reputation, despite it being a good thing to do.

hansvm

Absolutely. That begs the question though, if Trump has ordered federal employees to make the government efficient and eliminate the weaponization of government, are those employees not obligated to remove Trump and Musk from their current roles?

mort96

I see these kinds of comments regularly and am curious: what is your thought process? What makes you think that it's not illegal? What makes you think that legality matters here?

bmitc

Can you just state what you would like to?

s1artibartfast

what makes me think it is illegal. I dont think there is a congressional law that X data must be hosted at a given URL.

basscomm

It's only illegal if someone enforces the law

null

[deleted]

CalRobert

Laws are just words

pmarreck

I hate to sound like a conventional cis-man, but this is exactly the sort of situation where conventional cis-man energy is needed:

Where are the CDC people growing a spine to stand up to this? This is obviously bad.

The reason why bullies only understand 1 language (force) is exactly why counter-bullies who also speak that language are needed. And these are (usually) men (and some smaller percentage of women). (I'm seriously not trying to genderize this. I'm speaking of "fighting/disobeying/confronting energy" instead of "nurturing/complying/keeping-copacetic energy". Anyone who's good at that, should exercise it.)

If you have to take good science to the darknet, then fucking do so. That's what it's there for.

"The [Dark]Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore.

Alternately, move the data hosting to Switzerland, Iceland, or the Netherlands as a data-haven. Hetzner might be OK too, since very-left-wing Germany (while it has an agreement to comply with legal MLAT requests) might savor the opportunity to snub Trumpian requests or stall them indefinitely due to lack of obvious national-security importance.

IX-103

Sorry, I couldn't get through your third paragraph without hearing the "Team America: World Police" pussies/dicks speech in the background.

But your argument is inherently flawed. Part of the point of government is to regulate and direct the use of force. We have mechanisms that are supposed to apply force to "bullies". The problem is that the "bullies" have co-opted that system to use it for their own ends. This happened gradually so it didn't become obvious until the most recent "bully" decided he didn't even want to pretend that he wasn't in control.

Individuals who directly stand up to this administration will be hammered down with the full force of the government. The best we can hope for is a passive resistance and malicious compliance. That combined with grassroots efforts to fill the media with protests of objectionable policies is probably the best we can do for now.

The only other option is to apply force outside of the system to correct it, but things are not nearly to the point where revolution is the better option.

pmarreck

> The problem is that the "bullies" have co-opted that system to use it for their own ends. This happened gradually so it didn't become obvious until the most recent "bully" decided he didn't even want to pretend that he wasn't in control.

The funny thing is that people have always said this exact thing except paraphrased in various ways (perhaps the term was less "bully" and something more conventionally a universal term of disparagement like "fascist"). I definitely didn't want Obama going after whistleblowers, increasing domestic surveillance and not closing Guantanamo when I voted him in... and I liked his healthcare plan, until it died...

I suspect that everyone says this when the person they didn't want in charge, now is, and starts doing things that their biased media always depicts only the negative side of.

riffraff

There's some people organizing to preserve stuff under the "safeguarding research" moniker

https://fedihum.org/@SafeguardingResearch

https://safeguarding-research.discourse.group/

bmitc

That doesn't matter anymore. No one believed the CDC data to begin with. You think they're going to believe it when it comes from third-party backups?

Insanity

I think the benefit is not just from regular people having access - but other researchers who do need/trust the data.

cmxch

The problem is that the provenance of that data will be questioned. It’s one thing that researchers will trust and use that data, but that citing these archive sites will fall flat when their conclusions have to exit academia and be subject to extra scrutiny.

dang

Related ongoing thread:

Archivists work to save disappearing data.gov datasets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42881367 - Jan 2025 (56 comments)