No data, just vibes

0:00This is Unexplainable. I'm Meredith Hodinot. Lead used to be everywhere. It was in the air, pumped out of industrial smokestacks and cars burning leaded gasoline. It was in the water, lining municipal water pipes. Lead was in the ground soil. It was painted onto walls. It was glazed onto dinner plates. And so in 1976, the CDC surveyed thousands of Americans across the country to see just how much of that lead was in people's blood. And obviously that's like really labor intensive work. You've got to like go out in the field to a nationally representative sample, do this blood testing. Dylan Scott reports on health for Vox.

0:45And what this survey reported back was that, like, blood lead levels were much higher than people had assumed and had reached a really concerning threshold. This survey in the 70s was a wake-up call. It led to decades of bans, regulations, and emissions controls. We've gotten to a place where it's like, you know, there is still lead poisoning in the U.S., but we're in a completely different reality than we were 30, 40, 50 years ago. And that was made possible by the survey data. Data. Going out into the world and collecting information on what's actually happening. Through surveys and blood tests, but also monitors, sensors, experiments.

1:33Data is the bedrock of good science, so it can profoundly impact our everyday lives. But over the last year, Dylan, covering public health, and Umair Afan, covering science and the environment, they've seen the systems we rely on to collect good data get eroded away.

1:55Hello, Dylan. Hello, Umair. You guys report for Vox's health, science and climate team. And so we're coming up on a year into the second Trump administration, a year that is totally transformed scientific research in this country. And I wanted to dig in with you. Like when I think of the federal government, I don't necessarily think, oh, yeah, so crucial for gathering basic data, I guess, like beyond the census or something. But like, can you lay out how important the federal government is in this role? Yeah, I mean, I cover health care. And something to your point, Meredith, that I think I knew in the back of my mind, but did not fully appreciate until this past year, is that the federal government is like the biggest public health pollster that we have.

2:44Like the federal government, you know, is the only one that has the resources to go ask tens of thousands of Americans about all kinds of stuff, whether it's like, do you smoke? What do you eat? Are you obese? Do you have a substance abuse problem? Things like that to just keep our finger on the pulse of what's happening in this country and with people's health. Umair, where does the federal government play a role for climate science and data gathering? Well, the federal government has a lot of resources. There are almost no private institutions that can launch satellites at the scale that the U.S.

3:24federal government can do. There are almost no networks of sensors, of weather monitors, of weather balloons that can cope with what the U.S. federal government does. So without this, we have a much more murky picture of what's going on in the country. Umair, there's a lot of overlap between people's health and the environments that they live in. Tell me about the changes at the EPA and how that's making it harder to understand those connections. Well, the EPA's Office of Research and Development, like their mission was to provide a scientific basis for regulations. EPA, when it issues a rule, it has to draw on real world data.

4:04And so they actually conduct tests on animals, and they use sample data from the environment, and they collect a lot of information and study human physiology to see if they can unpack the mechanism behind which something like nonstick coatings on your frying pans affect your health or whether some of these additives to plastics can be endocrine disruptors. They measure that. They validate that with testing. And then they issue a regulation based on that. And over the past year, we've seen the Office of Research and Development, it was shuttered. And without this, the United States is now functioning without one of the most robust and best institutions that was doing this kind of work.

4:46Wow. Looking kind of wider to the big climate picture here, how has this year impacted what we know about how the climate is changing? Well, we've seen a pretty conspicuous effort across the government to diminish climate change as an issue of public concern. Project 2025, which was this guidebook put together by the Heritage Foundation for the incoming Trump administration, they pretty directly said that they wanted to eradicate climate change references from everywhere across government. Literally deleting the words climate change in some cases and in others, taking web pages offline or putting them behind several other layers and making them less publicly facing.

5:28One of the more recent proposals from the Trump administration was to shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research. And the reason why was cited by the White House Budget Director, Russ Vought, was that this institution, NCAR, was one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country. So this is a pretty deliberate effort to stop data collection, to stop scientific research around the climate because it conflicts with their ideology. Dylan, how have you seen this play out in health research? Yeah, so there's a couple of different ways. So first of all, there's just sort of what data is being collected.

6:07So, you know, with some of these surveys, it remains to be seen because some of these run on like an annual, biannual basis, or maybe only coming up here in 2026 on the first time that they'll be performed under this new Trump administration. But like one obvious area of concern is that the administration just won't collect data related to LGBTQ plus people. We're going to have a much fuzzier picture into what's happening with those folks and their health. But then in addition to that, we have seen layoffs at some of the teams that are responsible for collecting this information, like with the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which has been sort of our benchmark data point on things like opioid overdose deaths.

6:48And then you also have medical research grants. NIH, they provide funding to outside academics who are investigating all kinds of medical and scientific questions. So this is a really important function. And that's another area where we've seen cuts. We've seen sort of changes to how institutions and investigators are able to use the money that they receive from the NIH, which could also limit just ultimately their ability to perform their work. Honestly, this is the kind of thing where the impact is not going to be clear to us, I think, for a long time. Like with a survey, if that data gets collected or it doesn't, like we're going to find that out pretty fast.

7:29And yes, it creates some disruptions and obviously limits our ability to see into these problems. But like that's pretty clear cut, a very obvious result. But when we're talking about... Like we know what we don't know there. Exactly. But when we're talking about scaling back NIH funding and like the ability to both investigate some of these more niche problems, as well as importantly, like test interventions, I mean, new medications, trying to figure out how to actually treat and fix the health problems that we're identifying. Like, yeah, those are the things that, as you put it, Meredith, we won't know what we missed out on.

8:04And yet, like, it seems clear, given what we know about what leads to breakthrough medical treatments, that we're going to miss out on something as a result of these cuts. How will this lack of data, lack of knowledge, start showing up in everyday people's lives? That's a good question. I mean, it will be the kind of thing that is probably invisible to people a lot. It may not be obvious to people immediately, and they might even be tempted to think, like, so what's the big deal? Like, I'm not noticing anything different in my life. I mean, this is a prediction and those are always dangerous, but I imagine there are going to be like health problems, health trends that crop up that we're going to look back and think like we could have gotten on this sooner and we could have like, you know, started coming up with an intervention more quickly.

8:55And so I do wonder with this data collection stuff, like it may not show up for five to 10 years what the consequences really will be. And then it may take sort of another generation to really appreciate like, you know what, really robust data collection by the federal government is a really important thing for the government to do. Right. I mean, it sounds like the idea is that like our blind spots are getting bigger. And because those blind spots are getting bigger, we are more likely to get blindsided. Exactly. And have to deal with problems when they're much, much larger. Exactly. And to pick up on one of Dylan's points, I mean, I think one of the most immediate and pernicious effects of this is going to be trust, the lack of trust in government.

9:36If you don't trust your weather forecast, are you going to believe when they issue an evacuation warning for a hurricane in your community? And I think that can be pretty dangerous and have very far-reaching consequences.

9:51So the data is disappearing, but the real world is still out there. Can we get back on track? That's after the break.

10:03For the last 10 years, everything in American politics has basically revolved around one man. And as a political journalist who came of age during Donald Trump's rise in 2016, I've had a front row seat. I am officially running for president of the United States. It's going to be only America first. America first. Thousands of supporters of President Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol building. But is it possible to talk about politics without talking about Donald Trump? That's the question I'm going to ask in our new show from Vox. The idea of like a post-Trump or not exactly Trump-focused show can exist because he's not really driving any agenda items.

10:47It really does feel like so reactive. You know, I think this Iran thing is also going to cause a big split in the GOP. So far it doesn't among like people who say they're MAGA voters are still with Trump. But like for the first time, you see on a major issue open opposition from the start of this war. I'm Estet Herndon. And welcome to America Actually.

11:09Hi, I'm Brene Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop. A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling, and questioning. It's going to be fun. We rarely agree. But we almost never disagree. And we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday.

11:37What do you want for me? You want the numbers, Mason. Is there any chance of getting back on track? There are some groups that are working to try to salvage government data. There are archiving government websites and trying to take public data sets and download them and save them for other people to use. But again, there's in terms of the collection of the data itself, nothing really rivals the U.S. federal government. So while there are researchers and institutions that are privately trying to fill in the gaps, it's always going to be a stopgap measure compared to what the U.S. government as a whole can do.

12:15Yeah. Dylan, are we fated to a whole generation of scientific papers with an asterisk after 2026? Yeah. So I do think it's worth keeping in mind a couple of things. When a lot of the CDC data was getting scrapped, deleted in the early days of the Trump administration, there was a very concerted effort by outside research groups to basically download all the backlogs, everything that had been published online before, to at least kind of preserve the historical archive of the information that's been collected thus far. You know, going forward, it does seem inevitable that we'll be collecting less data and the reliability of that data might be more doubtful than it was in the past.

12:58An asterisk on every research paper that cites it might be appropriate. I do think something that remains to be seen is how much can sort of the nonprofit and academic sectors step up to try to fill this gap, you know, where it is like survey data, like you're just calling people up and asking questions. And so I don't think it's that like we're going to be completely closed off to understanding what's happening with people's health. There's going to be additional friction. It's just going to be harder. You know, it just adds additional obstacles to good public health. Absolutely. Dylan, you mentioned private sources that might be able to piece together that information.

13:38Umair, I'm curious, in climate, are there other sources we could pull together? And what would that look like? Sure. There are definitely private companies that are starting to get into this space as well. Private weather forecasting is actually an emerging industry. And in fact, that has actually been one of the other challenges here, because basically some of these private companies want to sell their forecasts as a product. And when the government is offering weather and climate data for free, that really undermines their product. And so there's actually been a push from some of these private companies to take some of these publicly available government weather data offline or have it passed through these private entities before it can be in a forecast.

14:21And that means that some of this publicly available information that we normally get for free could end up behind a paywall. Now, with climate change being a global issue, yes, there is global level monitoring of this issue. There's satellites launched by other countries that track CO2 from the air. But the United States has an important role here because it leads the way. Like the U.S. has been at the forefront of satellite monitoring of things like greenhouse gases. And the Trump administration has explicitly said that they want to shut down satellites that have CO2 monitoring capabilities and they want to take CO2 monitoring instruments out of the next generation of satellites.

14:58The whole world is going to be losing an important measurement tool. Some other countries and companies may try to step up there. But again, they'll be scrambling to catch up to a very robust system that the United States has made. Right. So how is this impacting your jobs as reporters? I mean, as Dylan was saying, it adds a lot of friction. I mean, there used to be like central places where I could reliably go to find basic facts. Oftentimes when I'm reporting a story, I just need to look up a specific number. One recent example was just that NOAA used to have this database of disasters in a given year whose damage tolls were greater than a billion dollars.

15:34They called this the billion-dollar disaster database. And it was just a good way for me to just kind of get a snapshot of just what were some of the costliest disasters in a given year. But they took that database offline. They said the last year of data collection was 2024. They did not collect any data for 2025. There's no reporting of that. So if I wanted to find out what was the most expensive disaster last year, I kind of have to do an archival search. I have to go through the news reports. I have to go to insurance companies and ask them, you know, where were the largest payouts over the past year?

16:04I'm not entirely sure how to answer that question. I thought initially it was the Los Angeles wildfires we saw. But now I have to double check. And I don't have this one easy reference anymore. And it's just going to add more time and energy that I would have to expend on reporting just to answer that basic question. And without that, we're, again, having to caveat and add lots of different qualifications to everything that we cite. And oftentimes we can't make as robust conclusions about what we're reporting on. What do you think we won't know in the future that we might have if we had this data?

16:41So something that just happened here is the federal government has told states that they can stop reporting childhood vaccination data for kids and mothers covered by Medicaid, which is a huge, that's more than 40 % of births are covered by Medicaid. So we're talking about like an enormous sample. And so one question, the obvious question that I have is like, what is the consequence of the federal government rolling back its vaccine recommendations? And the answer to that question is going to be harder to figure out because at the same time, the federal government is going to stop collecting data that could provide us with the answers.

17:22Could you tell me a little bit about the ideological resistance to numbers themselves? What seems to be the motivations behind the erosion of this data collection system? Meredith, so you just want us to unpack all of the problems with American society today? Oh, yeah, you know, casual, just, you know. Easy peasy. I mean, I think there's a couple of things that factor into this. One is obviously just the complete overhaul of the information ecosystem. And there are now sort of seemingly limitless sources of information. And it's not that hard to find information that aligns with what you would prefer to believe.

18:02And so if the official sources are not aligning with your priors, you can find somebody else. And that obviously then sows distrust in the official sources of information. And frankly, Meredith, I honestly don't know how that bell gets unrung. But yeah, I think we're in the middle of a really heady and long-term change and story. And it's hard to know exactly where it's going. But it has been a sort of surreal experience to watch how much people's relationships to, you know, experts, institutional authorities in general, the kind of data and science that we, I think, would all like to undergird good public policy.

18:50Like, that relationship has really frayed. And again, how it gets repaired, I'm not totally sure. I think one point worth making is that people often think of data as this completely objective, apolitical, bloodless thing, and it's not. There's a lot of political decisions and value judgments that go into data collection. Right. And this has been discussed long before the Trump administration. What's changed now with the Trump administration is that they've acknowledged an imperfect picture and their solution is to not look at the picture at all. Rather than refining, improving the resolution, filling in the blanks, they've decided that they're going to paint a completely alternative picture or just say that no picture is valid or that all pictures are equally valid.

19:36That's kind of the situation that we're in right now. And so it's that ideological framing of that context around this data collection that seems to be the most significant and the most potentially detrimental for our understanding of this. That if you reach a conclusion first and then look backwards for the numbers that will support you, very likely you'll find those numbers. But that's not how you do science. I mean, you have to look at the numbers first and then see the patterns that emerge. But there's a lot of motivated reasoning going on here. And that's why I think this current pattern of data lack of collection, this sort of pushback on the numbers and trying to erode how we measure the world is so important.

20:19and so troubling. Dylan, Umair, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. My pleasure.

20:37This episode was produced by me, Amy Padula. Editing from Meredith Hodnott and Sally Helm. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala and music from Noam Hassenfeld. Melissa Hirsch checked the facts. Julia Longoria and Jorge Just are our editorial directors. And Joanna Solitaroff has the cutest little dog named Mo. And Bird Pinkerton sprinted out of Platty's hole. Someone, anyone, Platty needs help. And also, on that note, does anyone have any idea who Eric Flapton is? And where can I find him?

21:19As always, thank you to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show with Noam and Bird, who scouted this episode for us. If you'd like to support the show and the journalism that Vox does, we would love it if you would become a member. It's really easy to do. Go to Vox.com slash members. You'll get access to all of Vox's journalism, but you would also know that you are supporting Vox journalism. And for those of you who have emailed us to let us know that you signed up because of Unexplainable, thank you. If you can't join our membership, though, that's totally okay. If you wanted to leave us a nice review on your podcast platform, five stars, or a written review, we would totally appreciate that, too.

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