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A Decision About Data: Whom Can We Trust When Data Are Manipulated?
- Marcus J. Hopkins
- 5 minutes ago
- 5 min read
By: Marcus J. Hopkins
January 19th, 2026
On Wednesday, January 22nd, 2025—just two days after being inaugurated for a second term non-consecutive term—the Trump Regime ordered all federal health agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDS), to halt all external communications until a presidential appointee was able to review and approve them (Goodman & Tirrell, 2025).
Within less than a week, federal employees, researchers, and contractors were ordered to cancel all scheduled speaking engagements, to delay all updates to federal websites, and to run every report, study, and email by a Trump official.
That was when I knew that decisions had to be made.
After the November 2024 presidential election resulted in the reelection of Donald Trump, I began downloading and hoarding as much data from as many federal agencies as I could, including each of the agencies listed above, as well as from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS), and other agencies across multiple spaces.
I did this because I fundamentally feared that, once in office, Trump and the people handpicked from the Heritage Foundation would make good on the promises laid out in Project 2025; that they would begin throttling, manipulating, and otherwise compromising data; that this was the last chance to access data that had not gone through political manipulation.
And then, January 22nd, 2025, rolled around, and my fears were realized.
Since January of last year, the Trump Regime has repeatedly and unabashedly gone out of its way to not place its thumb on the scale, but obliterate the scale altogether.
Websites were abruptly taken offline; government data sources that had stood for decades vanished overnight; scientists were told what they could and could not research; funding was halted for vital projects, including cancer research, infectious disease surveillance and prevention, and medical device development (Huang & Stone, 2025).
The Trump Regime has demonstrated that no sector is safe:
When faced with a negative jobs report, Trump fired the Commissioner of the BLS and attempted to install the Heritage Foundation's E.J. Antoni—a conservative "economist" in whose office was literally a pentaptych of the Bismarck, a Nazi warship.
Trump posted on Truth Social—the platform Trump started after being barred from posting on several prominent platforms after his failed attempt to have his supporters overthrow the U.S. government on January 6th, 2021— that Antoni would "...ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE" (Ahmadi, 2025), once again asserting his belief that any information or data that run counter to his Regime's narrative are part of a broad conspiracy against him; that the numbers are "rigged."
After receiving sharp criticism from across the political spectrum, Antoni withdrew his nomination in October 2025 (Horsley, 2025).
This pattern was nothing new for the new Trump Regime. Every department across every agency has faced severe budget and staffing cuts, with the Regime installing plants throughout the federal government. Data sets began disappearing without notice; numbers that were thoroughly examined, double-checked, and verified began changing as Regime plants began manipulating data (Miller, 2025).
Part of why I began frantically pulling data from these federal sources was that I am, at heart, a realist.
I expected these actions.
Meanwhile, other organizations, including almost every national advocacy and public health organization, were caught flatfooted.
As one colleague put it, "We had planned for a 'Worst-Case Scenario;' this is worse than that."
As a result, organizations across every sector have had to decide whether or not the federal data sources upon which they've relied for decades are still reliable.
The overwhelming consensus has been that they are not.
What Does This Mean for APPLI?
The new reality of the Trump Regime has forced the Appalachian Learning Initiative to make a tough decision:
How do we continue to report accurate data related to educational outcomes, social determinants, public health, and social assistance utilization if the sources of those data are no longer reliable?
The decision we arrived to is that we will no longer be relying upon any data issued by the federal government until such time as the Trump Regime is deposed.
As of January 2026, APPLI will continue to rely upon the last reliable data releases.
Does this mean that the data are incorrect?
Well...no.
And, yes.
Data are windows into a specific period of time—a snapshot that shows what the conditions were.
Many refer to this as a "data lag"—the period of time between when the data were collected and when they are published. In many cases, these data lags are 2-year lags. So, when the data say, "The incidence rate of new HIV diagnoses across the Appalachian Region is 5.2 (per 100,000)," this means that this was the rate of new HIV diagnoses in 2022—the last year for which data have been checked, cleaned, verified, and peer reviewed.
When we conduct research, we often rely on studies that were conducted years, and sometimes decades, ago. Why?
Because circumstances on the ground rarely see huge statistical shifts unless there is a catestrophic event, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Which brings us to another issue:
The pandemic fundamentally disrupted public health data in a number of ways:
Quarantine protocols resulted in fewer U.S. residents accessing screening, testing, diagnostic, and other healthcare services;
The severity of the pandemic force states to reallocate resources from across multiple departments to focus solely on COVID-19-related work.
This resulted in data from 2020 and 2021 being considered unreliable, and federal sources began advising researchers to look upon them with extreme caution.
At the time, I went on record stating that data collection and reporting would take roughly 5 to 10 years to recover.
And then...the "Worst-Case Scenario" occurred.
If I'm being honest...I have little confidence that these agencies will recover in any timely manner. The damage that has been and continues to be done to our federal agencies, its scientists, and its experts will take a generation or longer to repair...if they ever do.
In the meantime, APPLI will begin relying upon other sources for its data, including Economic Policy Institute's "Data Accountability Dashboard," a website that gathers and reports data from "next-best" data sources in order to help provide at least some source of information.
Is this the best solution?
No. Is it the best solution available?
Unfortuantely, yes.
How You Can Help Support Our Data Collection Efforts?
Because this new process requires us to find "next-best" sources for data across every determinant and indicator, this significantly increases the workload of APPLI's research team.
This means longer hours, more headaches, and an endless supply of hoops and hurdles. And all of this on a volunteer's salary (i.e., "zero dollars").
This makes even small-dollar individual donations vitally important.
Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to help support our efforts, and please share our content with your networks.