Article by Debora Price: “In an age of contested facts, polarised public discourse and eroded trust in institutions, the preservation of data and its independent governance are not technical details. They are foundational to democracy, social understanding, and the pursuit of knowledge. They form the basis of sound decision-making across policy, economics, industry and society….
In recent months, developments in the United States have sent a chill through the global data community: cuts, political interference, and a climate of uncertainty around national statistical services. While many have heard about the sudden withdrawal of billions of dollars of federal funding for science, and attacks on the National Science Foundation, there has been far less public visibility of the parallel loss of globally important data from archives.
In Spring 2025, the BBC headlined: “Inside the desperate rush to save decades of US scientific data from deletion” and the Financial Times “The White House War on Federal Statistics”. This was the subject of Anna Britten’s editorial in the May edition of Significance, official magazine of the Royal Statistical Society in the UK. She raises the alarm about the unexplained removal of datasets from Data.gov, stating that “it remains unclear at the time of writing whether they have been permanently deleted”. She cites staffing losses and terminations at key statistical agencies, and the disbanding of critical scientific advisory committees…
It is easy to take data archives for granted, especially when they are working well. In the UK, amongst other well supported Data Services, the UK Data Archive and UK Data Service have for nearly six decades quietly and expertly ensured that population, social and economic data of national importance — from the Census to the British Social Attitudes Survey, the Labour Force Survey to the Family Resources Survey, Understanding Society, the renowned Cohort Studies, and countless others — are actively preserved, curated, and made available for re-use. These are not merely data files. They are collective memory, social history, and the evidence base upon which we build policy and research…(More)”.
