A dark, dystopian government data center filled with towering servers and flickering computer screens. Dust-covered books and old research papers sit abandoned, while glowing terminals display files. A lone researcher, illuminated by the cold blue light of a monitor, desperately tries to recover lost data from a corrupted drive. The atmosphere is eerie, with dim overhead lights and an air of secrecy, symbolizing the slow decay of knowledge in a forgotten digital vault.

The Purge

The Trump administration has started one of the most significant assaults on human knowledge in centuries. Well-collected, curated and communicated data are facts—an evidence base. When facts contradict a political narrative, they are dangerous. The US government has realised the danger and begun The Purge. The government will now establish new “facts” to replace old facts. Purge-and-replace is part of the process of state capture. Evidence represents dissent, and the government must crush dissent. Reality is altered.

Until a week ago, successive US governments had invested in a data, evidence-based policy enterprise with generous global access. It was a resource for the world that supported research and evidence-based decision-making. And, unless the information was classified or subject to privacy laws (e.g., HIPAA for health data), anyone could look at everything from labor and criminal justice statistics to environmental and health data.

Going, going … !

Starting late last week, government websites began to disappear; among them, the USAID website vanished without a trace. All the development evidence USAID published has disappeared. If you try to reach the website today (2 Feb, 2025), you will get a message from your internet provider informing you the site does not exist. Perhaps you have the wrong address…or maybe it was never really there. (Queue spooky music.)

Individual pages on government websites are also disappearing. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) webpage, for example, providing evidence-based contraceptive guidelines has vanished. A week ago, the guidelines helped people exercise their reproductive choice using the best available evidence. But facts are dangerous. The idea of personal autonomy in reproduction runs counter to the authoritarian narrative of the current US administration. CDC is being scrubbed clean.

Data are also disappearing. The Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) is a longitudinal survey of adolescent health risks coordinated by the CDC. If I search the CDC website for “YRBSS”, I get links. If I follow the links: “The page you’re looking for was not found”. This loss of data is a tragedy. A quick look at PubMed reveals the kind of research that has used YRBSS data: everything from adolescent mental health to smoking. Without those data, no one today could do the same kind of research that was done before. Trends in adolescent health are lost and we will not know about any emerging health risk factors. It is hard to know precisely why the YRBSS has disappeared. However, in keeping with the religiously conservative nature of the current US government, maybe it is adolescent sex that is too dangerous for people to know about.

The US government is not content with just removing facts. They also want CDC scientists to rewrite their research to adopt a single, approved, authoritarian view of the world. Their research must conform to the Trump government’s ideology. An approach which is oddly reminiscent of Stalin’s insistence that Soviet researchers adopt the dead-end genetic science of Trofim Lysenko.

The CDC has instructed its scientists to retract or pause the publication of any research manuscript being considered by any medical or scientific journal, not merely its own internal periodicals…. The move aims to ensure that no “forbidden terms” appear in the work. The policy includes manuscripts that are in the revision stages at a journal (but not officially accepted) and those already accepted for publication but not yet live.

It hasn’t happened yet, but I have to wonder what will happen when the US Government targets PubMed and PubMed Central—exceptional scientific resources provided free of charge to the world by the National Library of Medicine (NLM)? NLM could be directed to purge from the database all abstracted data on every journal article that contains ideas that do not support the government’s worldview: gender, transgender, climate change, vaccines, air pollution (from fossil fuels)…. Commercial providers could still abstract those articles, but the damage would be enormous.

The vaccine denier, Robert F. Kennedy, junior, is currently being confirmed as Secretary of Health. He believes the widely debunked, fraudulent claim that vaccines cause autism. What happens when he decides that the National Library of Medicine should selectively purge evidence debunking the vaccine-autism link? Will that mean vaccines cause autism in the US (a “US-fact”) but not in the rest of the world (a “fact-fact”)? Researchers in universities and institutions that can afford subscription services can avoid such excesses, but that will not be the case for many Global South researchers who rely on PubMed for their research, nor will it be the case for the general public, who also have free access to PubMed.

I have focused on health because it is the domain I know the best. There is, however, almost no factual resource of the US government that will be safe from the purge. Facts that endanger a Trump administration political narrative must not be allowed to exist.

The US government is a climate-denying administration that has again pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord. It has already targeted climate change research. Justice, labour, and population statistics that do not conform to the US government’s socially conservative, racist and xenophobic views about the world will also be in danger. Trade data that don’t support Trump’s political narrative of a “golden age” will need to be adjusted.

One of the great tragedies is that, now that the US government has shown itself to be institutionally disinterested in (or actively opposed to) facts, it has endangered the value of its entire evidence-based policy enterprise. If you visit a US government website in a year, will you trust the content? You shouldn’t. Instead, you should ask yourself what political interest influenced the information. Researchers, policymakers, journalists—everyone— will need to parse US government websites like they parse information from any other authoritarian regime. Sadly, research coming out of US universities will also require extra scrutiny. Where we trusted the voices before, now we would need to ask, has US government policy biased it, what is the nature of the bias, and can we manage the bias?

Sometimes, it will be easier to ignore US research altogether because verification carries a cost.

There are small glimmers of hope. Archive.org (the Wayback Machine) has historical snapshots of US government websites, including some data snapshots, such as the YRBSS. These snapshot are BTP (befor the purge). Unfortunately, the archive is not as easy to navigate as the World Wide Web nor as easy to navigate as dedicated government websites. The value of the archived information also relies on the snapshot being taken at the right time to capture the latest BTP information. The CDC contraceptive-use guidelines purged a few days ago, are available on archive.org from a snapshot taken on 25 December, 2024. Assuming the CDC made no BTP updates since the last snapshot, the information is up to date…for now. Of course contraceptive guidelines evolve with new data and new technology and they will be out of date in the coming years.

If we are to survive the worst damage of The Purge, other government and non-government institutions worldwide will have to step into the breach. Historical data may need to be reconstructed and curated from sources such as archive.org. The Pubmed and Pubmed Central databases should be copied before the US government corrupts them. Where US data are still available, copy them. Outside the US, we will need to put in place prospective mechanisms to collect valuable global data that we can no longer trust from US sources.

…going…

We cannot assume that the facts from US government sources will remain uncorrupted tomorrow because they are uncorrupted today. The preservation of the truth will require resources and investment.

… GONE!

Welcome to The Purge