A federal regulatory information website that allows the public to see what agencies collect and to comment went offline and has only been partially restored, with data missing after Aug. 1 according to dataindex.us. The site's landing page reported it was "currently undergoing revisions," and OMB and GSA did not respond to inquiries. Separate incidents included temporary takedowns or maintenance messages at data.cdc.gov and parts of the U.S. Census Bureau. An analysis of 232 modified federal public health data sets found nearly half substantially altered, often replacing "gender" with "sex." Observers say the cause of the outages and changes remains unclear.
A federal website that informs the public about what information agencies are collecting and allows for public comment went down last weekend, and it has only been partially restored. The outage has raised concerns among advocates who already were troubled by the disappearance of data sets from government websites after President Donald Trump began his second term. As of Thursday, the website's landing page said, it was "currently undergoing revisions."
In February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's official public portal for health data, data.cdc.gov, was taken down entirely but subsequently went back up. Around the same time, when a query was made to access certain public data from the U.S. Census Bureau's most comprehensive survey of American life, users for several days got a response that said the area was "unavailable due to maintenance" before access was restored.
Researchers Janet Freilich and Aaron Kesselheim examined 232 federal public health data sets that had been modified in the first quarter of this year and found that almost half had been "substantially altered," with the majority having the word "gender" switched to "sex," they wrote last month in The Lancet medical journal.
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