On April 28, air traffic controllers responsible for as many as 20 flights into and out of Newark Liberty International Airport—some flying at hundreds of miles per hour—lost access to the radar and communications systems, maintained by the Federal Aviation Administration, that help ensure safe passage. “We don’t have a radar,” one controller told a pilot approaching Newark on audio recorded during the blackout, which lasted as long as 90 seconds, “so I don’t know where you are.” After the incident, several controllers took medical leave, citing trauma from the incident. The absences compounded long-running staffing shortages in air traffic control. Since last Monday, hundreds of flights scheduled to depart from and land at the airport have been delayed or canceled.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has vowed to hire more air traffic controllers and revamp the aging technology they rely on. Nonetheless, in February, hundreds of FAA workers were fired as part of the White House’s indiscriminate axing of probationary employees, i.e., those either recently hired or even promoted to new positions, and more than 1,300 FAA employees reportedly replied to an early retirement offer from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Last week’s Newark episode is among the more dramatic examples of how the Trump administration’s war on the administrative state—often already struggling to maintain basic government functions—threatens to undermine the essential, unglamorous work that keeps the country running.
While air traffic controller shortages have understandably been at the center of the story about Trump 2.0–era airline chaos, FAA cuts are gutting more behind-the-scenes positions too. Back in March, The Atlantic’s Isaac Stanley-Becker reported that as many as 12 percent of the FAA’s aeronautical-information specialists—those tasked with updating charts, maps, and flight procedures—had been fired or were exiting the agency as part of the government-wide buyout program spearheaded by DOGE. These kinds of cuts to critical information-gathering services are happening across agencies, eroding the government’s ability to collect and interpret data on everything from maternal mortality to flight paths, hurricanes, and electricity. The results could prove far more devastating than a few hundred canceled and delayed flights.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, for instance, faces drastic budget reductions as the White House asks states and local governments to shoulder more of the costs and responsibility for disaster response and preparedness; Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have gone so far as to suggest scrapping FEMA outright. FEMA and the country’s broader disaster response and preparedness systems—already concentrated at the state and local level—rely heavily on information gathered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Weather Service to issue warnings and evacuation orders, and ensure that adequate resources are in place before disaster strikes.
FEMA itself declined to test soil for hazardous substances in areas of Los Angeles County that were decimated by wildfires earlier this year. Such data collection has been standard practice after wildfires in California, because fire-devastated properties can contain dangerous concentrations of toxic chemicals that might threaten residents and local water supplies.
Meanwhile, hundreds of NOAA employees have been let go as part of DOGE’s mass firing of probationary employees across agencies. The administration has outlined plans to slash the agency’s budget by 27 percent, imposing steep cuts to and even eliminating vital programs for ocean research, coastal management, and satellite networks. The office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research faces a 74 percent cut, per a leaked memo from the Office of Management and Budget. “If we don’t understand what’s happening and why it’s happening, you can’t be adapting, you can’t be resilient. You’re just going to suffer,” Don Wuebbles, an atmospheric scientist who sits on NOAA’s scientific advisory board, told ProPublica’s Abrahm Lustgarten. “We’re going to see huge impacts on infrastructure and lives lost in the U.S.”
As I reported in March, NOAA’s already sparsely staffed, generally little-known research arms are tasked with collecting data that helps prevent everything from ships crashing into one another to algal blooms poisoning local water supplies. These functions are crucial not just to public safety but to the private sector, as well; commercial fisherman and shipping vessels, for instance, rely on NOAA data in order to know which fish populations are safe to fish and how to avoid dangerous ice floes. The Coast Guard similarly uses real-time data collected from NOAA-maintained buoys in search-and-rescue operations.
Potentially at risk too are the reams of data collected by federal economists and statisticians that are necessary for financial and energy markets. In March, the Trump administration dismissed expert advisers to the Labor Department’s statistical bureau and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. Experts have raised alarm bells in recent weeks about White House attempts to make it easier to fire federal officials. If economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics could be fired at will, without the usual lengthy appeals process, they could be pressured by political appointees into manipulating BLS data on politically sensitive subjects like inflation, unemployment, productivity, and growth. Even without such meddling, sweeping personnel cuts might limit the BLS’s already strained ability to perform the labor-intensive nationwide surveys of companies and job-seekers that comprise their monthly reports on jobs and prices, which are hotly watched by investors and policymakers.
The list of cuts to data-gathering bodies goes on—and on. The formerly 350-person U.S. Energy Information Administration collects troves of information that’s closely monitored by the energy industry, including weekly reports on oil and natural gas production, electricity prices, and fuel exports. That independent agency, housed within the Department of Energy, has reportedly lost 100 staffers as a result of government layoffs, resignations, and buyouts. Under fear of retaliation from the administration, ProPublica reported that EIA staffers canceled standard-order promotion of its Annual Energy Outlook and withheld the report’s 50-plus-page narrative portion, which discusses a projected rapid growth in alternative energy and diminishing U.S. reliance on coal, oil, and gas. A draft of that deleted section, obtained and reviewed by ProPublica, noted a reference case showing that increased electricity demand would be met through 2050 “mainly by generation from renewable sources” and that there would be “declines” in domestic oil and gas consumption.
To be sure, some of the information gathering now under attack from the White House could be replicated elsewhere. Last week, the administration dismissed all 400 authors of the upcoming National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report used by federal agencies, states, local governments, and private companies to understand climate risk and prepare for the impact of future storms, floods, and wildfires. The American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society then pledged to pick up that work, collecting peer-reviewed research assessing the current and future climate impacts in the U.S.
There’s no easy substitute, though, for the vast array of research in the Trump administration’s crosshairs. As the White House undermines the government’s ability to understand the world, it’ll get harder and harder to tell just how much damage its attacks on federal data collection are causing.
