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New York Times
21-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Government Science Data May Soon Be Hidden. They're Racing to Copy It.
Amid the torrent of executive orders signed by President Trump were directives that affect the language on government web pages and the public's access to government data touching on climate change, the environment, energy and public health. In the past two months, hundreds of terabytes of digital resources analyzing data have been taken off government websites, and more are feared to be at risk of deletion. While in many cases the underlying data still exists, the tools that make it possible for the public and researchers to use that data have been removed. But now, hundreds of volunteers are working to collect and download as much government data as possible and to recreate the digital tools that allow the public to access that information. So far, volunteers working on a project called Public Environmental Data Partners have retrieved more than 100 data sets that were removed from government sites, and they have a growing list of 300 more they hope to preserve. It echoes efforts that began in 2017, during Mr. Trump's first term, when volunteers downloaded as much climate, environmental, energy and public health data as possible because they feared its fate under a president who has called climate change a hoax. Little federal information disappeared then. But this time is different. And so, too, is the response. 'We should not be in this position where the Trump administration can literally take down every government website if it wants to,' said Gretchen Gehrke, an environmental scientist who helped found the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative in 2017 to conserve federal data. 'We're not prepared for having resilient public information in the digital age and we need to be.' While a lot of data generated by agencies, like climate measurements collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is required by Congress, the digital tools that allow the public to view that data are not. 'This is a campaign to remove public access,' said Jessie Mahr, the director of technology at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center, a member group of the data partnership. 'And at the end of the day, American taxpayers paid for these tools.' Farmers have sued the United States Department of Agriculture for deleting climate data tools they hope will reappear. In February, a successful lawsuit led to the re-publication of the Centers for Disease Control's Social Vulnerability Index. A banner at the top of the C.D.C. webpage now notes that the Department of Health and Human Services was required to restore the site by court order. The Public Environmental Data Partners coalition has received frequent requests for two data tools: the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, or CEJST, and the Environmental Justice Screening Tool, or EJScreen. The first was developed under a Biden administration initiative to make sure that 40 percent of federal climate and infrastructure investments to go to disadvantaged communities. It was taken offline in January. EJScreen, developed under the Obama administration and once available through the E.P.A, was removed in early February. 'The very first thing across the executive branch was to remove references to equity and environmental justice and to remove equity tools from all agencies,' Dr. Gehrke said. 'It really impairs the public's ability to demonstrate structural racism and its disproportionate impacts on communities of color.' Just a dozen years ago, the E.P.A. defined environmental justice as 'the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income.' The E.P.A.'s new administrator, Lee Zeldin, recently equated environmental justice to 'forced discrimination.' Nonprofit organizations used both screening tools to apply for federal grants related to environmental justice and climate change. But the E.P.A. closed all of its environmental justice offices last week, ending three decades of work to mitigate the effects on poor and minority communities often disproportionately burdened by industrial pollution. It also canceled hundreds of grants already promised to nonprofit groups trying to improve conditions in those communities. 'You can't possibly solve a problem until you can articulate it, so it was an important source of data for articulating the problem,' said Harriet Festing, executive director of the nonprofit group Anthropocene Alliance. Christina Gosnell, co-founder and president of Catalyst Cooperative, a member of the environmental data cooperative, said her main concern was not that the data won't be archived before it disappears, but that it won't be updated. Preserving the current data sets is the first step, but they could become irrelevant if data collection stops, she said. More than 100 tribal nations, cities, and nonprofits used CEJST to show where and why their communities needed trees, which can reduce urban heat, and then applied for funds from the Arbor Day Foundation, a nonprofit organization that received a $75 million grant from the Inflation Reduction Action. The Arbor Day Foundation was on track to plant over a quarter of a million new trees before its grant was terminated in February. How hard it is to reproduce complex tools depends on how the data was created and maintained. CEJST was 'open source,' meaning the raw data and information that backed it up were already publicly accessible for coders and researchers. It was put back together by three people within 24 hours, according to Ms. Mahr. But EJScreen was not an open source tool, and recreating it was more complicated. 'We put a lot of pressure on the last weeks of the Biden administration to make EJScreen open source, so they released as much code and documentation as they could,' Dr. Gehrke said. It took at least seven people more than three weeks to make a version of EJScreen that was close to its original functionality, and Ms. Mahr said they're still tinkering with it. It's akin to recreating a recipe with an ingredient list but no assembly instructions. Software engineers have to try and remember how the 'dish' tasted last time, and then use trial and error to reassemble it from memory. Now, the coalition is working to conserve even more complicated data sets, like climate data from NOAA, which hosts many petabytes — think a thousand terabytes, or more than a million gigabytes — of weather observations and climate models in its archives. 'People may not understand just how much data that is,' Dr. Gehrke said in an email. It could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per month just in storage fees, she said, without including the cost of any sort of access. She said they were talking to NOAA personnel to prioritize the most vulnerable and highest impact data to preserve as soon as possible. So far, the data they've collected is largely stored in the cloud and backed up using servers around the globe; they've worked out pro bono agreements to avoid having to pay to back it up. Some data have, so far, been left alone, like statistics from the Energy Information Administration, among other agencies. Zane Selvans, a fellow co-founder of Catalyst Cooperative said the group had worked for the past eight years to aggregate U.S. energy system data and research in the form of open source tools. The goal is to increase access to federal data that is technically available but not necessarily easy to use. 'So far we've been lucky,' Mr. Selvans said. 'Folks working on environmental justice haven't been as lucky.'
Yahoo
11-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
From TB to HIV/AIDS to cancer, disease tracking has always had a political dimension, but it's the foundation of public health
Federal datasets began disappearing from public view on Jan. 31, 2025, in response to executive orders from President Donald Trump. Among those were the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which asks respondents about their gender identity and sexual orientation and tracks behaviors like smoking and drug use; CDC's HIV dataset; and CDC and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease registry's Environmental Justice Index, which tracks pollution in communities, and Social Vulnerability Index, which identifies communities at high risk for disease and disability. The collection of public health surveillance data has never been politically neutral. It has always reflected ideas about individual rights. With our colleagues James Colgrove and Daniel Wolfe, we have written about the history and ethics of surveillance. Despite controversy, it remains public health's foundational tool. Surveillance typically involves tracking individuals with diseases by name for the purpose of direct action, including isolation, quarantine and treatment. It allows health officials to identify environmental threats and evaluate treatments. It allows governments to direct prevention and treatment resources where they are needed most, be that to a region or a group at highest risk. By the early 20th century, public health officials argued that without surveillance, they worked 'in the darkness of ignorance' and 'might as well hunt birds by shooting into every green bush.' Three major controversies in the history of public health underscore what is at stake with the collection and maintenance of this information. The collection of tuberculosis data provided the basic blueprint for public health surveillance. Debates over tuberculosis reporting began in the late 19th century, when the bacterial infection was reframed not as a disease of the elite but of the urban poor. New York City was the first in the country to require that physicians report the names of TB patients in an effort to address the leading cause of death in both the city and the U.S. The medical community bitterly resisted tuberculosis surveillance. A prominent New York City surgeon argued that surveillance represented a 'dictatorial … encroachment' of the health department that threatened to rob physicians of their patients. But most people were not under the care of a private physician, and tuberculosis surveillance was a way to ensure that the largely immigrant poor living in the tenement districts got referrals to clinics, nourishment and, if necessary, isolation. Despite physicians' attempts to kill these efforts, there was no public outcry about tracking 'the great white plague' despite extensive, sensational coverage of the controversy in the popular press. Debates around TB surveillance unfolded during a period in which both public health and medicine were highly paternalistic and authoritarian: Health department physicians or private physicians made medical decisions, not patients. That changed with the AIDS epidemic, the first major infectious disease threat in more than a generation. AIDS arrived as American politics took a sharp conservative turn with the election of President Ronald Reagan. When in 1985 it became possible to test for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, the prospect of named surveillance triggered deep fears about stigma and discrimination. The prospect of reporting the names of those with HIV prompted one gay activist to declare, 'First comes the national registry, then come the boxcars, then come the camps for people with AIDS.' Gay rights advocates, who prioritized privacy, rejected HIV surveillance as a threat. An alliance of gay rights leaders and civil liberties advocates was initially able to prevent health departments from undertaking named HIV surveillance. But by the end of the 1980s, there was growing pressure to return HIV/AIDS to 'the medical mainstream,' meaning that it could be managed therapeutically like other chronic conditions. As effective treatment became available in the 1990s, opposition faded, and all 50 states required named reporting. If TB and HIV/AIDS reporting began as histories of resistance, the story was very different when it came to cancer reporting, which lagged far behind infectious disease surveillance. In the wake of the environmental and women's movements, citizen activists, mothers of children with birth defects and women with breast cancer became alarmed about the threat of cancer linked to pesticides or industrial pollutants. Women with cancer asserted a 'right to be counted.' Although the National Cancer Act of 1971 directed the National Cancer Institute to 'collect, analyze, and disseminate all data useful in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer,' by the 1980s, 10 states still had no registry. Vermont's Bernie Sanders, then an independent member of the U.S. House of Representatives, called for a federally funded program to collect data on cancer in every state. Speaking in support of his bill in 1992, Sanders repeatedly invoked communities' right to know: 'We need to know the age of people who are coming down with cancer. We need to know where they live. We need to know the kind of work they do. We need their racial and ethnic backgrounds.' President George H.W. Bush signed the Cancer Registries Amendment Act, which mandated cancer surveillance, into law in 1992. But it was not until 2000 that all states established cancer registries. In the broader history of surveillance, two key lessons have emerged. First, despite some pitched battles, communities have more often viewed surveillance as serving their interests. Second, the system of public health surveillance in the U.S. remains an underfunded patchwork. The Pew Environmental Health Commission called birth defects surveillance 'woefully inadequate.' In 1972, the U.S. House Committee on Government Operations described occupational disease surveillance as '70 years behind infectious disease surveillance and counting.' In 2010, we ourselves observed that it was now 'a century behind and counting.' The scope of the changes that the Trump administration has planned for federal data systems and datasets is unclear. Per a federal court order, key public health surveillance systems and datasets are back online. But the landing pages for both the Social Vulnerability Index and the Youth Risk Behavior Survey display a caveat based in politics rather than science that 'any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female.' Systems can be compromised if datasets are scrubbed of key variables that enable public health action with populations at highest risk, are halted, or are removed from the public eye. Communities cannot act on what they cannot count. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Amy Lauren Fairchild, Syracuse University and Ronald Bayer, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health Read more: COVID-19 is the latest epidemic to show biomedical breakthroughs aren't enough to eliminate a disease Public health surveillance, from social media to sewage, spots disease outbreaks early to stop them fast How to find climate data and science the Trump administration doesn't want you to see Amy Lauren Fairchild has received funding from NIH and the RWJ Foundation. She currently receives funding from the Commonwealth Fund, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. Ronald Bayer has received funding from the RWJ Foundation and NIH.
Washington Post
11-03-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
How Trump is reshaping reality by hiding data
Warning: This graphic requires JavaScript. for the best experience. Curating reality is an old political game, but Trump's sweeping statistical purges are part of a broader attempt to reinvent 'truth.' The Trump administration is deleting taxpayer-funded data — information that Americans use to make sense of the world. In its absence, the president can paint the world as he pleases. We don't know the full universe of statistics that has gone missing, but the U.S. DOGE Service's wrecking ball has already left behind a wasteland of 404 pages. All sorts of useful information has disappeared, including data on: tktk Climate, Before Jan. 30 Today EPA | Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool sexual orientation and gender, Census | Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Data natural hazards, FEMA | National Risk Index for Natural Hazards crime DOJ | National Law Enforcement Accountability Database and health. ATSDR | Social Vulnerability Index (Data was restored by court order on Feb. 12) Before Jan. 30 Climate, EPA | Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool Today sexual orientation and gender, Census | Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Data natural hazards, FEMA | National Risk Index for Natural Hazards crime DOJ | National Law Enforcement Accountability Database and health. ATSDR | Social Vulnerability Index (Data was restored by court order on Feb. 12) Today Climate, EPA | Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool Before Jan. 30 sexual orientation and gender, Census | Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity data natural hazards, FEMA | National Risk Index for Natural Hazards crime DOJ | National Law Enforcement Accountability Database and health. ATSDR | Social Vulnerability Index (Data was restored by court order on Feb. 12) Some of this censorship has been challenged (and at least temporarily reversed) through litigation. Even so, DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, has continued its digital book-burning and is now blocking new data collection. For example, in recent weeks, DOGE has canceled contracts for scheduled data gathering at the Social Security Administration and Education Department, among other agencies. Contrary to claims that these contract cancellations save money, in many cases the data have already been collected — but will never see the light of day, even if a new administration changes course. That's because many contracts contain data deletion clauses. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement Look ma, no data! Curating reality is an age-old political game. Politicians spin facts, cherry-pick and create 'truth' through repetition. Statistical sleight of hand has long been part of that tool kit, as has burying inconvenient numbers. (In 1994, for instance, U.S. lawmakers blocked federal data collection on 'green' gross domestic product.) But Trump's statistical purges have been faster and more sweeping — picking off not just select factoids but entire troves of public information. 'Statistics provide a mirror to society,' said Andreas Georgiou, a Greek statistician who was criminally prosecuted in his home country after crunching accurate budget statistics during Greece's debt crisis. 'Sometimes these are uncomfortable peeks into reality.' For Trump, the current reality can definitely be uncomfortable. After all, government data include lots of evidence that could frustrate his ambitions. So, he developed a smoke-and-mirrors act: tktkt Inconvenient truths threaten Trump's plans. For example, evidence of climate change has proved troublesome for Trump and his allies. So, he disappears the relevant data ... In February, government websites were ordered to remove statistics related to climate change. ... and uses other tactics to obscure reality. Trump's energy secretary claimed 'there's pluses to global warming' on Feb. 19. This makes it easier for him to do what he wants. Now, no downsides to Trump's 'drill, baby, drill' agenda. Inconvenient truths threaten Trump's plans. For example, evidence of climate change has proved troublesome for Trump and his allies. So, he disappears the relevant data ... In February, government websites were ordered to remove statistics related to climate change. ... and uses other tactics to obscure reality. Trump's energy secretary claimed 'there's pluses to global warming' on Feb. 19. This makes it easier for him to do what he wants. Now, no downsides to Trump's 'drill, baby, drill' agenda. Inconvenient truths threaten Trump's plans. For example, evidence of climate change has proved troublesome for Trump and his allies. So, he disappears the relevant data ... In February, government websites were ordered to remove statistics related to climate change. ... and uses other tactics to obscure reality. Trump's energy secretary claimed 'there's pluses to global warming' on Feb. 19. This makes it easier for him to do what he wants. Now, no downsides to Trump's 'drill, baby, drill' agenda. He has repeated this trick again and again with other frustrating realities. Government data show new forms of bird flu transmission, which undercut his 'Make America Healthy Again' agenda and promise to reduce egg prices. Federal statistics reflect heightened incidents of violence against trans people, whose very existence Trump has denied via an executive order. Databases show that sometimes law enforcement officers abuse their power, misconduct Trump would prefer to cover up. Plus, findings on which educational programs most effectively help special-needs children undercut Trump's plans to cut education funding. Each of these examples has now been blocked or removed from government websites. It's the successful execution of an impulse Trump articulated back in June 2020, when the covid-19 pandemic was raging: 'If we stop testing right now,' he said, 'we'd have very few cases, if any.' Obstructing access to such facts makes it more challenging for experts and regular voters alike to assess how politicians are serving the public. Three cases of legerdemath and other tricks up Trump's sleeve Deleting data isn't the only way to manipulate official statistics. Trump and his allies have also misrepresented or altered data. Here are a few examples: 1. Incorrect data This is a screen capture of the Department of Government Efficiency savings website. Witness DOGE's bogus statistics on its supposed government savings. The administration counts as 'savings' some canceled contracts that had already been paid in full. Some canceled expenses were created out of whole cloth, such as $50 million supposedly spent on sending condoms to Gaza. 2. Misrepresented data This is a photo of Donald Trump standing in front of a large chart titled "Illegal Immigration into the U.S." (Julia Nikhinson/AP) (Julia Nikhinson/AP) (Julia Nikhinson/AP) One of Trump's favorite charts on immigration is riddled with errors. For one, it does not show the number of immigrants entering the United States illegally, as he claims, but the number of people stopped at the U.S. border. Similarly, when Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was recently asked about how much DOGE funding cuts might reduce economic growth, he suggested that the agency might decide to change how economic growth is calculated so that the usual GDP report strips out government spending altogether. This would be an abrupt change to the standard GDP methodology that has been used around the world for nearly a century, but it would certainly make the DOGE cuts look less painful. 3. Altered data In this photo, Trump holds up a forecast map of hurricane Dorian. He has drawn on it with a sharpie, extended the projected path of the hurricane into Alabama. (Evan Vucci/AP) (Evan Vucci/AP) (Evan Vucci/AP) When data doesn't tell the story Trump wants, he fabricates it. In what became known as 'Sharpiegate,' Trump notoriously altered a map of Hurricane Dorian's path in 2019. A screen capture showing NIH funding data before and after Jan. 30. On the Jan. 31 screen capture, there is no category called "Workforce Diversity and Outreach". NIH Report funding data, Jan. 30 The Workforce Diversity and Outreach budget item disappeared from the data on Jan. 31. NIH Report funding data, Jan. 31 NIH Report funding data, Jan. 30 The Workforce Diversity and Outreach budget item disappeared from the data on Jan. 31. NIH Report funding data, Jan. 31 NIH Report funding data, Jan. 30 The Workforce Diversity and Outreach budget item disappeared from the data on Jan. 31. NIH Report funding data, Jan. 31 Likewise, before Jan. 30, a National Institutes of Health website documenting years of spending data included a category called 'Workforce Diversity and Outreach.' That line item is now gone — even though the money was, indeed, spent. Taking cues from authoritarian illusionists Such actions are straight out of authoritarian leaders' playbooks. Research suggests that less democratic countries have been more likely to inflate their GDP growth rates and manipulate their covid-19 numbers. Statistical manipulation is also more common in countries that shun economic openness and democracy. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin infamously executed statisticians who served up unwelcome numbers. His census chief Olimpiy Kvitkin was arrested and murdered by firing squad after the 1937 census revealed the bloc's population to be millions smaller than Stalin had claimed. Those disseminating the inconvenient data were 'enemies of the people,' state media declared at the time. Recent data-suppression episodes have been less bloody but still disturbing. In 2013, the International Monetary Fund censured Argentina for not providing accurate inflation and GDP data. And as the Financial Times has documented, China began rapidly eliminating inconvenient data series after Xi Jinping became president in 2013. For instance, shortly after China's youth unemployment rate hit an all-time high, the government statistics agency simply stopped publishing it. To be clear, efforts to rewrite reality via statistical manipulation often don't work. If anything, China's data deletions reduced public confidence in the country's economic stability. (No one hides good news, after all.) The Trump team's efforts to suppress nettlesome numbers have similarly eroded trust in U.S. data. Only about one-third of Americans trust that most or all of the statistics Trump cites are 'reliable and accurate.' Meanwhile, missing or untrustworthy data lead to worse decisions: Auto companies, for example, draw on dozens of federally administered datasets when devising new car models, how to price them, where to stock and market them and other key choices. Retailers need detailed information about local demographics, weather and modes of transit when deciding where to locate stores. Doctors require up-to-date statistics about disease spread when diagnosing or treating patients. Families look at school test scores and local crime rates when deciding where to move. Politicians use census data when determining funding levels for important government programs. And of course, voters need good data of all kinds when weighing whether to throw the bums out. Many of us take the existence of economic or public health stats for granted, without even thinking about who maintains them or what happens if they go away. Fortunately, some outside institutions have been saving and archiving endangered federal data. The Wayback Machine, for instance, crawls sites around the internet and has become an invaluable resource for seeing what federal websites used to contain. Other organizations are archiving topic-specific data and research, such as on the environment or reproductive health. These are critical but ultimately insufficient efforts. At best, they can preserve data already published. But they cannot update series already halted or purged, so that Americans can keep tabs on how economic, health, demographic or educational metrics are faring under a new administration. Some private companies may step in to offer their own substitutes (on prices, for example), but private companies still rely on government statistics to calibrate their own numbers. Much of the most critical information about the state of our union can be collected only by the state itself. Americans might be stuck with whatever Trump chooses to share with us, or not. Illustrations by Michelle Kondrich.
The Guardian
24-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Elimination of federal climate tools, some used to inquire in to Musk's firms, sparks alarm
As Donald Trump's administration continues its purge of federal agencies, environmental justice campaigners are alarmed by the disappearance of federal environmental and climate data tools – some of which have been used to identify pollution concerns about Elon Musk's companies. Several federal agencies, including the EPA and CDC, previously published data regarding pollution levels across the country, as well as data about the vulnerability of each census tract, such as poverty rates and life expectancy. Several of the websites containing that data have gone dark in the weeks following Trump's inauguration. Some, such as the CDC's Social Vulnerability Index, came back online on 11 February following a court order, though they now include a note that the administration and department 'reject' the pages. Climate experts are concerned about the loss of two tools in particular: EJScreen, which mapped pollution burdens alongside socioeconomic indicators and was run by the EPA, and the climate and economic justice screening tool (CEJST), which identified disadvantaged communities that would benefit from climate-related funding. 'The elimination of environmental justice data and environmental justice tools is monumental,' said Naomi Yoder, a GIS data manager in the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice. Yoder is worried about not only the loss of data, but the loss of accessibility. The tools are how 'we show the rest of the world and policymakers that the issues people are talking about on the ground are backed up by data'. The data purge threatens to stymie efforts to protect some of the nation's most polluted communities – including ones where Musk's companies are located. Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, began building the world's largest supercomputer, dubbed 'Colossus,' in South Memphis, Tennessee, over the summer. The facility began operating in December to train Musk's chatbot, Grok. To power the massive data center, xAI has been operating 15 gas turbines. The gas turbines pump pollutants like formaldehyde and nitrous oxide into the surrounding primarily Black neighborhood, campaigners say. A permit application to operate the turbines filed last month indicates the turbines' annual hazardous air pollutants of up to 11.51 tons over 12 months could exceed the EPA's allowed maximum of 10 tons, according to the figures listed in the application. Attorneys from the non-profit Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) used EJScreen to establish that South Memphis, where the xAI facility was built, already suffers from a disproportionately high pollution burden. The census tract is in the 90th percentile in the US for 'toxic releases to air', and neighboring tracts are within the 95th percentile for ozone, according to EJScreen data that has now been preserved by archivists. The SELC campaign says that the gas turbines used by xAI will further worsen ground level ozone, better known as smog. South Memphis has long suffered from high asthma rates and poor air quality. People with asthma are particularly susceptible to ozone, which can aggravate the condition and increase hospital admissions. Libbie Weimer, a geospatial analyst at SELC, has used EJScreen in her day-to-day work for years. 'There are pollution concerns at that facility,' explained Weimer, and the surrounding neighborhood 'is a historically African-American community' that already experiences an outsized pollution burden. The SELC also used the National Emissions Inventory (NEI) to show that xAI's gas turbines, when used at full capacity, constitute the 9th-largest emitter of nitrous oxide in Shelby county, Tennessee. The NEI was taken down, but later restored after the 11 February court order. SELC referred to the NEI data in August, when asking the Shelby county health department to order xAI to cease operations until it had obtained a permit for the turbines, which it says are illegal. Tools like EJScreen 'help us quickly and efficiently get some baseline information about who's impacted', explained Weimer. 'The thing that's really important about it is that EJScreen, especially … democratizes access to this information.' The tools allowed anyone to 'easily look up and access information that's super relevant to the work they're doing, without necessarily going through the bottleneck of consulting technical experts'. An EPA spokesperson said in response to queries that the agency 'is working to diligently implement President Trump's executive orders, including the 'Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing''. They continued: 'President Trump was elected with a mandate from the American people to do just this. President Trump advanced conservation and environmental stewardship in his first term and the EPA will continue to uphold its mission to protect human health and the environment in his second term.' xAI did not respond to requests to comment. Campaigners say the missing datasets from various federal environmental data tools could have been used to examine the impact of Musk's business efforts elsewhere. Musk's SpaceX is seeking permission to launch starships from the Kennedy Space Center. The company's application for a commercial launch vehicle operator license to launch their Starship Super Heavy is still pending with the FAA. Its application is opposed by various environmental groups and advocates, including the Southeastern Fisheries Association, who have urged the FAA to consider environmental justice and the project's 'substantial impacts to disadvantaged communities'. That application must pass several steps first – including an environmental permit review. In EPA comments to the FAA, the agency 'strongly' urged the FAA to use the now-deleted EJScreen tool during their environmental review, in order to account for environmental justice. If the FAA were still able to use the tool, it would find the area where SpaceX intends to launch Starships is among the 88th percentile for cancer rates for adults. Some of Musk's Starships have exploded during flight, creating vast clouds of metal particulates, which have been linked to lung cancer. In response to queries from the Guardian, FAA public affairs specialist Steve Kulm said 'the FAA is committed to conducting environmental reviews in compliance with all applicable executive orders and environmental laws and regulations'. SpaceX has previously been found to have reportedly ignored environmental regulations: the company's headquarters in Cameron county, Texas, discharged thousands of gallons of industrial wastewater into the environment, for which it was fined over $150,000 for violating the Clean Water Act. SpaceX was facing multiple lawsuits from environmental groups. One of those lawsuits was dropped Monday after campaigners said they no longer felt optimistic about the suit's outcome. The EJScreen tool indicated that the headquarters in Cameron county are in an area in the 98th percentile of drinking water non-compliance, according to its environmental justice index, which takes into account the percentage of low-income homes and people of color alongside compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act. The new administration has also ordered the elimination of any directives associated with Biden's Justice40 initiative – affiliates of which have campaigned against his Tesla Gigafactory. The EPA's office of environmental justice and external civil rights has also been eliminated. 'There's been a huge effort from the Trump administration to wipe out access. Those datasets might even still be there, but the public can't readily use them,' said Yoder. 'Now it's going to require a team of specialists for many hours to get anything close to the same thing.' SpaceX did not respond to requests to comment.
Yahoo
19-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
An alarming trend: Ohio pharmacy closures spike, openings lag
(Stock photo) Ohio's pharmacy closures have spiked in recent years, and the stores have been closing in the communities that can least afford to lose them, according to a new data tool released by the Ohio Board of Pharmacy. The result, predictably, has been fewer pharmacies overall in Ohio despite a moderately growing population. The alarming numbers again raise questions about whether pharmacies can continue to be viable in many Ohio communities. Their loss is a public health concern not only because it makes it more difficult for people to get their medicine. Pharmacies also administer vaccines and provide other services. And for the medically underserved, the neighborhood pharmacy often represents the rare chance to talk to a medical professional about conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure. In Ohio, the number of openings of retail outpatient pharmacies peaked in 2015 at 110. But then something must have happened over the next 12 months. In 2016 there was a record number of closings, 120. Meanwhile, openings plummeted to 45 and stayed low for the following eight years, according to the board of pharmacy, which licenses and regulates them. Then something even more concerning happened. In 2023, the number of closures was a relatively low 55. But over the next year it shot up to 191, an increase of 247%. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE There were ample headlines announcing many of the closures. Bankrupt Rite Aid closed hundreds of stores both in Ohio and Michigan. Walgreens began a process of closing thousands of stores nationwide. And CVS last year finished up a process of closing 900 of its pharmacies. As a consequence of anemic openings and spiking closures, the number of outpatient retail pharmacies in Ohio has fallen from 2,219 in 2015 to 1,869 last year, according to the Board of Pharmacy data. That's a 16% drop over a period during which the state's population grew by about 2.5%, so there are fewer pharmacies serving more people. The closures last year prompted Dave Burke, a pharmacist, former state senator, and now executive director of the Ohio Pharmacists Association, to voice concerns that the business of pharmacy was on a precipice that could have disastrous consequences for Ohio. The closures are already having the heaviest impact on those who stand to be most hurt by them. As part of its new dashboard, the Board of Pharmacy looked at where closures were happening compared to where the most vulnerable Ohioans live. To do that, its staff used mapping data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Social Vulnerability Index. It looks at 16 pieces of information gathered by the Census Bureau such as income, employment status, educational attainment, minority status, whether one has health insurance, the availability of transportation and whether members of the household are children or seniors. Those with the most challenges are ranked high on the index, the next are ranked medium-high, then medium-low and low. When the Board of Pharmacy overlaid closures since 2012 on the CDC vulnerability map, it became clear that pharmacies were abandoning vulnerable neighborhoods at a much higher rate. Nearly 60% of the closures occurred in high and medium-high vulnerability neighborhoods. The impact of closures on those neighborhoods might be greater still, since it seems likely they had fewer pharmacies to start with. Ohio's independent and small-chain pharmacists have long accused pharmacy middlemen that are part of huge health conglomerates of driving them out of business. Combined, the three biggest middlemen control access to 80% of the insured patients. Pharmacies say that leaves them with no negotiating leverage, so they're forced to sign contracts in which the middlemen use a non-transparent system to reimburse them for the drugs they buy and dispense. The middlemen, or pharmacy benefit managers, also impose fees and other charges that cut into already limited profits, pharmacists say. In an interim report last year, the Federal Trade Commission said the pharmacists had a point. It said the practices of the middlemen appeared to be raising prices and making patients sicker. But Antonio Ciaccia, a Columbus-based drug-pricing expert, said the woes of Ohio pharmacies are due to a more complex set of factors than that. He said traditional pharmacies are getting squeezed by a federal program meant to benefit hospitals and health centers that treat the poor, staffing problems, and pessimism about the future. But he said middleman reimbursements are unquestionably an important factor. 'It all goes back to whether you have adequate money coming in the door,' Ciaccia said. In a statement, Board of Pharmacy Executive Director Steven W. Schierholt said his agency developed the dashboard to identify pharmacy needs so policymakers can address them. 'Having a pharmacy nearby is critical to the health and safety of Ohioans, especially those who depend on prescription medications every day,' he said. 'As the pharmacy market evolves in Ohio, it is imperative that we have a tool to help policymakers and local community leaders alike stay up to speed and even get ahead of emerging trends.' SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
