Updates on Federal Data Outages
February 6, 2025If you’ve been following the news this week, you may be aware of reports that some federal data has become (at least temporarily) inaccessible. We’ve been tracking developments and would like to share our best understanding of how data access has been impacted (if at all) and ongoing efforts/resources to provide alternative access, if needed.
Keep in mind that, as with much in Washington D.C. nowadays, any developments are fluid and official information is sparse. We don’t yet know the actual impacts of these changes, and caution should always be used when receiving new information.
Removal of datasets published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been one of the highest profile points of impact. Here’s what we know (as of Thursday 2/6 at 1:30pm EST) about some of the data sources most frequently utilized by our members:
- Census Bureau: while data.census.gov remains available, access to data files available via Census’ FTP server (including many not available from data.census.gov) was restricted on Tuesday (2/4). Access to some datasets has been restored, although important ones like population estimates as well as ACS microdata are still unavailable. For data that has been restored, impacts on the availability of specific fields are still uncertain.
- Bureau of Labor Statistics: we are not currently aware of any loss of access to public BLS data.
- Bureau of Economic Analysis: we are not currently aware of any recent loss of access to public BEA data, although we’ve previously highlighted the discontinuation of some vital regional data at the end of last year due to reduced resources.
- National Center for Education Statistics: we are not currently aware of any loss of access to public NCES data.
- Employment and Training Administration: it appears that the ability to download some public use data on apprenticeships may have recently been removed, although this is not confirmed, and dashboards providing aggregated data are still available. Other public use datasets remain available.
We’d also like to highlight that there are many great efforts underway to archive and preserve federal datasets. Some, such as IPUMS and ICPSR were archiving federal data well before current events, while others have been targeting specific datasets they see as potentially at-risk.
Finally, a reminder of other valuable alternatives for accessing public data:
- IPUMS – provides extensive microdata from the American Community Survey, Current Population Survey, Census GIS files, American Time Use Survey, and other national and international healthcare/higher education datasets.
- FRED – provides free and open-source access to thousands of economic datasets.
If you are aware of any changes in the availability of data that we mentioned above, or that you utilize heavily, please let us know. We are here to help answer questions, address concerns, and provide, so please reach out. Otherwise, we will continue to provide updates as we are able.