Trump's quiet war on data begins

"The disclosure section of the White House website will supposedly be home to at least some of the information normally hosted on the open data portal, including visitor logs. But, so far, those areas of the site contain nothing more than a promise that they'll be updated. The White House failed to respond to repeated requests for a timeline on those updates.

Positions such as CIO and chief digital officer, created under the Obama administration, were responsible for guiding these programs. But right now those roles are empty, and the White House has given no indication it plans to fill them any time soon (if at all). The same is true of more policy-focused positions involved in the government data programs like CTO and chief data scientist. These became increasingly important positions under President Obama, but they don't appear to be big priorities for Trump.

By ignoring these offices, the new administration has let an entire data infrastructure system atrophy. Former Chief Data Scientist for the White House DJ Patil explains that often these are 'datasets that people ask for by FOIA, and that's an incredibly inefficient use of taxpayer dollars... A lot of people invested a tremendous amount of time to build the systems and infrastructure' to streamline the process of requesting government data. And, 'a big chunk of that infrastructure is allowing what all administrations have typically provided, and that is transparency into who is using the White House and other datasets that people have a right to see.'

At this point, according to the Sunlight Foundation, there has only been one confirmed removal of data, and that was of animal welfare records from the USDA. But Howard warns, 'The big fears that many people have about takedowns haven't materialized so far. That doesn't mean they won't.'"