It’s terrifying that data US taxpayers paid for, collected and analyzed in the name of public health, can be removed on a whim. While there are a lot of efforts to archive said data, it would still make it unavailable to Americans who are not tech savvy. Unfortunately, that seems to be the idea, I think.
If the data is still in the possession of the government (e.g. in backups, on paper) then it is FOIA-able.
I had a gov agency temporarily throw all the materials into a trash can when I requested them and argued that since they were sitting in a trash can they were not available under FOIA.
Yes. It was argued in court that they couldn't be expected to go into the trash to pull out documents. But they were later. The case was settled on some ground, I can't remember what. Maybe they handed over the documents in the end. This was a decade ago, so I'm hazy on what the final outcome was.
A lot of public bodies will play games like this. It's not even clear to me why they do it. It'll be documents that aren't even controversial that they will resist. Ask them what brand of coffee they buy for the break room and they'll immediately get defensive and find some random exemption to apply. Law enforcement bodies are by far the worst, I think because the public are seen as terminal nuisances all the way down through the bodies.
majority of voters have made an ultimate choice. everything has to serve the choice. if you pay tax but don't or can't vote, sorry, it's your own problem.
Isn't this data already inaccessible to those who are not tech savvy? My grandma isn’t visiting any of the data download sites provided by the federal government. She doesn’t even know why she would, or even that such data is available. And if I provide it to her, she hasn’t the skills to do anything with it.
A lot of federal money goes to state and local health programs. For example, consider mammograms. A state will be given a budget to spend on mammograms. The state doesn't do those screenings itself, so it solicits bids from several healthcare organizations. Those organizations create proposals with estimates of the number of residents eligible for free screening in their area, the burden of breast cancer among that group, and whether those potential patients fall into underserved or high risk demographics. All of that comes from high quality data published by the federal government. Those groups pull data from these online data sets.
Your grandma might have gotten free mammograms because of that data.
Agreed that your grandma is unlikely to access the data directly, however that doesn't imply she is not affected by it's removal. As others have noted, professionals your grandma almost certainly depends upon(doctors for example) rely on the data.
Luckily, we live in a society of specialists, and while you are laying bricks, public health orgs are generating reports and taking interviews and making these data accessible and meaningful to you.
So, yes, your grandma relies on a data "supply chain" but, nevertheless, it benefits her.
It's a bit like asking whether road signs are effective for Americans who can't read. The signs are there for the people that are using the road, and if you're not using the road you can safely ignore it.
More like asking whether road signs are effective for Americans who are passengers in cars. No, it doesn't directly do her any good that they're technically accessible since she can't act on it, but it sure as hell affects her life that other people have access to the information provided by road signs.
I'm not sure the analogy works: roads were around long before writing, and there are still road users who can't read. That is why pedestrian crossing signals use lights in the shape of a person rather than written instructions.
