Some people get angry when they ask a reasonable question and are told that the answer is not hard to find, but that the information just isn’t available anymore. People who work for civil rights, state lawmakers, and researchers have been there in the months since one of the biggest cuts to the federal workforce in modern American history.
Pew Research says that the Trump administration fired about 348,000 federal workers in 2024 alone, which is 80% more than the previous year. Those are big enough numbers to change the way whole regions’ economies work. For example, in Maryland, about 6% of all jobs in the state were federal civilian jobs. Tens of thousands of jobs will be lost, which will have an effect on grocery stores, schools, and real estate markets. People pay attention. But it’s almost impossible to prove who was forced to leave and which communities were hit the hardest. The demographic information that would have shown it has been taken away in secret.
As part of a larger plan to get rid of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the federal government deleted or limited records that showed what race and gender employees were. The Office of Personnel Management said before that 41% of federal workers were people of color and 46% were women. Those numbers gave supporters a starting point. That baseline is where the story ends, and accountability starts to fall apart, if there isn’t any updated, easy-to-find data linked to specific layoffs.
In simple terms, Maryland Delegate Denise Roberts said, “They don’t want us to know.” It’s hard to disagree with that reading. When data disappears just at the time when it would be most useful, it’s no longer a coincidence. It is still not clear whether that was the actual goal or just a useful side effect of larger DEI rollbacks. In the end, it doesn’t matter which way you go.
This pattern goes far beyond the demographics of the workforce. The Brookings Institution found that in early 2025, a lot of datasets paid for by taxpayers were taken down from government websites. These datasets included crime statistics, climate data, global health records, sexual orientation numbers, and more. A senior fellow there named Caren Grown, who used to work for the World Bank, said it was both a research loss and a policymaking crisis. Skilled technical teams built data sets that were used to make decisions about where to put health resources, which communities to focus on, and how to measure risks. That stuff takes a long time to put back together, and most of the people who knew how to use it are also gone.
The fact that the human cost isn’t abstract makes this even harder to understand. Reuters reported on how a right-wing group called the American Accountability Foundation put out watchlists with photos and personal information about 175 federal employees, many of whom were women or people of color. The lists said that these employees should be fired.
At least 88 of the people listed have since quit the government. Some people left the country. A public health worker who spent years responding to Ebola outbreaks talked about how she changed her look to avoid being recognized, rerouted packages, and told her kids to lock the doors. That’s the real-life story behind any numbers that may have been available to show how many people were laid off before those numbers were removed.
People in the country feel like they are being asked to believe a story that can’t really be checked out anymore. There were mass layoffs. It’s likely that some areas were hit harder than others. But the information that could prove or disprove that has been erased. Maryland and other states are trying to figure out how bad the damage is by using incomplete records and accounts from other people.
In time, this kind of erasure might blend in with the background noise of political change and become more common. That would be a clear loss—not because data is holy, but because without it, the people most affected by these decisions have no proof of harm, no paper trail, and not much they can do. The firings took place. It’s becoming less and less likely that the full picture will ever come out.
