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TRANSCRIPT

Jane Coaston: It’s Friday, October 3rd, I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show that has a one-word question for Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson in conversation here with Pennsylvania Democratic Representative Madeleine Dean. 

[clip of Madeleine Dean] The president is unhinged. He is unwell. What are you doing–

[clip of House Speaker Mike Johnson] A lot of folks on your side are too.

Jane Coaston: Too? That didn’t sound like a denial. [music break] On today’s show, President Donald Trump determines the U.S. is in a, quote, “armed conflict with drug cartels.” And the Trump administration punishes a slew of blue states by canceling nearly $8 billion in grants for their clean energy projects. But let’s start with statistics! Don’t worry, this will not require you to do any math. Because of the government shutdown, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will not release its monthly unemployment and jobs survey today. But that’s probably not a big deal to Trump, who has apparently decided that the best statistics are the ones that either say what he wants to hear or are simply never heard at all. The most expensive extreme weather events? Which facilities are creating the most pollution? Quarterly reports. Incidents of domestic terrorism. The number of people who need food assistance. These are all statistics Americans need to know. And these are all forms of data under attack by the Trump administration, and this started long before the shutdown. America has been a world leader at collecting data on everything, from the number of bison living in plain states to the divorce rate. But our data supremacy might be coming to an end. And that’s really, really bad. For reasons we might not even know yet. So to find out more about the stats we’re losing and what else we’re losing in the process, I spoke to Denise Ross. She’s a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists and former U.S. Chief Data Scientist for the Biden administration. Denice, welcome to What a Day! 

Denice Ross: Thank you. Good to be here. 

Jane Coaston: Now, the United States has traditionally been a powerhouse when it comes to collecting data on pretty much everything. But I think it can be kind of um hard to wrap, especially for me, like wrap my mind around what all of these numbers and reports and insights are actually used for. So can you give us an example of how the government and other organizations use data to make our lives better or easier or just good?

Denice Ross: Absolutely. I’ll tell you about my current favorite federal data set. That’s the North American Bat Monitoring Database. Bats, you know, the little, the flying mammals. 

Jane Coaston: Yes. Big Fan.

Denice Ross: It turns out that America’s farmers use billions of dollars of free services from bats because they eat harmful insects. And so if we want to protect this free service for America’s Farmers, we need to protect the bats. And if you want to protect the bats, you need to know where they are. And that’s what this bat monitoring database does. So it’s a data set that you wouldn’t normally think of as being really important, but it actually is an important part of our agricultural economy. And I just learned a couple of weeks ago that bats also save babies. That in areas where bats have gone away, farmers use more pesticides and infant mortality goes up. 

Jane Coaston: But I think that that gets to my concern, which is that the data infrastructure in the United States has changed a lot since Trump took office in January. How?

Denice Ross: I served as the chief data scientist of the United States in the Biden administration. And since January, we’ve been monitoring what’s happening in the federal space. And I’ve seen a pattern where it falls into three buckets. The first is the targeting of data sets that are not aligned with administration priorities. This was probably one of the most high profile data losses that we saw at the end of January with changes to hundreds of data sets. Mostly targeting gender, DEI, and climate. For example, um Office of Personnel Management, they used to publish data on race and ethnicity of the federal workforce. And that information went away. Gender identity used to be in the National Crime Victimization Survey, and that was pulled down as well. So that’s the first bucket. The second bucket is broader and more damaging and will be harder to recover from. And that’s the collateral from the losses of contractors and staff, and even the advisory committees that give information to agencies on statistical methodology and how to keep up in a changing world. Those losses are across the board and not necessarily intentionally hurting data sets, but the end effect is that data sets are being compromised. And then the third bucket, and that’s the targeting of data sets that reflect poorly on the performance of administration policies. And there are three examples um in recent history. So in June, Social Security Administration removed performance data that included information on how long people are on hold when they call the Social Security administration. Um and the timing of that was right after the Social Security Administration lost about over 5,000 staff, and they were introducing more sort of red tape to make sure that they were catching fraud. So it would have been a good time to know if performance of these call centers was suffering as a result of these changes. And then in August, after a disappointing jobs report, I think everybody heard about the firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner and the president talking about those numbers being rigged. And then just last week, USDA, they announced that they’re canceling the current population surveys food security supplement, which is a collaboration between USDA and the Census Bureau, and it’s the only federal collection that gives us details on whether Americans have dependable access to safe and healthy food. So the timing of that loss is interesting because it coincides with the changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, um where we’re expecting that millions of Americans will be kicked off of that program. 

Jane Coaston: So it sounds to me like the Trump administration has decided that there’s just certain information it just doesn’t want to know, or I think more accurately, it doesn’t want us to know. But given everything you were just mentioning that there are less people to analyze and apply the data we do have and that the Trump administration is doing away with data that makes it look bad. How much do you and how much can we trust the reports that we do see like, what are the existing safeguards in place to ensure the data we’re seeing are accurate? And are those things still strong enough to rely on? Like, do you rely on them? 

Denice Ross: We’re certainly getting close to the edge with all of these losses to the staff and contractors and experts that usually bolster our data collections. But for now, experts on the outside are closely watching, especially the economic data as soon as it’s released. And the consensus right now is that the career staff on the inside are still working with a high degree of scientific integrity. But we’re all concerned about what happens when and if political leadership attempts to influence the statistical methodology behind the numbers, for example. And that’s especially important given the dissolution of, for example, the advisory committees that have been so central historically to informing methodological changes and just declining government transparency overall. 

Jane Coaston: So I think that that leads to an overall question that I think would be really helpful for folks, including me. I don’t think we are going to get full Soviet level data where everything is, you know, improved a thousand percent. But how can we accurately read data with an eye towards is this real or is it not? 

Denice Ross: It’s worth noting the distinction between the primary data that the federal government collects and then the layers of interpretations. For example, the National Climate Assessment that that’s based on core scientific data that’s produced by the federal government. And then the climate assessment was a report on top of that. So in general, when I think about this, I think about the core data and, you know, take it with a grain of salt, knowing that there may be limitations in the collection. The data might be coming slower than usual. It might contain less detail than usual, but I think the most scrutiny right now would be worth putting on these derivative works, the reports and the analyses and the interpretation of those primary data. And that’s where the ecosystem of people with deep expertise outside of government who are watching these data closely. That’s where that comes into play. And it’s more important than ever right now. 

Jane Coaston: To your point, last week, the Commerce Department came out with a revision to its second quarter GDP numbers. The original data showed the economy grew 3.3% in quarter two, but the new data says it actually grew at 3.8%. Thanks mostly to revised consumer spending numbers, which is obviously better for the Trump administration. So what goes into revisions like this? How common are they? And again, given this administration, how much can we trust it?

Denice Ross: So I’m not an economist, but revisions are they’re like a compromise between that tension between quality and timeliness. For example, if we want the numbers to be released on a frequent basis, then sometimes information’s going to come in after that will warrant a revision. And that’s just that’s just how statistics works. And it’s a sign of a healthy statistical system that we can come out with early numbers and then revise them as we get more information. So the fact that there were revisions itself doesn’t concern me, like that’s just part of the normal statistical process. But again, the fact that we are questioning this, I think speaks to the larger concerns about trust that we have based on the way that data have been used in this administration. 

Jane Coaston: Well, I think that that goes to my last question, which is, if data coming out of the Trump administration becomes compromised and that data itself, not the analysis, but the data we’re getting, what happens then? Like, what do we do as a society and as individuals when the numbers that tell us economy good, economy bad, poverty up, poverty down? If we can’t trust those, then what do we do?

Denice Ross: That’s a good question. And you know frankly, this feels to me like 20 years ago, after Hurricane Katrina, I was in New Orleans, and when the storm hit, 80% of the city flooded and all of those federal data became instantly historical. So during the time in our city’s history, where we had the most decisions to make, we did not have federal data to inform that. And we had to get really creative to fill in the gaps because we couldn’t answer basic questions like, where should we put health clinics or which playgrounds should we rehab first? Starbucks didn’t know what corner to open up on. There’s just so many unanswered questions if you don’t have a common base of trusted information coming from the federal government. And that is not a place that we want to be as a society, especially with shocks and stressors coming our way so quickly, we need to be able to be flying with all of our instrumentation. So for me, like it’s not an option to lose these data, federal data impact our lives in ways that are often invisible and also that we take for granted. So if this federal data apparatus continues to crumble, our lives are going to get a lot harder in ways that we can’t even anticipate. 

Jane Coaston: Denice, thank you so much for joining me. 

Denice Ross: Thank you. It was a pleasure. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Denice Ross, Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists and former US Chief Data Scientist for the Biden administration. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment. But if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five star review on Apple podcasts, watch us on YouTube and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines.

[clip of Scott Bessent] It’s unfortunate the Chinese leadership has decided to use the American farmers, soybean farmers in particular, as a hostage or pawn in the trade negotiations. And American farmers overwhelmingly voted for President Trump more than 90%. He loves the farmers. He loves them. 

Jane Coaston: Sure. That’s U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on CNBC discussing the effects of Trump’s trade war with China on American farmers. This, as the Trump administration is cooking up a big bailout for said farmers, roughly 10 to 14 billion dollars, according to the Wall Street Journal. Farmers have been ravaged by Trump’s trade policies, particularly soybean farmers, who have seen demand for their crops dry up in the wake of the U. S. China trade war. But where to find the money? The USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation fund would be the likely source. But wait, that fund only has four billion dollars left. Why? Because Trump previously tapped it to provide 28 billion dollars in farm aid during his first term trade war with China. The irony doesn’t stop there. Trump officials, including those of the Treasury Department, are looking at how to use tariff revenue to supplement the payments without triggering a messy fight in Congress. That’s right. The tariffs that hurt farmers in the first place are now their potential saving grace, which is basically a pyramid scheme. Trump takes your money with tariffs, then sells it back to you as a bailout. That’s Trumponomics. The timing also couldn’t be worse. The government shutdown has already crippled much of the agriculture department. Republican lawmakers are pushing Trump’s team to act fast, but sources tell Politico 35 to 50 billion dollars may ultimately be needed to make a real impact. All to fix a crisis Trump planted himself. An immigration judge rejected Kilmar Abrego-Garcia’s bid to reopen his asylum case, a strategy his lawyers hoped would keep him in the U.S. The request, filed in August, adds to the ridiculously complex web of cases he’s been pulled into since March, when the Trump administration accidentally deported him to CECOT, a mega prison in El Salvador, and said, oops, our bad. Facing a ruling from the Supreme Court, the Trump administration brought him back to the U. S. in June and offered him a full-threaded apology. Ha! No. Instead, the administration immediately charged Abrego-Garcia with human smuggling and announced plans to deport him to Uganda and then Eswatini, a small country in southern Africa. Now, Abrego-Garrcia has 30 days to appeal, a gamble that could either put him on the path to a green card or send him straight back to CECOT, the mega prison where he says he was beaten and tortured. Judge Paula Xinis, who presided over the case, told the government they can’t ship Abrego Garcia out of the U.S. for at least the next few months. She set yet another hearing for October 6th to figure out whether sending him to Uganda would put him at risk of danger or even torture, and promised a ruling within 30 days. In a clear effort to punish Democrats for the government shutdown, the Trump administration announced on Wednesday that it will cancel nearly $8 billion in clean energy projects in over a dozen states. Clear effort to punish isn’t something worth saying lightly, by the way, because Trump made the threat pretty damn clear when he said this Tuesday. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them and irreversable by them, like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like. 

Jane Coaston: And then this on Wednesday. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] So we’re doing well as a country, so the last thing we want to do is shut it down. But a lot of good can come down from shutdowns. We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want, and they’d be Democrat things. 

Jane Coaston: Subtle. According to an energy department document reviewed by The New York Times, the list of energy projects poised to lose funding just so happened to be in California, Minnesota, Oregon, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, New York and Washington. What do those states have in common? You guessed it. They’re all run by Democrats. And guess who isn’t losing their funding? Virginia, Texas and Louisiana. Conveniently, states run by Republicans. Case and point. White House Budget Director Russell Vought said, quote, “green new scam funding to fuel the left’s climate agenda is being canceled.” California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom fired back, saying in a statement that California will, quote, “continue to pursue an all of the above clean energy strategy that powers our future and cleans the air, no matter what DC tries to dictate.” 

[clip of President Donald Trump] If you try to poison our people, we will blow you out of existence because it’s the only language they really understand. That’s why you don’t see any more boats on the ocean. You don’t see any boats around Venezuela. There’s nothing. 

Jane Coaston: That was Trump earlier this week at a bizarre meeting with military leaders that he somehow made even more bizarre. And now, well, Trump has declared the United States is in a, quote, “non-international armed conflict with drug cartels.” That’s according to a Trump administration memo obtained by the Associated Press on Thursday. Last month, the US carried out deadly strikes against alleged drug smuggling boats in international waters. At least two of those operations were carried out on vessels that originated from Venezuela. The memo refers to cartel members as, quote, “unlawful combatants” and raises questions about how far Trump intends to use the executive branch’s war powers and if Congress will exert its authority to be an actual check on military actions. According to a person who spoke to AP on the condition of anonymity, Pentagon officials did not provide a list of the designated terrorist organizations at the center of the conflict to lawmakers. White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement Thursday that Trump, quote, “acted in line with the law of armed conflict to protect our country from those trying to bring deadly poison to our shores. And he is delivering on his promise to take on the cartels and eliminate these national security threats from murdering more Americans.” Because, as we all know, Trump loves laws. And that’s the news. [music break] One more thing. The government shutdown is now in its third day. And despite efforts by the GOP to get Americans to blame either Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer or nameless, faceless, quote, “illegal immigrants,” new polling shows folks aren’t buying it. According to The Washington Post, 47% of Americans polled are blaming Trump and the Republican Party for the shutdown. 30% are blaming Democrats and 23% of respondents are not sure who to blame. But some of the biggest victims of a government shutdown are not the politicians who still get paid during one. Instead, it’s the thousands of government employees who don’t, and their families, and the businesses that rely on them, from child care facilities to coffee shops. So to talk more about the impact the shutdown is having on federal employees who have already been through it this year. I spoke to Crooked Media’s Matt Berg. Matt, welcome to What a Day. 

Matt Berg: Thanks for having me. 

Jane Coaston: So you live in D.C. What’s the mood right now? 

Matt Berg: The mood is not great. The anger among federal workers is very real. I’ve spoken with nearly a dozen federal employees in the past day. They all feel like pawns being used, as one employee put it, by, quote, “the dumbest people in the dumbest timeline.” These are workers who have not been able to catch a break. They’ve been a political football for Trump since January. And a lot of them are really nervous, too. A lot of them have a spouse who’s also a federal worker. They rely on these paychecks to come through. If they’re furloughed or fired, then they don’t know what happens with their families. And they’re also worried about not getting back pay. 

Jane Coaston: Do they have a sense of how long this will go on? Because I think, like, I’ve been through two government shutdowns in D.C. In 2013 and 2018. In 2013, I remember, like the first couple of days, it was like, you know, my federal worker friends were like, it’s okay. And then the second week, it’s like not so okay. 

Matt Berg: Yeah, everyone I spoke with, interestingly, thinks it’s not going to end anytime soon. They’re all very pessimistic about any agreement happening. But interestingly, they’re also very supportive of what Democrats are doing. They’re just very frustrated that the Republicans control all branches of government right now and that the government shut down. Um. So, yeah, everyone thinks it’s going to last for a long time and are kind of bracing for that. 

Jane Coaston: Also, Trump is using government websites to push his messaging about the shutdown, about how it’s Democrats’ fault. But can you explain what’s going on on those sites? 

Matt Berg: So there’s this thing called the Hatch Act, which basically says that federal employees and agencies cannot act in partisan ways. It’s supposed to ensure that Americans trust the federal government. But uh over the past few days, we’ve seen these mysterious messages pop up on various websites saying that the quote “radical left” is to blame for the shutdown. I’ve been forwarded emails from federal employees uh who have gotten these messages from top Trump officials who are also blaming Democrats for the shutdown and saying how much Trump wants the government to stay open. So Trump is using the federal government in a way that has never been seen before to push his agenda on the shutdown. And at the education department, employees who are furloughed found out that their out of office emails automatically changed to blame Democrats for the shut down, no matter what they personally thought. Um. HUD Secretary Turner said today that this is not about propaganda. This is just about letting the American people know what’s going on. But that’s not how most federal workers, and experts who look at this stuff legally, think. 

Jane Coaston: Do you have the language of those emails? 

Matt Berg: Yes, I have one right here from Jason Evans, Undersecretary for Management. He says, unfortunately Democrats are blocking this continuing resolution in the US senate, due to unrelated policy demands. If Congressional Democrats maintain their current posture and refuse to pass a clean continuing resolution to keep the governement open, uh before midnight on September 30th, 2025, federal approprated funding will lapse. A funding lapse will result in certain government activities ceasing due to a lack of appropriated funding. 

Jane Coaston: And so what you said earlier, that’s not legal to do? Correct?

Matt Berg: According to just about every expert and every journalist also who has worked throughout administrations, this again has never been seen before and seems very illegal. It’s another question to see what comes of court cases, unions, and others are already calling this out. But Trump officials are holding the line and saying that this is perfectly fair game. 

Jane Coaston: Fantastic. Matt, thank you so much for joining me. 

Matt Berg: Thanks for having me. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Crooked Media’s Matt Berg. And hey, you can subscribe to the What a Day newsletter he writes at crooked.com/subscribe. [music break] That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, think about whether you’d like to accept a rose from New York City mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how this ad aired during ABC’s The Golden Bachelor on Wednesday. 

[clip of Zohran Mamdani] You deserve someone who works as hard as you do, who thinks about you every second of the day. That’s the kind of mayor I promise to be. New York, will you accept this rose? Paid for by Zohran for NYC. 

Jane Coaston: Like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston, and let’s be real, if Andrew Cuomo made this ad, I would call the police. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Emily Fohr and Chris Alport. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Sean Allee, Gina Pollack, and Caitlin Plummer. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. We had help today from the Associated Press. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]

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