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Data manipulation within the US Federal Government

Discussion in 'Too Hot for Swamp Gas' started by G8tas, Jul 15, 2025 at 10:28 AM.

  1. G8tas

    G8tas GC Hall of Fame

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    We gathered metadata from the US Department of Health and Human Services, CDC, and Veterans Affairs database harvest sources (metadata inventories of the agency datasets), and selected databases that were modified between Jan 20 and March 25, 2025. We excluded duplicates, datasets that had no archived copies for comparison or were otherwise unavailable, and datasets routinely updated monthly or more frequently. The final cohort included 232 datasets. We manually compared each dataset to archived versions hosted by the Internet Archive. We tracked alterations to words only, not numbers in the data. We did not track changes to the US Government websites other than those hosting the datasets. Full methodological details are in the appendix (pp 2–3).

    We found that 114 (49%) of the 232 included datasets were substantially altered. Of these, the vast majority (106 datasets [93%]) had the word gender switched to sex (appendix p 2). Only 15 (13%) of the 114 altered datasets logged or otherwise indicated that the change had occurred. Alterations in 89 (78%) of the datasets were to the classification or categorisation of the data, such as column headers or stratification categories, and alterations in the remaining 25 (22%) were to descriptions of the data such as tags or narrative introductions to the dataset.

    https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01249-8/fulltext

    Altering data without notification and without logging your changes? How trustworthy and this has all happened in March
     
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  2. AgingGator

    AgingGator GC Hall of Fame

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    This is an honest question: Are you actually surprised at this.
     
  3. gator_jo

    gator_jo GC Hall of Fame

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    Of course not. As the OP states - this happened in March. Under Trump.

    What did we expect would happen when we elected a convicted felon who campaigned by telling a litany of outright lies, continued to do so in office, and hired a coterie of unqualified conspiracy kooks to positions of the highest level? Oh, and we let a guy have access to all levels and varieties of data, and fire people, simply because he made the largest campaign donation in US history.

    The amount of unethical, probably criminal, and clearly dishonest abominations committed by the administration of our elected felon is almost unquantifiable.

    So no, not surprised in the least. Perhaps we can find a different lying felon to head the US government next time and see if we get different results.
     
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  4. G8tas

    G8tas GC Hall of Fame

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    Knowing who is in charge of HHS, of course not
     
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  5. obgator

    obgator GC Hall of Fame

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    What? The people who brought us this are manipulating data? No way! This is my shocked face.
    [​IMG]
     
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  6. AgingGator

    AgingGator GC Hall of Fame

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    Jo, if you take off your tin foil hat for a moment you will realize that this has been going on a long time. It didn’t just start six months ago. But go on with your Trump,Trump, Trump, Convicted Felon nonsense. And don’t worry, you will get another chance in the future when a dem is in the WH to take an objective look at things and realize they all lie
     
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  7. vaxcardinal

    vaxcardinal GC Hall of Fame

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    And he forgot to add in the eating dog bit
     
  8. WC53

    WC53 GC Hall of Fame

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    Old City
    So they changed pronouns or manipulated data. Hmm, we didn’t track changes in numbers.

    Every yin has a yang
     
  9. G8tas

    G8tas GC Hall of Fame

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    Apparently they're good at manipulating Epstein data too