Healthcare Experts Sound Alarm Over Deletion of Federal Health Data Under Trump-Era Orders

As new details continue to emerge, healthcare professionals and policy experts are raising alarms over the Trump administration’s handling of federal healthcare data, particularly the deletion and removal of key databases and research assets tied to public health and medical outcomes. Several of these actions were carried out under executive orders and administrative directives that aimed to reduce federal oversight and government spending—but in doing so, they may have eliminated decades of taxpayer-funded health data in the process.

During his term, former President Donald Trump signed a number of executive orders aimed at deregulating healthcare and rolling back Obama-era transparency measures. In 2019, Executive Order 13890, for instance, prioritized reducing the federal regulatory footprint in healthcare, while other directives pushed agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to shift focus away from enforcement and toward so-called “flexibility” for providers. While the language centered on efficiency and cost savings, experts say the practical impact included the removal of critical datasets, including those related to hospital-acquired infections, maternal health outcomes, and opioid overdose tracking.

DoorSpace CEO Sarah M. Worthy, whose company supports healthcare workers through technology-enabled retention solutions, criticized the move:

“While this administration is citing a need for budget cuts as the motivation behind the shuttering of our nation’s regulatory healthcare system, I can think of no greater waste than the deletion of billions of dollars worth of research and data that taxpayers have funded through the past several decades. It’s one thing to choose to spend money on different priorities going forward and quite another to delete all the outcomes we’ve already paid for and are still benefiting from.

This must be what it felt like for ancient Egyptians to watch the great Library of Alexandria burn to the ground, and those lost scrolls amounted to a mere fraction of the knowledge US scientists have accumulated through taxpayer-funded research.”

Among the resources reportedly altered or removed during the Trump administration were sections of the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP), maternal mortality datasets, and datasets tied to the Affordable Care Act’s enforcement mechanisms. Some of these databases, previously available through public portals like Data.gov or HHS open data initiatives, disappeared without formal explanation or were buried under new access restrictions.

Defenders of the administration say that pruning outdated or duplicative data was part of a necessary modernization effort, arguing that agencies should not be burdened with maintaining unused datasets. But public health researchers say many of the deleted files were still in active use by epidemiologists, university researchers, and healthcare organizations seeking to improve patient outcomes or monitor disease trends.

Former HHS staffers, speaking anonymously to various media outlets, described internal pressure to comply with executive directives even when it meant removing information used by public health professionals. In some cases, they say, scientists and analysts were not given adequate time to archive or migrate data before it was deleted or made inaccessible.

The implications of these decisions are now being debated as agencies under the Biden administration attempt to rebuild portions of the healthcare data infrastructure. However, advocates for data transparency say the damage may already be done. Losing access to longitudinal datasets—those collected over many years—makes it significantly harder to understand trends in areas like cancer rates, rural hospital closures, or the effectiveness of government health interventions.

Policy organizations such as the National Academy of Public Administration and the Union of Concerned Scientists have called for new safeguards, including a national data preservation strategy that protects scientific and healthcare data from politically motivated deletion. They argue that data funded by taxpayers should remain part of the public domain, regardless of the party in power.

The debate over health data deletion ties into a broader concern about how executive power is used to shape, restrict, or eliminate access to public knowledge. For researchers, clinicians, and healthcare innovators, the absence of trusted datasets doesn’t just slow progress—it can lead to worse outcomes for patients and communities.

As the healthcare industry continues to grapple with systemic challenges, the conversation now includes a new dimension: how to ensure the knowledge it relies on isn’t wiped away with the stroke of a pen.