“Uncertainty.”
“Loss of trust.”
“Definitely a crisis.”
These are some of the ways in which researchers describe the state of affairs for government data in many countries.
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“There is a new type of politics that is undermining the credibility of official statistics,” says João Pedro Azevedo, chief statistician for the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF in New York City.
Official statistics are data collected and validated by both national statistical agencies and international organizations. Nearly every country has an agency for official statistics. They collect information and organize it into statistics about myriad aspects of life, including what people earn, how many individuals are employed, how well children perform in school, the quality of nutrition, how long patients have to wait for an operation, levels of air pollution and increases to average temperatures.
National agencies collect data through surveys and from secondary sources. These data sets are used by governments to inform policy, by businesses to plan for the future, and by researchers and advocacy organizations. Official statistics, such as those measuring nations’ gross domestic product (GDP), are also the foundation for monitoring progress towards the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, the world’s plan to end poverty and achieve environmental sustainability.
“Official statistics are like the backbone of a nation’s data infrastructure,” says Steve Pierson, director of science policy at the American Statistical Association (ASA) in Washington DC. “Just like any other infrastructure — roads, bridges and highways — they cannot fail.”
People who work with or study official statistics say that they have never experienced a period similar to today’s situation. Those who call the current state a crisis think it has been triggered by an accumulation of overlapping factors. These include falling response rates to national surveys, cuts to funding and, in some cases, government interference.
Although funded by governments, national statistics offices are expected to operate independently of politicians, not least so that they are free to report the data as measured — much as academic research operates at arm’s length from its public-funding bodies. Moreover, rules established by an assembly of the world’s national statisticians and endorsed by the UN require that some data sets meet international standards, which state that official statistics should be accurate, impartial, trustworthy and grounded in evidence.
Although there is a history of inappropriate government involvement in the collection and reporting of national statistics (A. V. Georgiou Stat. J. IAOS 37, 85–105; 2021), there is a record of statistics agencies calling out the misuse of such data, too. But researchers worry that this might not be the case in future. “I fear that it is becoming harder for official statisticians to do their jobs,” says Diane Coyle, research director at the Bennett School of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, UK.
Nature explores problems with official statistics in four countries that are causing concern for researchers and statisticians.
United States: make statistics great again
The US national system is approaching a “crisis point” because of political interference and funding cuts that are threatening long-established data sets. That’s according to a report published last December by the ASA, the professional body for US statisticians (C. M. Bowen et al. The Nation’s Data at Risk: 2025 Report; ASA, 2025).
Unlike most countries, the United States doesn’t have a single national agency for official statistics, although it does have the post of chief statistician. Instead, the system for official statistics comprises 16 agencies and units. In 2023, under then-president Joe Biden, the ASA began investigating the health of US official statistics, culminating in the first edition of its report at the end of 2024.
Some problems, such as long-term budget cuts to agencies, have been building for more than a decade. Although the country has seen several instances of inappropriate political interference in the past, the ASA reports that the magnitude of these problems has increased since US President Donald Trump regained office in January 2025.
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Events came to a head last August when Trump abruptly fired Erika McEntarfer, then the head of the Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) in Washington DC, after the agency published US employment data showing that the unemployment rate had increased to 4.2% in July, compared with the previous month’s rate of 4.1%.
The president’s actions shocked statisticians. In a statement, a group known as Friends of BLS, which is co-chaired by two former BLS chiefs, called the move an escalation of the president’s “unprecedented attacks on the independence and integrity of the federal statistical system”.
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, described in a statement sent to Nature why the Trump administration made changes to the BLS leadership: “For years the BLS has been failing America’s businesses, policymakers, and families by publishing jobs reports with vastly inaccurate data.”
Specialists point to other threats to the country’s official statistics, too, such as the termination of several long-established data sets. Last September, for example, the US Department of Agriculture ended its 30-year-long survey of household food insecurity, calling it “redundant, costly, politicized”. However, researchers say that the data set provides crucial information about the more than 40 million people in the United States who are unable to feed themselves without assistance.
Congress is pushing back on the Trump administration’s attempts to slash budgets. For example, the US National Center for Education Statistics, which provides publicly available data on student achievement, education finance and other measures, lost all but three of its staff members when its budget was cut last March. But Congress has since restored its funding, and the centre is slowly starting to hire people again.
Argentina: inflation nation
Argentina is a rare country in which the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (known by its Spanish acronym INDEC) is a household name. The country has a history of severe inflation, and INDEC is the guardian of the nation’s inflation data.
“In 95% of countries, if you ask people on the street what’s the name of the country’s statistical institute, they don’t know. It’s not an issue, it’s not controversial,” says Leopoldo Tornarolli, an economist at Argentina’s National University of La Plata. “In Argentina, my parents, my friends, everyone knows what the INDEC is.”
Between 2007 and 2015, “statistics on inflation and poverty were widely criticized as being politically influenced”, says Azevedo, who previously worked at the World Bank on statistics concerning Latin American countries. This situation led in 2013 to warnings from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington DC, which lends to Argentina, to correct the data “without further delay”.
After a change in government in December 2015, INDEC regained its independence. But a fresh controversy over the calculation of inflation has alarmed researchers.
This has erupted under the presidency of Javier Milei, an economist. Since Milei took office two years ago, inflation has decreased from an annual rate of 211% to 32%. The current controversy revolves around how exactly to calculate inflation.
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Last year, INDEC began discussing an update to a national survey of household expenditures, one of the sources for its inflation calculation. By international standards, household-spending surveys used for inflation calculations should be updated every five years. But INDEC had been using data from a 2004–05 survey that did not capture current consumption patterns, such as the amount that people spend on online streaming platforms, including Netflix and Spotify.
Last October, INDEC announced that it would start using the results of a 2017–18 survey to update the inflation calculations, starting in January 2026. January’s inflation figures were scheduled to be published on 10 February. However, in interviews with Argentinian media outlets in early February, economy minister Luis Caputo said that the decision to adopt the new formula would be indefinitely delayed because he and the president did not agree to the changes. On 2 February, Marco Lavagna stepped down as INDEC’s director.
The reversal worries researchers. Tornarolli says that the change to the underlying data set needed to be made, “whether it meant that inflation will go up or down. It was the right thing to do”. Susana Kidyba, a former senior INDEC official, agrees. “I think it does affect the credibility of the INDEC, the fact that they announced something and didn’t publish it.”
Both INDEC and the Ministry of Economy declined to answer questions from Nature.
India: concerns about independence
Problems with statistics in India, too, have been building for many years, culminating last November in an IMF report highlighting key shortcomings in economic data.
The IMF noted several concerns, including use of an outdated base year for economic statistics and not accurately counting the contribution of the informal sector, such as people working in open-air markets, to the economy. In January, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) announced that it is enacting a plan to rectify these issues, starting by using 2022–23 as the base year for economic statistics and by including sample surveys of those smaller businesses it needs to better measure the performance of this sector.
In addition to these issues, researchers have broader concerns about what they see as increasing government influence over India’s statistical processes and shrinking methodological transparency of some official data sets.
In 2019, two members of the National Statistical Commission (NSC), a public-sector organization with responsibility for verifying the quality of official data, resigned over concerns that it was being sidelined by the government, for example through delays to the publication of employment statistics.
Seven years later, things do not seem to have improved, according to members of India’s Parliament. Last December, a parliamentary committee recommended that the NSC be given statutory powers to report to the parliament instead of the government — a move intended to shore up its autonomy. The statistics ministry has said that the NSC already has sufficient autonomy.
MoSPI’s secretary, Saurabh Garg, told Nature that the ministry regularly consults with the NSC about reviews and suggestions for its statistical products and methodologies. Garg added that the NSC, which comprises five independent specialists, “has the requisite autonomy to discharge its functions effectively and efficiently”.
Some researchers point to another concern about official statistics in India: the lack of information about how the data are collected and analysed.
