Donald Trump's first mandate as president was characterized by an unprecedented volume of false and misleading statements – exceeding 30,000According to several press organizations. While he is progressing in the first 100 days of his second mandate, his administration seems to intensify this model, amplifying a disinformation apparatus to justify his actions and his changes in politics.
In doing so, he also dismantles the government's ability to assess its own policies, replacing credible evidence with propaganda. The second Trump administration systematically eliminates funding and staff for monitoring and assessing programs. This threatens our ability to make decisions based on informed evidence on policies and programs, leaving the public vulnerable to uncontrolled disinformation and ineffective governance.
When the process or mechanism to measure systematically and objectively what works and what does not work, what must be improved and what we must reproduce in other places and with other people is dismantled, the public will no longer have access to information and critical data.
The gathering and the credible evidence report to shed light on political decisions were introduced within the framework of the legislation on the major company when programs under the 1965 law on primary and secondary education, sponsored by Senator Robert F. Kennedy, were to be evaluated. Since then, the evaluation has been the key to shaping effective government programs. Its importance was reinforced in 2019 with the adoption of the law on the development of policies based on evidence, signed by President Trump. This law obliged each government agency to develop evaluation policies describing its priorities and practices under the appointment of an evaluation director.
During its first two months in power, the Trump administration executed an “evidence drain” by eliminating or considerably reducing significant research and evaluation programs. The Institute of Education Sciences has been practically eliminated; Only three staff members remain at the National Center for Education Statistics; And just over 20 staff members must perform the vital functions of the National Center for the Evaluation of Education and Regional Aid. Before the Trump cuts, these offices employed more than 180 people.
Administration reductions to research funding have received more attention and, in fact, research is essential to medical and technological progress. But the evaluation cuts also weigh seriously.
Evaluation studies inform us of our national performance. With precise and carefully designed studies, we can carefully modify programs and policies to improve their performance and finish those we learn do not work well. Careful studies that produce nuanced answers to these questions and others have been ordered by our government for more than 60 years to answer questions in a timely and relevant time, such as those that we should study at the moment: what is happening when social services are cut? Who and where do these cuts have the most significant impact? How does the movement of federal student loan programs from the Ministry of Education to the Small Business Administration affect access to these programs?
The public must know and understand the implications for the reduction of evaluation budgets and federal evaluation offices. Without good evidence to counter or support complaints made by civil servants, we, the public, may have access only to false information, which is now regularly driven on uncontrolled social media and the media. This is why it is so dangerous for the public and so opportunistic for an administration that goes to authoritarianism to cut these studies with a chainsaw.
Marginal individuals with questionable professional credibility have politicized research studies by refuting well -established results and distributing disinformation, as we have seen with the efficiency and safety of vaccines. The Trump administration has just hired one of these people to study the already discredited link between vaccines and autism. Expeating taxes for this type of “research” is a waste of undeniable resources and a direct effort to continue to push disinformation to the public, which makes it more difficult to discern the facts of fiction.
We must also be deeply concerned about the fact that the current administration will hire individuals that are equally unquied and discussed to assess the results of its cavalier cuts to funding and staff.
We must continue to carry out solid assessment studies of our programs and policies and provide the public with credible information to shed light on our national, local and cooking table discussions. Many states and philanthropic organizations support such efforts. They should increase their commitments to this vital work.
To guarantee honest assessments that counter-informing, we must, as a public, question the quality and accuracy of the evidence used to support the values based on the value of what policies and programs are “well” implemented and “well” for the American people. This is at the heart of the survival of our increasingly fragile democracy.
Christina Christie is the dean of the School of Education and Information Studies of the UCLA.
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Ideas expressed in the play
- The Trump administration's discounts to federal evaluation programs, including the Institute of Education Sciences and the National Center for Education Statistics, threaten the development of policies based on evidence by focusing on the mechanisms that evaluate the efficiency of the program.
- The elimination of surveillance capacities is likely to replace credible data with disinformation, as seen in the thrust of administration to study demystified affirmations as vaccines causing autism, which compromises public confidence in scientific consensus.
- These reduce the inverted decades of bipartite support for evaluation, including the law on the development of policies based on 2019 evidence, and weaken the public's ability to keep the government responsible for political results.
Different views on the subject
- The reduction of federal bureaucracy, including evaluation programs, aligns with wider efforts to rationalize government operations and eliminate unnecessary expenses perceived, as indicated in executive decrees targeting agencies as the minority of the business development agency(3).
- Critics argue that federal assessments can perpetuate bureaucratic bloating and that the reallocation of funds to guide the implementation of policies prioritizes budgetary and economic growth, such as tax reductions carrying out the deficit(1)(3).
- Certain frame reductions to agencies such as NIH are necessary to curb “partisan missions” and redirect resources towards priorities such as national security and the application of immigration, reflecting an emphasis on the small government(2)(3).
