Federal cuts threaten information key to Minnesota’s economic growth

The numbers have rolled in for decades, landing on the desks of decision-makers from the statehouse to company executive suites.

The figures might look meaningless stacked in a spreadsheet, but this knowledge — from unemployment measures to health care gaps and Wall Street markets intel — is key to keeping Minnesota’s economy running.

Details of the local talent pool can help woo a new employer to town. Tracking farm revenue from one county to the next can measure the impact of government subsidies. Colleges invest in training programs based on industries expected to grow. Corporations use population data to help plan where to expand.

But federal staffing shortages under President Donald Trump are threatening to cut off the information pipeline. Years of underinvestment had already hampered the flow even before Trump’s crusade against government spending.

Local numbers have been some of the first casualties, creating blind spots in Minnesota and beyond.

“We just flat-out won’t know,” said Kelly Asche, senior researcher at the nonprofit Center for Rural Policy and Development.

In addition to budget cuts, advocates are concerned about a proposal to make the annual American Community Survey from the U.S. Census Bureau voluntary. A similar effort in Canada decimated the data, undercounting many communities and obscuring social service needs.

Joan Naymark, executive director of Minnesotans for the American Community Survey (ACS), said she used federal data daily in her former role as market analytics and planning director at Target Corp.

“If we didn’t have accurate, reliable, consistent data from the Census Bureau at Target, we wouldn’t have placed a lot of bets. We wouldn’t have invested millions of dollars to build a store unless ACS data showed it could be profitable,” she said. “And I guess the question is, without accurate, consistent data, will people just make up numbers or not move forward with projects?”

Independent U.S. government agencies have collected and distributed data since the late 19th century.

In recent years, abundant digital-age data has created new possibilities for what the agencies could do with enough resources, said Erica Groshen, who served as Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner from 2013-2017.

But diminished funding and declining survey responses — a global issue Groshen attributed to factors including survey fatigue, privacy concerns and the challenge of tracking down respondents who only use mobile phones — have threatened the agencies’ core work.

”Now, the agencies are facing a lot of collateral damage from the actions of the current administration,“ Groshen said. ”Most of it is not aimed at the statistical agencies, but it is having serious impacts."

About 260,000 workers have left or made plans to leave the federal government this year amid layoffs, buyouts and other measures (like return-to-office mandates) under the Trump administration, according to a Reuters tally.

A hiring freeze means agencies can’t replace the people they’ve lost, and the proposed 2026 budget includes additional cuts that would affect data production at both the federal and state levels.

BLS, a labor department agency that produces the consumer price index (CPI) inflation measure, cited the hiring freeze this month when it alerted economists it had stopped collecting price data in Lincoln, Neb., Provo, Utah, and Buffalo, N.Y.

The agency’s commerce department counterpart, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), recently announced it would discontinue some data on new foreign direct investment in the U.S. “due to resource constraints.”

The scope of the staffing shortage at the two agencies isn’t publicly available.

“We’re hearing 15% loss at BLS; we’re hearing 20% loss at [BEA],” said Steve Pierson, director of science policy at the American Statistical Association. “And if you don’t have the people, you can’t do these things.”

Some of the greatest losses have been among staff who produce economic projections at BLS, said Marty Romitti, senior vice president at the Center for Regional Economic Competitiveness.

The Occupational Employment Projections, released at the end of each summer, project which jobs will be in demand across the country over the next 10 years. It’s highly requested, widely used information, Romitti said, influencing decisions such as the training programs colleges invest in and the careers students choose.

“Without the funding, all of a sudden you have this infrastructure and this standardization that goes back to the wild, wild west, right?” he said. “That really impacts states and state policymakers, but also impacts just a student in eighth grade.”

It’s not a mystery what will happen if federal data disappears. It’s already happened.

The first Trump administration cut questions about sexuality from federal surveys, reducing available data on LGBTQ Americans. Since January, some previously public data sets have disappeared from government websites.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, in-person surveys that provide data for closely watched measures like the CPI and the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey weren’t possible.

Greater MSP, the Twin Cities’ economic development organization, had to suspend its online dashboard showing how the region stacks up nationally on business vitality, education, infrastructure, environment and other metrics according to federal data.

“It hit pause on a really important regional practice of leaders and institutions coming together across sectors and political boundaries to just look at a shared set of facts and understand how we’re performing,” said Peter Frosch, CEO of Greater MSP. “We have found from that pandemic experience there is not an alternative to federal data sources. So we will know less about things that matter to our economy and our community.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.