Making Data Harder to Find

ThinkProgress and Steve Benen look at the latest in the continuing efforts of the administration to hide data. They note that this nifty site run by the government, basically a repository for some useful reports from the BEA and the Census will be discontinued in March.

Repositories like this are needed, even if the data exists elsewhere, because data can be very, very hard to find at some government run sites. I have a miserable time extracting info from the Treasury site, for instance, and the Census Bureau’s site doesn’t win many prizes for ease of use in my book. I don’t expect them to use the vast sums of money they save discontinuing this site to improve their other sites that really need a lot of help.

I’d bet they’re more likely to take a look at what may be the most useful repository of all and try to figure out how to make it go away. And maybe lean on the Fed while they’re at it. In fact, to make this administration look good, there are other sites they’re going to have to kill.