Last week, SSRS Vice President Darby Steiger and Senior Vice President Chris Jackson joined Amy O’Hara, president of the Association of Public Data Users (APDU), for a live webinar presenting the findings of SSRS’s landmark EMERGE Initiative report, Voices from the Data Community: How 2025 Has Impacted Public Data Users.

Watch the full recording on APDU’s YouTube channel >>

Highlights from the EMERGE Study

The EMERGE report presents findings from a survey of 521 users of federal statistical data conducted in February-March 2026, one year into the wave of disruptions that began reshaping the federal statistical system in 2025. The results are striking in their consistency: 93% of respondents report that changes to the federal statistical system have impacted their ability to do their work, with more than half describing those impacts as major.

Respondents shared many examples of how these disruptions have affected their work, breaking down into three broad categories.

  • Delays and administrative bottlenecks: websites going offline without notice, data publications canceled or indefinitely delayed, and restricted-use data approvals stretching from days into months.
  • Reductions in the scope and availability of data itself: including the discontinuation of key variables like sexual orientation and gender identity data and survey efforts like the CPS Food Security Supplement.
  • Growing threats to data quality and integrity: including broken time series, methodology shifts that undermine longitudinal analysis, and an erosion of confidence in the independence of official statistics, accelerated by events like the politically charged firing of the BLS Commissioner in August 2025.

Public data users are adapting as best they can, turning to archived datasets, state and local administrative data, private-sector sources, and statistical workarounds. But the message from respondents was nearly unanimous: these are imperfect substitutes, not solutions. What users want is restoration of a federal statistical system that is comprehensive, accessible, and dependable.

Looking ahead, nearly 80% of respondents express serious concern about the continuity of federal data collections, and more than 70% worry about the long-term erosion of public trust in federal statistics.

Highlights from the Q&A

The discussion with APDU webinar attendees after the presentation was, in many ways, as substantive as the findings themselves. A few themes stand out.

We need to staying ahead of emerging gaps. One attendee asked how the community can get ahead of data gaps that don’t yet exist but are clearly coming, citing the likelihood that other data programs could follow SOGI data into discontinuation. Chris emphasized the importance of proactive archiving: ensuring that at-risk data is preserved before it disappears, rather than scrambling after the fact. Darby noted that before 2025, the concept of a “data emergency” did not exist. Now that it does, the community needs to be ready act accordingly.

We need to make a case for a “Project 2029.” Multiple attendees raised the idea of developing a coordinated, consensus-based roadmap for rebuilding and modernizing the federal statistical system, a plan that could be handed to a future administration as a clear agenda for restoration and reform. Chris and Darby expressed strong support for the concept, noting that the resources required are not enormous, but that coordination and a willingness to make a values-based case for federal data are both essential. As noted during the discussion: counting people is literally written into the Constitution before anything else, the data community needs to get comfortable saying so.

The business community is an untapped voice. Chris acknowledged that private-sector users of federal data were underrepresented in the EMERGE survey, and that this is a missed opportunity, since businesses that rely on federal statistics for market planning, site selection, and demographic analysis have both significant stakes and significant political influence. Reaching that community more effectively is a priority for future research.

AI is not a substitute for federal data. An attendee raised the growing perception that AI can fill gaps left by federal data.  Darby pushed back firmly: AI models depend on high-quality, impartial, real-world data to function reliably. Synthetic respondents and AI-generated projections are not substitutes for actual human voices and well-collected statistics. Getting that message into broader public circulation, in plain language, through accessible channels, is one of the communications challenges the field now faces.

What Comes Next

The EMERGE report identifies four near-term actions the civil society and philanthropic communities can take to support federal data users:

  • Curating a centralized index of validated alternative data tools; building a proactive communications program to connect users with emerging resources
  • Archiving the expertise of departing federal statistical staff before it is lost permanently;
  • And launching targeted data collections to fill the most critical gaps, particularly for populations and topics, like SOGI, that have been removed from federal data collection entirely.

The full report is available for download here >>

We are grateful to APDU, the Knight Foundation, and all of the partners and advisors who made this research possible, and to the more than 500 data users who shared their experiences and helped make the case that the stakes of this moment extend well beyond the research community.

Want more information?

Contact Chris Jackson or Darby Steiger to learn more about the EMERGE Initiative.