Government shutdown sidelines some U.S. data troves

Here’s another group suffering because of the partial government shutdown, now in its seventh day: stat geeks.

Most federal agencies’ websites carry notices that they aren’t being updated during the budget impasse. But the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the National Institute of Standards and Technology all went one step further, replacing their sites with a message indicating that they will be offline until their appropriations are restored.

The NIST left a couple of segments of its site online, including a database cataloging the website vulnerabilities that hackers exploit. But Census and the BEA went completely dark, removing access even to historical data.

OK, so maybe it’s not such a horrible thing to withhold some numbers from researchers. Still, it seemed curious that Census and the BEA felt compelled to go as far as they did, while other stat collectors in the Commerce Department (e.g., the Economics and Statistics Administration) and elsewhere (e.g., the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics) did not.

Happily, J. Steven Landefeld, director of the BEA, was still on the job Monday to provide an explanation. In fact, he appeared to be the only person at the BEA office in Washington on Monday. Anyway, he said his agency and Census had two reasons for taking their sites offline rather than leaving them online without updates.

First, Landefeld said, the agencies were reluctant to keep the websites operating with no one on hand to answer questions from users or address technical problems. And second, “We were also concerned about attacks on the website” from malicious hackers. In fact, he said, “We have had a spike in those.” That’s no surprise, considering the incessant poking and prodding by ideologically motivated hackers.

There’s no telling how long the sites will remain dark. The House was slated to continue its work Monday on a series of mini continuing resolutions that the Senate refuses to take up; the latest is one to fund the Food and Drug Administration. If the impasse continues, perhaps the House will get around to a mini-CR to fund the Census and BEA websites.

Then again, probably not.

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