What The Hell America!

The federal government does a lot of things. It lifts millions of seniors out of poverty! It forecasts avalanches! It invades foreign countries based on dubious intelligence! It determines what time it is! And when it’s got a spare moment, it protects the Constitution — or at least one copy of it.

If you set aside the military and the big retirement and health care programs — the federal government is, after all, an insurance company with an army — one could argue its main product is information. And that information has major impacts on both individual Americans and the economy they live in. Businesses use census data to decide where to open locations. Vacationers watch hurricane forecasts to decide whether that trip to Boca is a good idea or not. Employers use labor and economic data to decide whether to expand or lay workers off. People protect their health with vaccines based on federal research. (At least they used to.) And that’s not to mention all the specialized research — storing nuclear weapons! growing better avocados! inventing the internet! — that is invisible to the general public but nonetheless spawns benefits. The feds produce so much information that it’s had to innovate new processes just to handle it all.

A lifetime ago, I used to cover K-12 schools in Texas. Huge swaths of even the most local education policy is influenced by federal data both sweeping and granular. It’s a big part of how a school figures out where it stands among its peers. The lion’s share of that data was produced by the National Center for Education Statistics, which until January 20 had about 100 employees, including lots of Ph.D.-trained statisticians.

Today, it has three. No part of the Department of Education was cut more, as far as reporters can tell. It’s inconceivable that three remaining caretaker employees could produce the data and analysis that NCES used to — meaning American public schools are going to be just a little bit more ignorant about how they’re teaching our kids.

As journalists, we’ve gotten used to the idea that, when the information we produce disappears, there is often a cost. Residents who don’t know there’s lead in their tap water will keep on drinking it. If they don’t know the pollutants that new processing plant is dumping into the river, they can’t organize to protest it. If they don’t know the mayor is on the take, they won’t hold it against him when it’s reelection time. As our industry declines, that interconnection between information and outcomes is part of our pitch — how we try to convince readers, donors, members, and citizens that we’re a cause worth supporting.

But if you could somehow trace all the information we report back to its source — to trace the Mississippi back to Lake Itasca — an awful lot of it would show origins in government research, government-mandated data collection, and the deep sea of information gathered in public records. I don’t mean political propaganda, of which there is no shortage — just the basic corpus of knowledge that serves as the lowest level of the information pyramid. The base everything else is built on.

On Tuesday morning, Wired — the 32-year-old tech magazine that has been surprisingly active on the Trump II beat — announced an initiative that recognizes the role of public information in its work. On stories that are primarily sourced to public data, there will be no paywall. Here’s a statement from the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which has been trying to convince publishers to make such a move:

The news business isn’t just any business — it serves a vital role in our democracy, recognized by the First Amendment. But media outlets can’t serve that role if they’re bankrupt. And as a result, news readers often find themselves blocked by paywalls from reading important stories about government business.

That experience is particularly frustrating for readers who are unable to access the groundbreaking investigative reports outlets like Wired magazine have been publishing, particularly over the first couple months of the Trump administration. Fortunately, Wired has a solution — it’s going to stop paywalling articles that are primarily based on public records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

This approach makes a lot of sense from the standpoint of civil duty. They’re called public records for a reason, after all. And access to public documents is more important than ever at this moment, with government websites and records disappearing, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency doing its best to operate outside the public’s view, and the National Archives in disarray…

We commend Wired for tipping the balance that all for-profit media outlets must strike between public interest and business more toward the public interest. We hope others will follow its lead (and shoutout to outlets like 404 Media that also make their FOIA-based reporting available for free).

(Of note: Katie Drummond, Wired’s global editorial director, is also a board member at the Freedom of the Press Foundation.)

It feels a little tired, in 2025, to talk about the spaces we operate in as “information ecosystems.” So much of the internet’s underlying ideology mixes woo-woo utopian language with technolibertarian outcomes. “Information ecosystem” sounds like bad dialogue from an upcoming Avatar sequel. But it’s also a perfectly appropriate metaphor. The production, distribution, and consumption of information — including the subgenre of news — can’t be easily reduced to an org chart. Knowledge can come from anywhere and spread to anywhere.

And, as in actual ecosystems, the loss of seemingly insignificant players can have hard-to-predict consequences. Reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone National Park 30 years ago is somehow responsible for increasing the park’s songbird population today. (The wolves made life more dangerous for the fat-and-happy elk population; as a result, the elk spent more time on the move instead of lazily munching on young willow trees; the healthier supply of willow trees drew many more beavers — whose dams have changed river flows and fish populations — along with lots of songbirds that dig hanging out on willow branches.)

It’s impossible to know today what impact Trump’s strip-mining of the federal government will have on how well we understand the world a decade from now. But as Wired’s move implies, we should recognize that it’s unlikely to disappear without serious consequences.