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Policy experts discuss how funding cuts, agency disruptions, and declining trust are affecting U.S. public data—and the innovative solutions emerging to fill critical gaps.
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Data Crisis Deepens as Agencies Face Cuts, Disruptions, and Declining Trust
Jul 28, 2026
Policy experts at every level of government require solid facts and data to come to the best decisions for their constituencies. However, especially as the second Trump Administration took over executive agencies in 2025, the data world has faced unprecedented new challenges. These include funding cuts that limit agencies' ability to gather and maintain data, frequent leadership changes that disrupt continuity, increased constraints on accountability and oversight, and disruptions in key statistical divisions. The combination of these challenges has made it significantly harder for policy professionals to rely on consistent, high-quality data.
Some of these issues were explored recently in an illuminating webinar which is part of the Democracy and Public Service Initiative, a partnership between the National Academy of Public Administration and the Bridge Alliance. The panel was moderated by Democracy and Public Service Initiative Fellow Joel Gurin, President and Founder of Center for Open Data Enterprise (CODE). “It is a fraught issue and one where we need to seek a lot of creative solutions,” Gurin said.
Beth Jarosz, Vice President of the Association of Public Data Users, observed that the field faced significant challenges even prior to 2025, but conditions have deteriorated markedly in the past two years. Jarosz stated, “We went from slowly eroding budgets and not being able to modernize to wholesale disruption of entire statistical divisions like the National Center for Education Statistics, the removal of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, major cuts in agency staffing, and increasing rules that constrain the accountability and oversight of those agencies.”
A pollster by training, Chris Jackson, SSRS Civil Society Research Lead, referenced surveys his group has conducted with the “data user community,” including businesses, academics, local governments, and nonprofits. He said 93 percent of those surveyed noted they were impacted in some fashion. It ranged from “delayed programs they were working on because the data wasn’t accessible, or canceling of programs because the data wasn’t available.
Francesa Perucci, Director of Policy and Partnership at Open Data Watch, is an expert in international data research and “citizen data,” the practice of public participation and collaboration in scientific research, where everyday volunteers collect, analyze, or report data. She noted that citizen data is one potential solution to a data crisis. “Citizen data responds to the erosion of trust in data. You provide agency to citizens, so you engage them. You get better representation and inclusion, stronger relevance, and overall fill the data gaps,” Perucci said.
Stefaan Verhulst, Co-Founder of GovLab, noted that while the world may be enjoying an “AI Summer,” we’re also experiencing a “data winter.” “We’re seeing a decline of trust but also accessibility,” he said. But Verhulst, an expert in “nontraditional data,” also noted that we’re experiencing an explosion in the sheer volume of data available as the world converts to a digital age. “How do we reuse this massive amount of data that has resulted from digital instrumentation and transactions for public interest purposes and complementing official statistics?” Verhulst said.
You can watch the entire webinar recording here:
Bradford Fitch is a Senior Advisor to the Bridge Alliance, former CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation, and author of “Citizen’s Handbook for Influencing Elected Officials."
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Protesters clash with law enforcement after a federal agent shot and killed Alex Pretti on January 24, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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Single Mothers Lost Months of Income Hiding From Ice — and Now Can’t Afford To Renew Immigration Papers
Jul 27, 2026
It was a frigid January morning in Minneapolis. Alexa quietly stepped outside her apartment to heat her car for her baby, who was waiting inside in her crib.
They immediately spotted her.
At the edge of the complex, the doors of a van carrying Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents swung open. They sprinted toward her.
She remembers the guns they held, and how the sight of them caused her to drop her lunchbox in the snow, turn on the spot and run as fast as she ever had back into the safety of her apartment, back to her daughter. When she shut the door, she didn’t leave again for nearly three months.
She couldn’t work. Those months drained every penny she had saved. When her own money ran out, she had no one to turn to. A year prior, her partner died in a car accident while she was eight months pregnant, leaving her with no other family in the United States. As she kept an eye on the ICE agents outside of her window, she turned to Minneapolis’ robust mutual aid networks run by volunteers who delivered groceries, formula and diapers to her door.
When ICE finally started to withdraw from the city in April, Alexa, whose name The 19th has changed to protect her privacy, finally ventured out. She started picking up odd jobs again and life returned to some sense of normalcy.
Until it came time to renew her Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) application about two months ago.
Alexa arrived alone in the United States from Honduras when she was 14 years old, which qualified her for DACA. For years, that policy has protected her from deportation and granted her permission to work. That work permit has been her lifeline over 12 years, and every two years she has faithfully renewed it.
With no savings, she had to decide between paying her rent to keep her baby and her 5-year-old housed, or paying the application fee — $555 — plus nearly $800 in attorneys fees she usually pays to ensure the application is done correctly. She chose rent.
But without her work authorization, Alexa can’t find a better job or regain any stability. She picks up any odd job that comes her way — cleaning hotel rooms, cooking and selling food — to gather up enough to renew her permit.
“I only work and work, and I can’t do anything else because I need to recover economically. I am the only one who is here with my daughter,” Alexa said in Spanish. “This is how many of us are.”
In the months since the end of ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, which claimed the lives of two American citizens and saw hundreds of people with no criminal background detained, the immigrant families who hid in their homes are still reeling from the long-term effects of months of employment and income loss. One of the most pressing now: Interruptions in their immigration status or delays in paperwork that have kept them stuck in a cycle of uncertainty for nearly eight months.
Bri, a Minneapolis single mother who has single-handedly been running a mutual aid network for months, said about 52 people have contacted her seeking help covering their DACA fees. Nearly all of them are single mothers like Alexa.
“I have a lot of families, single moms, people from my community that are reaching out asking if I know who can get help,” said Bri, whose name The 19th changed for her safety. “A lot of families don’t have $500 lying around right now.”
At the start of the year, Bri amassed about $250,000 in donations to help get breastmilk donations to babies whose mothers had been detained, as well as other needs. That money helped 174 families with rent assistance and other bills. But “the need is just so high right now,” Bri said, and she’s now out of funds. Across the state, demand at food shelves and the number of eviction filings are set to hit all-time highs in 2026. In Minneapolis, the city estimates that immigrant workers with limited English proficiency lost $152 million in wages from December to March alone.
Bri has started a new GoFundMe, but no funds have trickled in yet. She’s been referring people to other local organizations, but those too are running out of money and having a harder time drawing donations or volunteers.
The support that flooded into Minneapolis at the start of the year has abated, but the problems have not.
Around town, people are on certain street corners with their tools waiting for someone to drive by and give them a job. Restaurants aren’t as full. Kids aren’t out at parks as much as they used to be. Church pews go unfilled on Sundays. Recently, two people were taken by ICE out of a front yard where they were cutting grass.
Single mothers, who work at higher rates than other mothers because they rely on the income to support their children, are already more likely to be low-income, facing higher rates of food and housing insecurity. Even three months of work disruption could put them in a precarious position, at risk of losing their housing and not having enough to feed their children.
Karen Clara, the social services director at the St. Louis Park Emergency Program, a local social services agency, said the organization has been using donations that came in at the start of the year to cover rent assistance for more than 200 families, and recently more people have been asking about aid with immigration paperwork filing fees. They’ve continued offering the rent assistance as a way to open people up to use other funds to cover filing fees, she said.
But the group is down to their last $5,000.
“I’ve been having mostly a lot of conversations with people to try to troubleshoot and think about letting them know our funding is running out. ‘How are things looking? Are you able to maybe join with another family member who is in the area to save money with rent? How are jobs working?’” Clara said.
Tracy Roy, the legal director at the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, said part of the problem for DACA families is there is almost no way to waive the filing fees, even for those with little to no income. On top of that, those who filed at the start of the year are seeing processing times as long as eight months in some cases, Roy said.
The Trump administration was sued last month for delays in processing DACA renewal applications, which are usually fulfilled within four to eight weeks but now can take three months or more.
For the single moms who are left to raise children after a male partner is deported, which is common among the people she sees, Clara said, there is now fear of deportation.
When they come in, Clara said, she “can see the hesitancy on their faces.”
“We’re a few months out from when things have kind of calmed down, but it’s a lot of trauma that’s gonna have to be worked through,” she said. “There’s going to be long-lasting financial effects. There are families who are torn apart.”
Ensuring they can maintain their immigrant status, she said, is “priority level number one.”
Jazmin, a single mother of two girls in Minneapolis, is preparing for her DACA to lapse in September. She was fired from her job at Target at the start of the year when she stopped going to work as ICE descended on the city. She’s back at work now, but was demoted, and her last day will be September 18 unless she can renew her DACA by September 20, when it’s set to lapse. In the meantime, she’s playing catch-up on an even slimmer budget and trying to squirrel away anything she can for her DACA renewal. With attorney fees, it will cost her about $1,300.
Jazmin has renewed the application numerous times since she got DACA in 2015 — she’s been in the United States since she was 5 years old — but this is the first time it may lapse.
“All of this is a nightmare that we all hope will end soon,” said Jazmin, who The 19th is identifying only by her first name.
As a precaution, she appointed someone to care for her girls should she get deported. With no family in the United States, she selected one of her daughters’ teachers.
“I felt like a horrible mother that day, because how could I sign my kids away to a teacher? But in that moment it was for their safety,” she said. “I felt like I failed them.”
Roy said the situation for many families exemplifies how ICE operations like Metro Surge could destabilize families’ lives for years — even for those who avoided deportation.
The attacks on immigrant families “haven’t stopped just because they’ve gotten quieter,” she said. ICE is still detaining people.
For now, her organization has been able to cover immigration paperwork filing fees for all the families who have come to them asking for help — about 100 this year — and the organization does not charge any legal fees to help with applications. But there is little legal recourse for those who are in limbo waiting to receive their permits as delays continue.
And eventually, their funds, which came in through donations largely at the start of the year, will dry up.
“It is something we are talking about internally, is how we can continue to do this if we don’t have a steady stream of donations,” Roy said.
Single Mothers Lost Months of Income Hiding From Ice — and Now Can’t Afford To Renew Immigration Papers was originally published by The 19th and is republished with permission.
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Reclassifying Faith?: Inside the Department of War’s Revision to Its List of Religions
Jul 23, 2026
This nonpartisan policy brief, written by an ACE fellow, is republished by The Fulcrum as part of our partnership with the Alliance for Civic Engagement and our NextGen initiative — elevating student voices, strengthening civic education, and helping readers better understand democracy and public policy.
How Are Religions Recognized in the U.S. Military?
Introduced in World War 1, dog tags, or metal identification tags worn by U.S. service members, are one of the primary ways the U.S. military recognizes religions. Besides including a service member’s name, Department of War (DOW) identification number, and blood type, dog tags can include a service member’s religious preference. Since 2017, service members have chosen from a list of 211 recognized religions, also known as the “Faith and Belief Codes,” for their dog tag engravings. Outside of dog tags, the U.S. military has also shared service members’ religious preferences with the Army Chaplains Corp. First established under President George Washington, three chaplain corps (Army Chaplain Corps, the Air Force Chaplain Corps, and the Navy Chaplain Corps) host commissioned officers who provide religious support to service members and their families. As of today, more than 3,000 chaplains serve in the Chaplains Corp. Among them, approximately 110 religious faith groups are represented.
Why Did the U.S. Military Reduce Its List of Recognized Religions?
In a memo first released to news outlets on June 4, 2026, the DOW announced a reduction to the list of recognized religions by the U.S. military. A notable decrease from the 211 previously recognized religions, the new list, renamed “Religious Affiliation Codes,” contains just 31 religions. Intended to “streamline the DOW’s collection of religious preferences selection for Service members,” the move follows other previously announced changes by the Department, including chaplains being instructed to wear their religious insignia in place of their rank insignia, or symbols worn on military uniforms indicting a service member’s duties, pay grade, or rank. The new list of recognized religions is expected to take effect in July.
Who Supports the New List?
Supporters of DOW’s new, reduced list of recognized religions include Under Secretary of War for Personnel and Readiness Anthony J. Tata, who suggested the new list would “enhance the delivery of targeted religious support from the Chaplaincy.” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell praised the DOW’s new list, calling it “long overdue” and beneficial to chaplains, who can now quickly respond to the spiritual needs of their units. Secretary of War’s Pete Hegseth, who hinted at reducing the list in late March, voiced his support for the new list and labeled the old list of over 200 religions “impractical and unusable.” Some veterans also supported the new list, with Retired Major General Randell E. Kitchens, who formerly served as the Air Force’s Chief of Chaplains, noting that the list "appears to represent major faith groups.”
Who Opposes the New List?
Critics of the DOW’s new, reduced list of recognized religions include lawmakers, religious organizations, and veterans. The Unitarian Universalist Association expressed concerns that, with Unitarian Universalism removed from the list, service members identifying with the religion could now face challenges accessing spiritual care. Meanwhile, co-founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, Mikey Weinstein, argued that the change violated the U.S. Constitution's “separation of church and state.” Lawmakers like Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and Senator John Curtis (R-UT) also questioned the new list, specifically the DOW’s decision to not label the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a Christian denomination. Veterans protested the new list too, with a former U.S. Army Chaplain calling the new list “an excuse for the failure to provide the free exercise of religion for all people.”
What Will Happen to Chaplains and Service Members With Unrecognized Religions?
Although the DOW eventually responded to criticism of the new list by removing the labeling that stated whether a religion was a Christian denomination, 31 religions still remain on the list. That said, military experts like Retired General Steven Schaick worry chaplains of unrecognized religions could lose their ecclesiastical endorsement, an official certification from one’s religious denomination to serve as a chaplain. An ecclesiastical endorsement is required by all branches of the military. And while the memo stated service members could still put unrecognized religions on their dog tags, and many of the unrecognized religions remain on the Department of Veteran Affair’s (VA) list of approved emblems for headstones, some former military members predict that the changed policy will make some service members feel unrecognized, putting their well-being at risk.
Reclassifying Faith?: Inside the Department of War’s Revision to Its List of Religions was first published on The Alliance for Citizen Engagement and was republished with permission.
Stephanie Peterson is a senior at Purdue University Northwest.
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Don't Hold Your Breath Waiting for Politicians or Their Consultants to Fix Gerrymandering
Jul 22, 2026
2018, a nonprofit worker in Michigan named Katie Fahey posted a message online asking if anyone else was tired of politicians drawing their own districts. She had no campaign experience and no political base.
Within two years, the ballot initiative she built, called Voters Not Politicians, had written an independent redistricting commission into the Michigan constitution. Hollywood eventually made a documentary about it, Slay the Dragon, which is a fairly accurate description of what she had actually done.
- YouTube www.youtube.com
California voters had already done something similar a decade earlier. The Independent Voter Project supported both Proposition 11 in 2008 and Proposition 20 in 2010, handing the state's congressional map to an independent citizens commission instead of the legislature.
Neither reform came from Congress, a caucus, a task force, a political consultant, or a framework; both came from voters who grew tired of waiting and took matters into their own hands.
This brings us to the Congressional Problem Solvers Caucus, which unveiled a Gerrymandering Reform Framework on July 1 calling for national standards and an end to mid-decade map redraws. (The particulars are covered by Independent Voter News here.)
Their big plan landed a few months before a midterm election in which independent and No Party Preference voters have grown loud about their disgust with gerrymandering. That disdain is not exactly irrational, especially since 94% of House seats are considered safe for one party or the other, according to the Cook Political Report.
One of the framework's earliest fans is a California political consultant who reposted the caucus's press release, calling it important and necessary and adding that the country needed to enter 2031 with real, standardized reform.
He did not mention, in that post, that he has spent years drawing California's congressional districts for Democrats, or that he is paid each time those districts get redrawn. It is possible to cheer for the end of a war you are paid to help wage, though it is not obvious why anyone should mistake the cheering for sincerity.
The caucus's own math is not encouraging at all. Every single one of these representatives knows full well that nothing becomes law without a majority. No majority is attainable in the current House unless Republican Speaker Mike Johnson and Democrat Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries agree on something—an event with no recent precedent.
The immediate mess we find ourselves did not start with Congress either. President Donald Trump pushed Texas to redraw its map outside the normal 10-year cycle, and Texas obliged him.
Governor Gavin Newsom then asked California voters for permission to respond, temporarily setting aside the state's own independent commission to draw a map of the legislature's choosing.
Voters agreed, wiping California's gold standard of independent redistricting off the books.
As of May 2026, 10 states—Alabama, California, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah—had new congressional maps. Before 2025, according to Ballotpedia, only two states had conducted voluntary mid-decade redistricting since 1970.
So here is one truth about partisan gerrymandering: the people in Congress or the political consultants currently getting any credit for wanting to fix it are not the people with the power to do so, and the people who do have that power were never in Washington to begin with.
Katie Fahey did not need Congress, and neither did the voters of California, thanks to the power of direct democracy.
Congress can keep issuing frameworks for as long as it likes; a framework requires no votes and changes nothing. A ballot initiative requires signatures, patience, and nobody's permission, not in Sacramento and not in Washington, which is presumably why it remains the only version of reform that has ever actually worked.
Cara Brown McCormick is the principal at Smart Campaigns and advises on strategy and research.
Don't Hold Your Breath Waiting for Politicians or Their Consultants to Fix Gerrymandering is republished as part of The Fulcrum’s partnership with IVN and the Latino News Network to expand voter‑first journalism and strengthen public‑centered coverage of democracy.
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