The Trump regime has been removing information that is not consistent with their ideology from federal agency websites. It is essentially a modern day version of book burning. This move to alter the historical record mimics both the Nazi book burning of 1933 -1945, as well as Communist Russia’s photograph-doctoring from 1922-1991. Like these authoritarian governments, the Trump regime is replacing information with propaganda, much of which consists of lies and erroneous statements made by Trump himself. As part of this effort, the regime is purging not only data but also staff at the nation’s information agencies, notably, the Census Bureau.

Further, the Trump regime is also signaling that it does not need demographic and economic information for its initiatives. This will affect both state and local governments. For example, consider the HOME Investment Partnership program, which was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush in 1990 as part of the Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act. This program, which was designed exclusively to create housing for low-income families, quickly became the largest Federal block grant to states and local governments to provide affordable housing.

The HOME program has paid dividends across Washington state. The city of Bellingham alone has benefited to the tune of $4.6 million in HOME grants from 2021 to 2024, which is an annual average of $1,158,916. This annual HOME funding is based on a formula that uses US Census Bureau data to estimate six qualifying factors (see below). Given the Trump regime’s purge of data, as well as staff who produce the data, one can expect that less than accurate information will be fed into future formulas used in programs such as HOME.

As an example, if the Census Bureau produces an estimate of Bellingham’s population that is, conservatively, 2.6 % lower than its actual population, our annual HOME funding would be reduced by approximately $18,300.  Over the ten years between the 2020 and 2030 census, this underestimate would cost the city of Bellingham $183,000 in HOME funds.

But federal programs that assist local governments are not the only ones that will be affected by these data purges; they will also affect programs run directly by the states. For example, Washington state’s revenue sharing program estimates the revenue each jurisdiction can expect to receive from the state as their portion of state taxes collected on liquor, criminal justice, gas taxes, etc. This program relies on annual population estimates of cities, towns, counties, and other jurisdictions developed by the population unit of the governor’s budget office in Olympia, the Office of Financial Management (OFM). Started under the auspices of the Washington State Census Board, these annual estimates have been calculated since the 1940s as part of an emergency measure during a massive wartime in-migration.  

In 2025, Bellingham is expected to receive about $3,421,900 through this revenue sharing program. However, these allotments are based on decennial census data produced by the U.S. Census Bureau and are supplemented by the inter-censal data the Census Bureau produces. If the inter-censal data are inaccurate, the population numbers will be inaccurate, causing the related information produced by OFM to be inaccurate as well. Following the earlier example of the HOME program, if its population is underestimated by 2.6%, Bellingham would only receive about $3,336,352, a loss of about $85,550. Over the course of the ten years between the 2020 and 2030 census, the 2.6% underestimate would lead to an estimated loss of  $855,000 in state revenue-sharing funds for Bellingham. 

Then, of course, there is the propaganda aspect of the data purging going on under the Trump regime. This appears to be in line with the principles laid out by Hitler’s Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.  But that is yet another article.

*Wolkenkuckucksheim translates into “Cloud Cuckoo land.” It was used by Field Marshall Erwin Rommel to describe Adolf Hitler’s strategy for defending the French coastline during WWII.