Week After Week, The US is Dismantling Knowledge Infrastructure

This perspective is part of a series of provocations published on Tech Policy Press in advance of a symposium at the University of Pittsburgh's Communication Technology Research Lab (CTRL) on threats to knowledge and US democracy.

Acker is the author of Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platforms, published today by MIT Press.

There was a running joke in the first Trump term that every week was “infrastructure week.” At the close of the first year of Trump’s second term, that joke has been slowed down, flipped, and reversed. Now, every week seems to bring another assault on institutions, destroying another layer of the nation’s infrastructure.

It’s a pattern that follows the same playbook: fire career professionals who maintain the nation’s information institutions, replace them with loyalists, then defund ongoing data collection and management efforts that took decades to build. In the spring of 2025, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Commissioner was fired hours after releasing disappointing jobs data. The first woman to serve as the Librarian of Congress was dismissed in a two-sentence email. The National Archivist was removed despite having previously blocked the Biden administration’s Equal Rights Amendment ratification. Each firing portends further erasure of critical knowledge production in the nation’s most robust institutions, by systematically weakening America’s ability to collect and preserve information that markets, policymakers, and citizens depend on.

The dismissals are part of a coordinated assault on America’s knowledge infrastructure. From statistical agencies to national scientific research, the massive defunding threatens profound risks to economic competitiveness that Wall Street has yet to fully price in. The systematic targeting spans the entire knowledge production chain, from soup to nuts. The National Science Foundation has already terminated hundreds of previously approved grants, stopped paying out those that remain, and is no longer awarding new ones. Trump’s proposed 2026 budget would slash NSF funding from $9 billion to $4 billion, a 55% reduction, the deepest cuts to American scientific research since the agency’s founding.

Americans have always been anxious about the nation’s history: writing it, rewriting it, tearing it down, and debating its meaning. But what happens when this anxiety becomes destructive action, when fear produces what sociologists call “agnotology,” or the deliberate production of ignorance? This is the paradox of the present moment and the current assault on knowledge infrastructure. Week after week, we are witnessing the systematic destruction of the very instruments designed to document reality.

The institutions under attack are universities, data repositories, libraries, archives, statistical agencies that have earned their legitimacy through decades of transparency and authentication of verifiable information. Consider the irony: we now live in an age of unprecedented data collection and information access but face the lowest literacy rates in decades (a problem itself measured through government data collection). Americans have less trust in institutions and the basic facts they provide. The Federal Reserve estimates government-supported research has yielded 150-300% returns since 1950, but who will calculate the cost of ignorance we’re about to incur? Economists have warned that politicizing national statistics creates adverse economic consequences; but today the bigger risk is that future economists won’t have reliable federal statistics to access at all.

Trump’s proposed 2026 budget would cut most non-defense research support, while executive orders have already mandated immediate rescission of Biden-era AI safety protocols. Terminated research projects include efforts to develop cleaner fuels, measure methane emissions, and help communities transition to sustainable energy. Big Tech should take note: this isn’t just about academic papers, it’s about the competitive advantages that flow from publicly funded research becoming proprietary innovation. When that chain breaks, so does America’s innovation edge.

What makes this particularly damaging is hampering data accessibility and restricting information from publicly funded research. As a researcher who studies scientific data management, I’ve observed that scientists across disciplines are managing mountains of data assembled from federally funded research, but defunding will prevent them from sharing the data that taxpayers paid for. This creates a double loss: the immediate research termination and the permanent inaccessibility of already-generated knowledge that could lead to more innovation. When a cancer research project is defunded, we don’t just halt future discovery, we lose access to the data analysis that other researchers could build on. Put another way, it’s like gluing together pages in a library book, so no one else can read it.

American knowledge infrastructure includes government agencies, libraries, archives, and university research repositories and it serves three critical economic functions. First, statistical agencies like the BLS verify reality, giving us unemployment numbers, inflation data, and other economic information that markets need to function. Second, research institutions and universities fuel discovery, turning federal research grants into new knowledge. Third, libraries and archives guarantee that this knowledge is protected, reliable, and accessible to the public now and in the future. Dismantling any component weakens the entire system. Without reliable statistics, research funding, or accessible data, information asymmetries will surely increase.

Trump will certainly be remembered for reshaping American democracy, but his administration’s real achievement will be making memory itself optional. Future historians will face an unprecedented challenge of documenting a period that destroyed its own documentation and dismantled the chains of knowledge production. The absurdity of reversing infrastructure week is clear: we’re creating history by destroying the ability to record it. Is it worth it?