The US Department of Health and Human Services has announced it is cutting 10,000 of its 82,000 jobs and restructuring:

As part of the restructuring, the department’s 10 regional offices will be cut to five and its 28 divisions consolidated into 15, including a new Administration for a Healthy America, or AHA, which will combine offices that address addiction, toxic substances and occupational safety into one central office.

AHA will include the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

These divisions do many different jobs, but as usual what stands out to me is their data- both because it is what I have found directly useful in the past, and because it is what I still have some control over now. Writing your Representatives or writing an op-ed has a minuscule chance of changing Federal policy, but if you download data, you definitely have that data.

What worries me here is that some of the agencies being consolidated might discontinue some of their data products going forward, or even pull some of what they have already created offline. I don’t think this is farfetched given what has happened so far, and given that even in good times these agencies pull down data they painstakingly prepared. For instance, HRSA only publicly posts the State- and County-level Area Health Resources File back to 2019, even though they have annual data going back to 2001.

Probably all 13 of the reorganizing divisions have data worth looking into, and given the staff cuts, even data products in the other divisions could be at risk. But my plan is to focus on the two reorganizing divisions whose data I have previously found useful- HRSA and SAMHSA. HRSA has a nice data download page with 16 different datasets, including the Area Health Resources File, which offers detailed information on the health care workers and facilities in each US county. SAMHSA offers the National Substance Use and Mental Health Services Survey, the Treatment Episode Data Set, and the National Survey of Drug Use and Health. I have previously cleaned and archived the state-level version of the NSDUH, but not the individual-level version that is for now still available from SAMHSA.

All of these datasets are easy to download now, and some will probably become very hard to access later, so now is a good time to take a few minutes and save whatever you think you might need.