Learning, Leading, and Losing Access: My Journey in Public Health Data

Posted on May 20, 2025 by Gabriela Lazalde

This entry is part 57 of 62 in the series Wide World of Public Health Systems

In late 2016, just a few weeks into the first Trump administration, I was completing my MPH in Public Health Administration and Policy at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health and aiming to begin a PhD program to continue my research training in the fall. In the personal statement I wrote as part of my application, I described my future aspirations of working with “organizations evaluating current programs and policies, assess[ing] impact of future changes…[and] quantifying benefits produced by current policies and programs.”

At the time, I felt driven to keep learning how I could use public health data in a way that could help preserve and expand benefits of pro-health policies. In my MPH program concentrating on Public Health Administration and Policy, I had begun to learn first-hand how much of an asset data could be in advocating for state and national-level policies and practices that promote public health. I had used a wide variety of data sources on state and federal policies and their outcomes throughout my courses and community-facing work.

After beginning my PhD training in UCLA Community Health Sciences PhD program, I continued growing my policy and data analysis skills in my coursework, dissertation preparation, research internship with Bienestar, a community-based organization working in substance use and HIV prevention and care, and in my graduate assistantship at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. These experiences helped me progress toward the career goals I had described and led me to my current role at the University of Minnesota Center for Public Health Systems. Virtually all of the specific learning experiences I’ve described have depended upon having access to high quality public health data and federal funds to produce such data.

For example, as part of an NIMHD-funded project, the Latino Youth Health Study (LYHS), I helped with the design and analysis of an add-on to the US’ largest state health survey, the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS). The generation of such data allows researchers and advocates to better understand the factors influencing the health of Latino families in California and justify the types of policies that protect their health. Currently, such policies as the expansion of public benefits to non-citizens are under threat, despite evidence of the federal political climate generating a chilling effect on Latino (and Asian) immigrants’ use of health care services.

In my current role, changes to federal public health infrastructure have resulted in challenges to completing work relevant to understanding and improving the current and future public health workforce. Researchers across the country are experiencing delays due to limitations on CDC communication and increased scrutiny from the federal government; pressure to reconfigure research plans to exclude consideration of anything that might be interpreted as DEI related to comply with Executive Orders; and uncertainty about the future of funding. The worry most closely connected to the past experiences I’ve described, however, relates to the threat of loss of data. As many have described, federally available data are disappearing from public availability. It is unclear when or if these losses will conclude.

I was reminded of this as recently as today, when I visited the National Archive for Computerized Data on Aging, a collection of data hosted through the University of Michigan’s ICPSR. At the top of the site, a banner ominously reads “On March 31, 2025, as a sponsor of this project, NIH requested that the following language be added to this website: This repository is under review for potential modification in compliance with Administration directives.”

I had been searching the site as part of a larger literature review project where colleagues and I are assessing what data sources may be available to conduct public health workforce-centered research in the future. While downloading and saving versions of the currently available data will likely be the approach we take to carry this work forward, questions loom around how ongoing threats will affect how and whether future versions of these data will be collected and shared.

This loss of access to quality data sources will harm not only current and future public health researchers who will struggle to answer critical research questions, but also the communities whose health they aim to protect with their work. In the face of these challenges, it will be important for us to share how ongoing experiences affect our work and steps we are taking to ensure the work can continue. The two professional organizations I am a member of – AcademyHealth and the American Public Health Association – have monitored and reported ongoing federal changes and suggested actions public health researchers can take to advocate to protect our data access.

About the Author

Gabriela Lazalde: Gabriela Lazalde is a researcher for the Center for Public Health Systems. As a social scientist trained in theory-driven quantitative analysis, her work focuses on how policy affects health. She holds an MPH from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health and a PhD from UCLA.