Information ministry

• Suppression over falsification. The most instructive comparison might sound wild, but: From 1936 to 1956, the Soviet government under published very little population data; and officials plain fabricated the 1939 census results. But outright falsification happened less often than simply refusing to publish or collect data the regime decided was unsuitable. The state closed statistical journals and university departments. World-renowned statisticians like Andrey Kolmogorov abandoned statistical research. The policy wasn’t about lying to the West; it was about controlling the domestic narrative by eliminating any factual basis for criticism. When life-expectancy indicators worsened in the 1970s, the government launched new rounds of suppression. Without data showing the problem, the problem officially … didn’t exist.
• The pincer movement. What distinguishes the current moment from either the Soviet pattern—or even from the surveillance abuses of U.S. President Richard Nixon in the 1970s—is the combination. Nixon weaponized IRS data against his political enemies and created the Plumbers unit to plug information leaks. But Nixon faced institutional resistance—the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Director J. Edgar Hoover opposed Nixon’s Huston Plan for expanded domestic surveillance; courts forced release of White House tapes; the U.S. Congress passed transparency reforms, including the Tax Reform Act of 1976, making tax records confidential by default. The current administration is attempting both suppression and weaponization simultaneously, while systematically removing the officials who might resist. It closes off public access to government data that enables accountability while demanding government access to citizen data for purposes that include identifying political opponents.
• Patrimonial information control. This serves a specific form of power consolidation. As Steve Hanson describes it here in The Signal, patrimonial rule treats the state as family property, demanding personal loyalty over constitutional authority. Information control becomes essential: removing data that could challenge the leader’s narrative (employment figures showing weakness, climate data contradicting denial, demographic research documenting inequality), while gathering data to identify disloyalty (which immigrants receive food assistance, which organizations support opposition movements, where critics appear in tax records or voter rolls). The question isn’t so much whether the data is true or false; it’s whether the data serves or threatens the leader’s hold on power.

Watch what the administration is building: an information architecture where accountability flows in only one direction. The public loses the ability to verify claims about economic conditions, public health threats, or environmental impacts. State and local governments must hand over citizen data with “unfettered access” or risk losing federal funding. Executive orders systematically dismantle the privacy protections enacted after the Watergate scandal that ended Nixon’s presidency—the careful limitations on how government agencies can share and use personal information.

The general mechanism matters more than the specific motive. Whether the administration believes climate change is a hoax or finds the data inconvenient makes no difference: Citizens can’t verify conditions independently either way. Once you build infrastructure consolidating personal data in a “master database,” that infrastructure persists. What this administration is creating now, in other words, will outlast it.

No, the Trump administration is not the Soviet Union, let alone the Soviet Union under Stalin. But Stalin did something specific with statistics worth noticing in the United States in 2025. He eliminated data showing his policies were failing. He fired statisticians and closed the bureaus producing inconvenient numbers. The question shifted from what is true to what can be proven. Without reliable data, Soviet planners couldn’t tell which policies worked and which didn’t—one reason the system eventually collapsed under the weight of its own inefficiencies.

In the U.S., post-Watergate reforms assumed transparency would prevent future abuses—that freedom-of-information laws, privacy protections, and congressional oversight could constrain executive power. But those assumptions depended on officials enforcing the rules, courts upholding them, and institutional resistance slowing overreach. 

The shutdown’s data blackout may prove temporary, but what the administration is building behind it may not be: an information architecture that enables the government to know as much as possible about its citizens, while citizens can verify almost nothing about their government.