The Attack on Public Statistics
What the weakening of the U.S. Women’s Bureau means for history, policy, and democracy
by Eileen Boris and Beth English
The views and opinions expressed in this post are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, policies, or positions of the Organization of American Historians.
Called “an ineffective policy office that is a relic of the past,” the US Women’s Bureau faces elimination in the Trump administration’s proposed Fiscal Year 2027 budget. Although last fiscal year Congress rejected zeroing out the Women’s Bureau funding, the renewed budgetary attack by the Trump administration is one of many examples of statistical agencies under threat from budget and staffing cuts, and the politicization of the very act of statistics gathering and analysis which turns the country’s economic and social activity into usable information for policymakers and the public alike.
In December, Federal News Network reported that most federal statistical agencies lost between 20 and 30 percent of their staff in 2025, citing the annual report of the American Statistical Association. That same ASA report found that widespread staffing and spending cuts had led to certain public-facing data sets being delayed, suspended, or canceled. Former Chief Statistician of the United States, Nancy Potok, decried these cuts noting, “these statistical agencies are essential infrastructure” with “so many critical decisions made based on federal statistical data.”
Established in 1920, the U.S. Women’s Bureau is simultaneously both one of the oldest of the nation’s statistic gathering agencies and today a canary in the coal mine for women, workers, and anyone dependent on reliable, nonpartisan data collection and reporting for informed policy making. The mission of the Women’s Bureau to study and improve the lives of working women remains largely the same as it was a century ago with activities including investigation of women’s laboring conditions, collection of statistics, developing policies, and, more recently, awarding grants to state and private entities to undertake projects that improves the lives of working women.
The Women’s Bureau grew out of the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in response to the surge of wage-earning women who entered the workforce, often under poor and unregulated conditions. A movement of and on behalf of women workers and the resulting patchwork of state-level “protective” labor laws—ranging from restrictions on hours and night work to access to lunchrooms and toilet breaks—led to a broader push among labor activists and reformers for the creation of a permanent, federal-level agency to study and advocate for women workers. Then, the surge of women into the industrial workforce during World War I pushed Congress to create the Women’s Bureau within the Department of Labor. From its early activities of investigating working conditions in factories, mills, and offices, and promoting labor standards and protective legislation through to today, the Bureau has played an essential role in women’s economic activities, security, and workforce participation.
Historians understand the significance of the Women’s Bureau even if the Trump administration, particularly Budget Director and Project 2025 mastermind Russell Voight, does not. Formed out of the WWI Women in Industry Service, the Bureau studied “the mother who must earn.” In a series of bulletins, it recorded the experiences of women in industry by state and sector, calling for relieving what came to be called the double day, the combining of wage labor with maintenance of families and household performed disproportionately by women. Its women-only legislation set the standards for all workers: minimum wages, maximum hours, and occupational health and safety. The early Bureau under Republican as well as the subsequent Roosevelt and Truman presidencies gave a voice to trade union women to bring their concerns to the government. During WWII and the Korean War, it campaigned for maintaining labor standards and expanding day care to lessen absenteeism and increase efficiency of the hundreds of thousands of Rosie the Riveters who entered the industrial workforces of war time.
To be sure, new administrations shifted some of its priorities. Under Eisenhower appointee Alice Leopold, the Bureau undertook guides to women in business and professional careers. With the rise of the new feminism in the 1960s and 1970s and decline of manufacturing and expansion of the service sector, the Bureau fought against discrimination and pushed for equal rights. It became an important voice supporting major legislation, including the 1963 Equal Pay Act, the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, and the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act. It realized that equality sometimes meant that women—and we might add others with care responsibilities—needed special treatment to level the playing field. It became the place to turn to for up-to-the-date information on occupational wage gaps by race and gender, as well as on childcare prices. It fought to enhance opportunities for non-traditional employment and to open up apprenticeships, historically male-dominated pathways, to high-paying skilled jobs.
But, like other Department of Labor offices, the Women’s Bureau came under the DOGE knife. At least two dozen grants programs under its administration, including those to increase women’s presence in non-traditional occupations like construction, trades, and information technology have been eliminated. So too has $1.4 million that supported the gender-based workplace violence prevention Fostering Access, Rights, and Equity (FARE) program been eliminated. Even if funding for these programs remained in place, with buyouts and resignations reducing Women’s Bureau personnel from 55 in 2024 to 21 in 2026, the staff simply isn’t there to spend allocations—a fate hampering many parts of the Executive branch. A staff member who found herself in charge removing web pages on gender equity lamented that “We were not allowed to do the work we were doing anymore. We were not allowed to email people anymore, everything got cut.” She now has joined the Bureau’s ongoing staff exodus.
If agencies like the Women’s Bureau once rendered women’s labor visible, countable, comparable, and contestable, their weakening reverses that process and the historical record will be structured by absences that are the product of political choice.
The current rationale reeks of the same disregard not only for the status of women in the labor force made by a previous charge by Project 2025 that it engaged in “politicized research,” but for all statistic-gathering and analyzing agencies of the federal government—that is, that the Bureau’s reports and findings were contrary to the administration’s priorities. In the case of women, those priorities might be summarized as a return to the home and a command to have babies within an idealized heteronormative family supported economically by a sole male breadwinner, whether or not you want or can afford to do so. Rather than the pronouncements of a strongman about the role of women, children and families in an idealized version of the past, women need an agency of their own to advance decent work for us all.
That some of the Women’s Bureau numerical series stopped in 2024 is troubling for future historical research as well as for current policy making dependent on data. Indeed, one of the last acts of the Biden-era Bureau was to give researchers access to downloadable data on labor force participation focusing on categories of race and sex, along with other files, knowing their vulnerability under the incoming administration.
Historians recognize what is unfolding as a form of archival dispossession and that the dismantling of statistical capacity actively reshapes what can be known about the nation’s economic and social life. If agencies like the Women’s Bureau once rendered women’s labor visible, countable, comparable, and contestable, their weakening reverses that process and the historical record will be structured by absences that are the product of political choice. In the absence of sustained, systematic measurement, inequality becomes harder to prove, exploitation easier to obscure, and the past itself more vulnerable. What is at stake is not only women’s work, but the evidentiary foundation on which any future history of it will depend.
Eileen Boris is Hull Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, and is President of the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA). She specializes in labor studies, gender, race, class, women's history, and social politics.
Beth English is a historian of labor, gender, deindustrialization, and globalization. She is the Executive Director of the Organization of American Historians.