By MIKE SCHNEIDER

The data nerds are fighting back.

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After watching data sets be altered or disappear from U.S. government websites in unprecedented ways after President Donald Trump began his second term, an army of outside statisticians, demographers and computer scientists have joined forces to capture, preserve and share data sets, sometimes clandestinely.

Their goal is to make sure they are available in the future, believing that democracy suffers when policymakers don’t have reliable data and that national statistics should be above partisan politics.

“There are such smart, passionate people who care deeply about not only the Census Bureau, but all the statistical agencies, and ensuring the integrity of the statistical system. And that gives me hope, even during these challenging times,” Mary Jo Mitchell, director of government and public affairs for the research nonprofit the Population Association of America, said this week during an online public data-users conference.

The threats to the U.S. data infrastructure since January have come not only from the disappearance or modification of data related to gender, sexual orientation, health, climate change and diversity, among other topics, but also from job cuts of workers and contractors who had been guardians of restricted-access data at statistical agencies, the data experts said.

“There are trillions of bytes of data files, and I can’t even imagine how many public dollars were spent to collect those data. … But right now, they’re sitting someplace that is inaccessible because there are no staff to appropriately manage those data,” Jennifer Park, a study director for the Committee on National Statistics, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, said during the conference hosted by the Association of Public Data Users (APDU).

‘Gender’ switched to ‘sex’

In February, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s official public portal for health data, data.cdc.gov, was taken down entirely but subsequently went back up. Around the same time, when a query was made to access certain public data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s most comprehensive survey of American life, users for several days got a response that said the area was “unavailable due to maintenance” before access was restored.

Researchers Janet Freilich and Aaron Kesselheim examined 232 federal public health data sets that had been modified in the first quarter of this year and found that almost half had been “substantially altered,” with the majority having the word “gender” switched to “sex,” they wrote this month in The Lancet medical journal.

One of the most difficult tasks has been figuring out what’s been changed since many of the alterations weren’t recorded in documentation.

Beth Jarosz, senior program director at the Population Reference Bureau, thought she was in good shape since she had previously downloaded data she needed from the National Survey of Children’s Health for a February conference where she was speaking, even though the data had become unavailable. But then she realized she had failed to download the questionnaire and later discovered that a question about discrimination based on gender or sexual identity had been removed.

“It’s the one thing my team didn’t have,” Jarosz said at this week’s APDU conference. “And they edited the questionnaire document, which should have been a historical record.”

Among the groups that have formed this year to collect and preserve the federal data are the Federation of American Scientists’ dataindex.com, which monitors changes to federal data sets; the University of Chicago Library’s Data Mirror website, which backs up and hosts at-risk data sets; the Data Rescue Project, which serves as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts; and the Federal Data Forum, which shares information about what federal statistics have gone missing or been modified — a job also being done by the American Statistical Association.

The outside data warriors also are quietly reaching out to workers at statistical agencies and urging them to back up any data that is restricted from the public.

“You can’t trust that this data is going to be here tomorrow,” said Lena Bohman, a founding member of the Data Rescue Project.

Experts’ committee unofficially revived

Separately, a group of outside experts has unofficially revived a long-running U.S. Census Bureau advisory committee that was killed by the Trump administration in March.

Census Bureau officials won’t be attending the Census Scientific Advisory Committee meeting in September, since the Commerce Department, which oversees the agency, eliminated it. But the advisory committee will forward its recommendations to the bureau, and demographer Allison Plyer said she has heard that some agency officials are excited by the committee’s re-emergence, even if it’s outside official channels.

“We will send them recommendations but we don’t expect them to respond since that would be frowned upon,” said Plyer, chief demographer at The Data Center in New Orleans. “They just aren’t getting any outside expertise … and they want expertise, which is understandable from nerds.”

Follow Mike Schneider on the social platform Bluesky: @mikeysid.bsky.social

By MICHELLE L. PRICE

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff said Thursday the U.S. is cutting short Gaza ceasefire talks and bringing home its negotiating team from Qatar for consultations after the latest response from Hamas “shows a lack of desire to reach a ceasefire in Gaza.”

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“While the mediators have made a great effort, Hamas does not appear to be coordinated or acting in good faith,” Witkoff said in a statement. “We will now consider alternative options to bring the hostages home and try to create a more stable environment for the people of Gaza.”

It was unclear what “alternative options” the U.S. was considering. The White House had no immediate comment, and the State Department did not immediately respond to messages.

A breakthrough in talks on a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas has eluded Trump’s administration for months as conditions worsen in Gaza. The territory recently had its deadliest day yet for aid-seekers in over 21 months of war, with at least 85 Palestinians killed while trying to reach food Sunday.

The sides have held weeks of talks in Qatar, reporting small signs of progress but no major breakthroughs. Officials have said a main sticking point is the redeployment of Israeli troops after any ceasefire takes place.

White House special envoy Steve Witkoff, from right, Donald Trump Jr., and Bettina Anderson watch as President Donald Trump arrives at Teterboro Airport in Teterboro, N.J., en route to attend the Club World Cup final soccer match, Sunday, July 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Witkoff said the U.S. is “resolute” in seeking an end to the conflict in Gaza and said it was “a shame that Hamas has acted in this selfish way.”

Earlier Thursday, Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu’s office recalled his country’s negotiating team back to Israel in light of Hamas’ response.

In a brief statement, the prime minister’s office expressed its appreciation for the efforts of Witkoff and mediators Qatar and Egypt, but it gave no further details.

The deal under discussion is expected to include a 60-day ceasefire in which Hamas would release 10 living hostages and the remains of 18 others in phases in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel. Aid supplies would be ramped up and the two sides would hold negotiations on a lasting truce.

The talks have been bogged down over competing demands for ending the war. Hamas says it will only release all hostages in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal and end to the war. Israel says it will not agree to end the war until Hamas gives up power and disarms, a condition the group rejects.

White House special envoy Steve Witkoff, right, and Jared Kushner wait for the arrival of President Donald Trump at Teterboro Airport in Teterboro, N.J., en route to attend the Club World Cup final soccer match, Sunday, July 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

It’s the latest setback for Trump as he’s tried to position himself as peacemaker and made little secret of the fact he wants to receive a Nobel Peace Prize. The Republican president also had promised to quickly negotiate an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine, but little progress has been made there, either.

With the war in Gaza, Trump earlier this month met with Netanyahu at the White House, putting his weight behind a push to reach a breakthrough and a ceasefire agreement.

But despite his newly strengthened partnership with Netanyahu following their countries’ joint strikes on Iran, the Israeli leader left Washington without any announced breakthrough.

The State Department said earlier in the week that Witkoff would be traveling to the Middle East for talks, but U.S. officials later said that Witkoff would instead travel to Europe.

It was unclear if he was holding meetings there Thursday.

Associated Press writers Josef Federaman and Julia Frankel in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

By JAMES POLLARD

NEW YORK (AP) — Technology drove the personal wealth behind many philanthropists atop the list of last year’s biggest American donors. But Wendy Schmidt and her husband, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, are fairly unusual in their insistence that the scientific advancements they fund be shared widely and for the planet’s protection.

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The Silicon Valley veterans’ philanthropies, led by Wendy Schmidt, have joined the growing ranks focused on marine conservation since the Schmidt Family Foundation’s inception in 2006. With a net worth estimated to exceed $25 billion, they’re embracing that role as the Trump administration cuts billions in federal funding to scientific research.

“We work really hard to make sure science holds its place in our society,” Wendy, the president and co-founder of the Schmidt Family Foundation and Schmidt Ocean Institute, told The Associated Press. “It’s how we got where we are. It’s why we have these technologies that we’re using today.”

Her latest philanthropic venture is Agog: The Immersive Media Institute. Co-founded last year with climate journalism pioneer Chip Giller, the effort attempts to spark social change by fostering new connections with the natural world through extended reality technologies.

Grantees include “Fragile Home,” a project exploring displacement through a mixed reality headset that takes users through the past, present and future of a Ukrainian home; and Kinfolk Tech, a nonprofit that aims to help excluded communities reshape public monuments by superimposing their own digitally rendered installations onto real world spaces.

The Associated Press recently followed Wendy Schmidt on a tour of Kinfolk Tech’s Juneteenth exhibit in Brooklyn Bridge Park and spoke with her about funding scientific research. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Agog Executive Director Chip Giller, left, philanthropist Wendy Schmidt and Kinfolk Tech co-founder Idris Brewster, right, tour Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York City on June 7, 2025. (AP Photo/James Pollard)

Q: What do you hope to accomplish with Agog: The Immersive Media Institute?

A: (Extended reality) has an enormous amount of power. It has a power to get inside your head. It has a power to move you and remove your ego in a way, and it puts you inside as a participant of something. You’re seeing a story rather than just being an observer. And so, it has a potential for stirring you to action.

We realized someone’s going to take this and they’re going to make it really good. And they’ll probably use it for entertainment and someone will make money with it. But maybe there’s a better way to use it. As a philanthropist, I’m thinking about what good can come out of this and how can we use this for social good and to create more empathy in the world, more connection for people.

Q: Why are you leaning into diversity and inclusion with this tool when others are rolling back similar philanthropic efforts?

A: Well, they’re not going away. Because even when you think about AI and how you program an AI, if you’re not inclusive, you’re not really serving everybody. And when you have a technology just as powerful as this one is, and those that are more powerful, they must be inclusive by design. We work with all of our grantees to make sure that we’re listening and that their voices are heard and their stories, in this case, get told by them.

Q: What is philanthropy’s role in advancing climate research when the U.S. government is reducing funding for that area?

A: We’ve frankly continued to do what we’ve always done, which is to try to be on the frontier of research and efforts to understand our planet, to share that understanding openly with more people. Because when you see something differently, your whole worldview changes. We’re finding things in the ocean we didn’t know existed at all, even five years ago. And they should change the way we think about the planet.

And so (what’s going on today in our country) is really a shame. There are many important projects that have lost funding, and you can’t save all of them. But we are doing everything we can to shore up people in our very broad network of scientists and young PhD students and post-PhD folks, researchers everywhere. We’re expanding our opportunities on Falkor (too), on the (ocean) research vessel. Most people are lacking funding. We’re helping them to have funding so they can complete their mission. We don’t think science should stop because of what’s going on here. In fact, it’s more important than ever.

As always, it’s our job as philanthropists to take risks — to do what governments and industry often won’t do anyway. You can’t do everything, but you can do a lot. Particularly when it comes to climate and climate science. Climate modeling is super important in terms of public health and the surveillance and reporting of data. When the United States isn’t doing that, there are others who can do that if you build out their architecture. And philanthropy can play a very big role in doing that.

Q: How do you restore that faith in science?

A: Experiential (media) I think is important. One of the things that Agog can do is expose people to realities that they don’t see. People accept what they see on the surface. But when you, for example, bring people along on a dive that our robot SuBastian does off of Falkor (too), and you show them a world no human eye has ever seen, and they witness what is really on the earth. And then you give them the science and tell them this is most of life on earth and that this plays this function in your life and your well-being.

We can help people make connections when we can show them things, get their attention, and reveal the most wonderful things they’ve ever seen that are here on this planet.

Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

By MICHAEL PHILLIS, TRAVIS LOLLER and M.K. WILDEMAN

The worst water Colt Smith has seen in 14 years with Utah’s Division of Drinking Water was at a mobile home park, where residents had been drinking it for years before state officials discovered the contamination.

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The well water carried cancer-causing arsenic as much as 10 times the federal limit. Smith had to put the rural park under a do-not-drink order that lasted nearly 10 years.

“The Health Department refers it to us like … ‘Why aren’t you guys regulating it?’ We had no idea it existed,” he said.

More than 50 years after the Safe Drinking Water Act was passed to ensure that Americans’ water is free from harmful bacteria, lead and other dangerous substances, millions of people living in mobile home parks can’t always count on those basic protections.

A review by The Associated Press found that nearly 70% of mobile home parks running their own water systems violated safe drinking water rules in the past five years, a higher rate than utilities that supply water for cities and towns, according to Environmental Protection Agency data. And the problems are likely even bigger because the EPA database doesn’t catch all parks.

Even where parks get water from an outside source — such as a city — the clean water coming in can become contaminated if it passes through problematic infrastructure before reaching residents’ taps. Because the EPA doesn’t generally require this water to be tested and regulated, the problems may go unseen.

Utah is one of the few states to step in with their own rules, according to an AP survey of state policies.

“If you look back at the history of the Safe Drinking Water Act, like in the ’70s when they were starting, it was, ‘Well, as long as the source … is protected, then by the time it gets to the tap, it’ll be fine.’ And that’s just not how it works,” Smith said.

The challenge of being ‘halfway homeowners’

In one Colorado mobile home park, raw sewage backed up into a bathtub. In a Michigan park, the taps often ran dry and the water resembled tea; in Iowa, it looked like coffee — scaring residents off drinking it and ruining laundry they could hardly afford to replace. In California, boxes of bottled water crowd a family’s kitchen over fears of arsenic.

Almost 17 million people in the U.S. live in mobile homes. Some are comfortable Sun Belt retirees. Many others have modest incomes and see mobile homes as a rare opportunity for home ownership.

To understand how water in the parks can be so troubled, it’s useful to remember that residents often own their homes but rent the land they sit on. Despite the name, it’s difficult and expensive to move a mobile home. That means they’re “halfway homeowners,” said Esther Sullivan, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado in Denver who lived in several mobile home parks as she researched a book. Residents often put up with “really egregious” property maintenance by landlords because all their money is tied up in their home, she said.

Pamela Maxey, 51, of Kalamazoo, Michigan, said she had forgotten what it was like to have reliable, clean water until she traveled to her state Capitol last year to advocate for better mobile home park protections and stayed in a hotel. By then, she had spent eight years in a park where sewage backed up into homes and the flow of tap water was sometimes weak or discolored.

“It wasn’t until I went into the bathroom to take a shower that I realized, ‘I don’t have to jump in here and squint my eyes closed the entire time and make sure water doesn’t get in my mouth because I don’t know what’s in it,’” she said. “I went to brush my teeth, and I just turned the faucet on and I brushed my teeth from the water coming from the faucet. I haven’t been able to do that for over a year.”

Victoria Silva, a premed student in Fort Collins, Colorado, estimates the water in Harmony Village Mobile Home Park where Silva lives went out or lost pressure 20 to 30 times over roughly three years there.

Residents at Oasis Mobile Home Park walk past water tanks in Thermal, Calif., Tuesday, April 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

“People don’t realize how much water they need until the water is out for five minutes when they need to flush, when they need to rinse something off their hands, when they need to make some pasta,” Silva said.

The park’s owner says a licensed professional ensures water is maintained and tested, and outages are minimized.

Small water companies, serial problems

The U.S. has some 50,000 water utilities, most serving small towns and rural areas. Many struggle to find expert staff and funding, and they violate clean water rules more often than the handful of large utilities that serve cities. But even among the hard-pressed small utilities, mobile home parks stand out.

The AP analysis found that more than half these parks failed to perform a required test for at least one contaminant, or failed to properly report the results, in the past five years. And they are far more likely to be repeat offenders of safe drinking water rules overall.

But that’s only part of the story. The true rates of mobile home park violations aren’t knowable because the EPA doesn’t track them well. The agency’s tap water violation database depends on information from states that often don’t properly categorize mobile home parks.

When Smith first searched Utah’s database in response to an AP request for data from all 50 states, he found only four small water systems identified as belonging to mobile home parks. With some keyword searches, he identified 33 more.

Cases of bottled drinking water are stored under a kitchen counter in the home of Agustin and Ricarda Toledo in Oasis, Calif., Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Other parks aren’t in the databases at all and may be completely unregulated.

One July day in 2021, officials with the EPA were out investigating sky-high arsenic levels in the tap water at Oasis Mobile Home Park in the Southern California desert when they realized the problem went way beyond just one place.

“It was literally us driving around and going, ‘Wait a minute, there’s a bunch of mobile home parks!’” said Amy Miller, who previously served as EPA’s head of enforcement for the Pacific Southwest region.

The water in these other parks had been off their radar. At some, testing found high levels of cancer-causing arsenic in the water that had been provided to residents for years.

It’s impossible to know how many unnoticed parks are out there. Most states aren’t actively looking for them and say they find very few. In Colorado, after the state passed a new law to require water testing at all mobile home parks, officials uncovered 79 parks with their source of water unknown. That’s about a tenth of the total parks in the state.

Pipes ‘like spaghetti’ in the ground

Many parks are decades old with aging pipes that can cause chronic water problems, even if the water that supplies the park is clean when it enters the system.

Jake Freeman, the engineering director at Central States Water Resources, a Missouri-based private utility company that specializes in taking over small water systems in 11 states, said substandard and poorly installed pipes are more common to see in mobile home parks.

“A lot of times, it’s hard to find the piping in the mobile home parks because if there’s any kind of obstruction, they just go around it,” he said. ”“It’s like spaghetti laying in the ground.”

After a major winter storm devastated Texas in 2021, Freeman said, the company found pipes at parks it had taken over that “were barely buried. Some of them weren’t buried.”

When pipes break and leak, the pressure drops and contaminants can enter water lines. In addition, parks sometimes have stagnant water — where pipes dead-end or water sits unused — that increases the risk of bacterial growth.

Rebecca Sadosky is public water supply chief in North Carolina, where mobile home communities make up close to 40% of all water systems. She said owners don’t always realize when they buy a park that they could also be running a mini utility.

“I think they don’t know that they’re getting into the water business,” she said.

It doesn’t have to be like this

Utah is a rare state that enforces safe drinking water standards even within mobile home parks that get their water from another provider, according to AP’s survey of states. A small number of other states like New Hampshire have taken some steps to address water safety in these parks, but in most states frustrated residents may have no one to turn to for help beyond the park owner.

Victoria Silva brushes their teeth with filtered water Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2025, in Fort Collins, Colo. (AP Photo/Brittany Peterson)

In Colorado, when Silva asked officials who enforces safe drinking water rules, “I just couldn’t get clear answers.”

Steve Via, director of federal regulations at the American Water Works Association utility group, argued against regulating mobile home parks that get their water from a municipality, saying that would further stretch an already taxed oversight system. And if those parks are regulated, what’s to stop the rules from extending to the privately owned pipes in big apartment buildings — the line has to be drawn somewhere, he said.

Via said residents of parks where an owner refuses to fix water problems have options, including going to their local health departments, suing or complaining publicly.

Silva is among the advocates who fought for years to change Colorado’s rules before they succeeded in passing a law in 2023 that requires water testing in every mobile home park. It gives health officials the ability to go beyond federal law to address taste, color and smell that can make people afraid to drink their water, even when it’s not a health risk. The state is now a leader in protecting mobile home park tap water.

Smith, the Utah environmental scientist, said stopping the contaminated water flowing into the mobile home park and connecting it to a safe supply felt like a career highlight.

He said Utah’s culture of making do with scarce water contributed to a willingness for stronger testing and regulations than the federal government requires.

“There’s sort of the communal nature of like, everybody should have access to clean water,” he said. “It seems to transcend political ideologies; it seems to transcend religious ideologies.”

The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment