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This article is part of The Rooftop, a blog and multimedia series from Å·²©ÌåÓýͶע’s Future of Land and Housing program. Featuring insights from experts across diverse fields, the series is a home for bold ideas to improve housing in the United States and globally.

Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has announced several decisions likely to worsen housing insecurity and loss in the United States.

The White House’s proposed budget would slash from the federal rental assistance program that enables nearly 10 million people to afford housing—cuts that would almost certainly increase eviction and homelessness. Newly imposed global tariffs have raised costs of construction materials by an estimated nearly , stifling acutely needed housing supply. The administration has imposed across the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), slashing staffing at the federal agency that oversees homelessness support, fair housing enforcement, and financial assistance for homeownership. And it has , impacting short and long-term disaster preparedness, recovery, and families’ ability to .

These decisions coincide with a large-scale attack on our that includes firing research staff, disbanding technical data panels, potentially limiting federal survey , and allowing an unelected presidential advisor aided by college-aged kids to seize control of our most private and sensitive information. Although these attacks may be less visible than the gutting of our social safety nets and mass layoffs at federal agencies, they collectively weaken and undermine the integrity of our data, and could harm government decision-making the most long-term.

“Although these attacks may be less visible than the gutting of social safety nets and mass layoffs at federal agencies, they collectively weaken and undermine the integrity of our data.”

There’s immense power in data that is trusted, transparent, and accessible to the public—which is by and large the goal of federal data. It forms the foundation for decision-making by supplying official statistics on who comprises the U.S. population and how that population is faring on measures of health, education, employment, and other indicators of well-being. If this data becomes unreliable or less robust, or simply ceases to exist, the public loses the ability to not only track collective well-being at any given time, but also to hold leaders accountable for any inaction or ineffective governance.

Housing is already an area where we lack comprehensive federal data. If we allow that vacuum to continue, or even expand, as the Trump administration’s cuts unfold, we’ll have no way to track one of the most foundational indicators of well-being: housing security.

The Black Box of Housing Loss

Across the United States, an estimated lose their homes each year through eviction, foreclosure, post-disaster displacement, and other kinds of housing loss. These forms of displacement splinter communities, damage physical and mental health, and limit access to jobs, education, transportation, child care, and other necessities for well-being. Meanwhile, has hit a record high, nearly half of all renters are already , and are out-of-reach for many prospective owners.

And yet despite its , we know very little about this loss, including exactly how many people lose their homes each year, and what happens to individuals and families after they’re displaced. That’s in large part because we lack a federal data system dedicated to measuring housing stability.

To address this crucial data gap, the Senate Appropriations Committee directed HUD to investigate how to measure “housing turnover” (which HUD defined as the processes by which individuals and families involuntarily lose their housing). found that a “comprehensive picture” of the scope of housing displacement would give policymakers a better understanding of how well the United States is doing to ensure that residents are stably housed. HUD further found that “measuring each form of turnover individually while aggregating them into a single measure would illuminate broader patterns of housing turnover,” and that “a combination of federal, state, and local data and a combination of survey and administrative data is the best path forward.”

Better Housing Data Is Possible

At a time when existing federal data infrastructure is actively under attack, it’s hard to imagine the administration opting to invest in stronger housing data. Indeed, when people can’t track or measure what’s happening, it’s harder to hold the government accountable, and easier for the truth to be manipulated or obscured.

Against this backdrop, advocating for better housing data through Congressional action is more vital than ever, as is supporting state and local capacity, which is among the recommendations from the 2024 HUD report. The authors make clear that better housing data is an achievable goal, noting that housing loss can be measured with different kinds of data collected from existing pathways, including administrative data (such as aggregating and standardizing court records from eviction cases) and household survey data.

To develop a national measure of housing loss, the authors outline several options, including the addition of housing-loss questions to federal surveys already administered by the Census Bureau. Ultimately, such a measure—if rigorous, regularly collected, and available at the national, state, and local levels—would have profound impacts on our understanding of the causes and consequences of housing loss, and improve our ability to develop policies and programs that keep people more securely housed.

Beyond political will, there’s no reason why we can’t establish a housing-loss rate measure comparable to the , which has become a widely accepted and closely tracked measure of the country’s economic health. When the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the job-loss numbers each month, the public instinctively assesses its progress against the actions taken by the White House, the Federal Reserve, and public and private employers, and decide for themselves whether those actions are sufficient to safeguard our economic well-being.

Any actions that pave the way for administrations to obscure the impact of their decisions and mask the economic and social damage of, say, draconian cuts to our social safety net, or wholesale dismantling of federal agencies, should immediately set off alarm bells. At a time when the country is facing several crises, including an increasingly insecure housing future, we should be doing everything we can to strengthen our federal data systems, not allowing them to be purposefully dismantled.

Editor’s note: The views expressed in the articles on The Rooftop are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policy positions of Å·²©ÌåÓýͶע.