Access to federal data in flux

Speaker 1 This Marketplace podcast is supported by Wealth Enhancement, who ask, do you have a blueprint for your money?

Speaker 1 Wealth Enhancement can help you build the right blueprint for investing, retirement, tax, and more.

Speaker 1 With offices nationwide, there's an advisor who's ready to listen and craft a blueprint for your future. Find out more at wealthenhancement.com/slash build.

Speaker 1 This podcast is supported by Odoo. Some say Odoo business management software is like fertilizer for businesses because the simple, efficient software promotes growth.

Speaker 1 Others say Odoo is like a magic beanstalk because it scales with you and is magically affordable.

Speaker 1 And some describe Odoo's programs for manufacturing, accounting, and more as building blocks for creating a custom software suite. So Odoo is fertilizer, magic beanstock building blocks for business.

Speaker 1 Odoo, exactly what businesses need. Sign up at odoo.com.
That's odoo.com.

Speaker 1 Corporate news to start, government data and the absence of it to follow, and then

Speaker 1 they keep using that word. It does not mean what they think it means.
From American public media, this is Marketplace.

Speaker 1 In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Risdahl. It is Thursday today, the 20th of February.
Good as always to have you along, everybody.

Speaker 1 Those of you who've been wondering what's going on on Wall Street, how traders seem so sanguine given the uncertainty, the answer came to us early this morning, 7 a.m.

Speaker 1 local time in Bentonville, Arkansas, to be specific. The quarterly earnings call from the world's biggest retailer, during which Walmart CEO Doug McMillan touted some of the highlights.

Speaker 1 Advertising sales were up 29% last quarter, he said. Its third-party marketplace grew 34%.

Speaker 1 Membership income grew double digits as well. But careful listeners will have noticed that none of those things are actually retail sales.

Speaker 1 Daniel Ackerman gets us going with what Walmart's up to, besides just selling things.

Speaker 2 Walmart, the quintessential big box, right?

Speaker 3 Not anymore. They've done a pretty good job the last couple of years investing in these alternative businesses.

Speaker 2 Michael Baker heads consumer research at T.A. Davidson.
He says those alternative businesses include taking a cut from third parties who sell through Walmart's website.

Speaker 2 Walmart also sells ads on said website. It offers shipping services too.
And one reason Walmart can do all that, says Chi Hong Li, a business professor at UConn, is because it's really big.

Speaker 4 They have the scale. They have the infrastructure and they have the expertise.

Speaker 2 Walmart has thousands of trucks, warehouses, and stores, plus a fancy web platform, all initially built for its sprawling retail business.

Speaker 2 Jason Miller is a professor of supply chains at Michigan State.

Speaker 3 When you build up all of these resources that may have excess capacity, if you can sell out on the marketplace, it makes sense.

Speaker 2 Miller says this isn't an original idea. For instance, Amazon has allowed third-party sellers on its platform for decades, and Walmart is following suit.

Speaker 3 Some of these third-product resellers may be selling niche goods that Walmart itself would never want to stock in inventory and sell itself.

Speaker 3 And what it does is it gives the consumer a broader product portfolio.

Speaker 2 Michael Baker of D.A. Davidson says there's a reason Walmart is leaning into its advertising logistics and marketplace services.

Speaker 3 All fall under this heading of alternative businesses and all have higher margins. They're pretty profitable.

Speaker 2 Baker says Walmart can use that profit to keep prices low at its retail stores, something that could come in handy at times when the core business might be a little bit more, you know, impacted by some external factors.

Speaker 2 Because at the end of the day, Retail is still Walmart's core business. It sells more stuff to Americans than anyone else.
I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace.

Speaker 1 It's worth a note here that Walmart is the first of the big retailers to report earnings.

Speaker 1 So perhaps more bad tidings to come in this moment when consumers, as we have been telling you, are a tad irritable. Elsewhere on Wall Street, big bank shares took a tumble today, too.

Speaker 1 We will have the details when we do the numbers.

Speaker 1 There are a lot of questions about what's happening in and to this economy right now. We've covered some of them in the past couple of weeks.
And here's another.

Speaker 1 Who does, and more to the point, who does not have access to government data, specifically public data sets from the CDC and other key agencies that have been taken offline.

Speaker 1 We're going to talk about government data today and tomorrow, what happens when it goes away, and why we need it.

Speaker 1 David Van Riper is the director of spatial analysis for something called the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, known colloquially as EPAMS, which makes sometimes unwieldy government data sets easier to use.

Speaker 1 Welcome to the program.

Speaker 5 Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1 This will sound like a silly question, but I don't really think it is. Why does what you do matter?

Speaker 5 So I think of federal statistical data sets like an X-ray. And they provide information about the population throughout the U.S.,

Speaker 5 diving all the way down to individual neighborhoods. And,

Speaker 5 you know, thinking of it as an X-ray, we can really hone in on various parts of the body and really figure out what's going on in our communities.

Speaker 1 Okay, so given that the state of play here with access to federal data is in flux, it does seem like some of the data has come back, some of it maybe not.

Speaker 1 My question is, was there a moment in the last three and a half, four weeks when you woke up and said, oh, shoot, this is bad?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 5 So I went to bed on Thursday, January 30th, kind of thinking that the next day was going to be a kind of a regular work day.

Speaker 5 And I woke up on the 31st and got to my office and started looking at Slack and social media and started to realize that, oh, a lot of the centers for disease control data are not available anymore and started to realize that, oh, this could become a problem for people who rely on these data to carry out their day-to-day jobs.

Speaker 1 Say more about that.

Speaker 1 Say more about those problems.

Speaker 5 Yeah, so a lot of people have built workflows. They kind of build these data sets into their day-to-day operations.

Speaker 5 They're continually going to federal statistical websites to look up documentation, to download data files. And all of a sudden, those were no longer accessible.

Speaker 5 And if you didn't have those data sets downloaded to your local computing system, you started to get real nervous about how you were going to access those data potentially a long time into the future.

Speaker 1 You and your colleagues, in point of fact, actually spent some frenzied moments there in sort of late January, early February, downloading basically everything you could.

Speaker 1 We did.

Speaker 5 We wanted to make sure that we had all of the data and documentation, especially that we needed for our particular data products.

Speaker 5 We were also getting inquiries from groups around the country asking us if we had grabbed data set X or data set Y.

Speaker 5 And we were in communication with other organizations and people who were also kind of grabbing and downloading as much data as they could.

Speaker 1 We don't know what's going to happen with federal data.

Speaker 1 The management of it right now is chaotic at best. And I guess that leads to this question.
What happens if in six weeks somebody flips a switch and this data just vaporizes and never comes back?

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 5 the research community has done a lot of work in the last

Speaker 5 three weeks to download as much data as they could as it's come back online. Right now, it's mostly

Speaker 5 we're going through a process of documenting who has what data. Going forward, though, if federal statistical products are delayed or are no longer provided, right, if they're canceled,

Speaker 5 it's going to be like we've taken that x-ray machine away from a doctor.

Speaker 5 We're not going to know what's going on in communities and being able to measure whether or not specific policies are having the expected impact, you know, those statistical data sets are really fundamental for that measurement.

Speaker 1 So it's interesting.

Speaker 1 I went to your website and I went to the mission statement, and the first sentence in the mission statement is: IPAMS democracizes access to the world's social and economic data for current and future generations.

Speaker 1 That seems unobjectionable. And I guess I wonder, as a guy now who's been doing this for decades, right,

Speaker 1 what do you make of this current moment?

Speaker 5 I think it's definitely concerning, right? I think we've never seen such a widespread removal of public access to data that should be made available to the public.

Speaker 5 It's all paid for by our tax dollars. And without that public data,

Speaker 5 you really have to rely on other channels of communication, which might be biased or which might be telling you a story they want you to hear.

Speaker 5 But we, as a population aren't allowed to see the data to make our own assessments of what's going on.

Speaker 1 David Van Riper at IPAMS at the University of Minnesota. David, thanks for your time.
I really appreciate it.

Speaker 5 Thank you very much for having me. Appreciate it.

Speaker 1 If we've learned anything the past, what, decade, maybe 15 years, it's that the key metric for digital economy companies, no matter the industry, is the number of active users, weekly, monthly, take your pick.

Speaker 1 That's true for streaming companies, it's true for social media platforms, and it turns out it's true for AI companies, too.

Speaker 1 Reuters reports that ChatGPT now has more than 400 million weekly active users. That's up 30% in just the past couple of months.

Speaker 1 And the growth comes as chatbot competition overall has been heating up, given DeepSeek, the highly capable, as you might remember, but purportedly much cheaper to build model from China.

Speaker 1 The success of free open source models like that, like DeepSeek, does put some focus on how AI companies can monetize their products and also whether they can recoup the billions of dollars that have been spent so far.

Speaker 1 Marketplace of Megan McAdi-Carino takes that one.

Speaker 7 400 million weekly active users is nothing to sneeze at, says Eric Suffert, an independent tech analyst at Mobile Dev Memo.

Speaker 3 But the problem is, consumers are just going to migrate to whichever model or whichever app they feel best serves them.

Speaker 7 About a month ago, DeepSeek topped Apple's download charts. This week, it's the latest version of XAI's Grok.
Then there's Perplexity, Anthropic's Claw, Google's Gemini.

Speaker 7 Large language models have become a commodity, says Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus of cognitive science at NYU and author of Taming Silicon Valley.

Speaker 1 Everybody's using the same formula to make essentially the same kind of thing, which makes it hard for any of them to say, you know, their product is distinct from anybody else's.

Speaker 7 Which means companies are likely to compete on price, says Ted Mortensen, tech strategist at Baird.

Speaker 3 You're going to see a race to zero in the near term.

Speaker 7 Most companies already offer a free tier, and they'll be under pressure to keep lowering prices for advanced features, Mortensen says.

Speaker 7 Last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on X the company was losing money, even on its pro subscriptions, which cost $200 a month.

Speaker 7 Computing costs should come down as semiconductor efficiency improves, says Doug O'Laughlin at Semi-Analysis.

Speaker 8 As hardware improves, yeah, we see cost downs of like one-tenth, one-hundredth.

Speaker 7 But consumer chatbot memberships aren't likely to drive profits for AI companies, says analyst Andy Thurai at Constellation Research. What will?

Speaker 7 Tailoring AI systems for industries that will pay a premium for productivity gains, like healthcare, law, or finance.

Speaker 3 It's about the business use case, not the business problems you solve with it.

Speaker 7 And AI companies might also look to make money the way way most apps do. Advertising.
I'm Megan McCarty Carino for Marketplace.

Speaker 1 You know what you don't need AI for?

Speaker 1 Finding our podcast. That's what.
If you miss it on the air, go to marketplace.org. You can download it there.
Or, of course, the platform of your choice, just follow us, would you?

Speaker 1 Coming up.

Speaker 9 There's like little simple things that people are like, you can just shut off the water. And I'm like, what do you mean?

Speaker 1 First time homeownership, am I right? First, though, let's do the numbers.

Speaker 1 Dow Industrial is down 450 points today. Sounds like a lot.
It's 1%, 44,176. The NASDAQ down 93 points, about 1%,

Speaker 1 19,962. The SP 500 slipped 26 points, 4 tenths percent, 61 and 17.
Just heard from Dan Ackerman about Walmart's other lines of business besides retail.

Speaker 1 The company posted fourth quarter earnings that were strong, but shares nonetheless down 6.5%. Target missed to the tune of 2%.

Speaker 1 Chipotle says it's using AI to hire 20,000 workers specifically to prep for a period from March to May that they are calling, I'm not making this up, burrito season.

Speaker 1 One might fairly ask, is it AI that's trying to make burrito season happen? Chipotle down 1.4% today. Bonz Rose yield on the 10-year teenote 4.50%.

Speaker 1 You're listening to Marketplace.

Speaker 7 So Clorox toilet wand is all I need to clean a toilet?

Speaker 7 You don't need a bottle of solution

Speaker 7 to get into the story revolution. Clorox clean feels good.

Speaker 10 Use as directed.

Speaker 11 Just in thousands of winter arrivals at your Nordstrom rack store. Save up the 70% on coats, slippers, and cashmere from Kate Spade, New York, Vince, Ugg, Levi's, and more.

Speaker 9 Check out these boots.

Speaker 5 They've got the best gifts.

Speaker 11 My holiday shopping hack, join the Nordy Club. Get an extra 5% off every rack purchase with your Nordstrom credit card.
Plus, buy it online and pick it up in store the same day for free.

Speaker 11 Big gifts, big perks. That's why you rack.

Speaker 10 You've finally broken loose from work. Three friends, one tea time,

Speaker 12 and then the text.

Speaker 10 Honey, there's water in the basement.

Speaker 10 Not exactly how you pictured your Saturday. That's when you call us, Cincinnati Insurance.
We always answer the call because real protection means showing up, even when things are in the rough.

Speaker 10 Cincinnati Insurance. Let us make your bad day better.

Speaker 10 Find an agent at CINFIN.com.

Speaker 13 This is the story of the one. As head of maintenance at a concert hall, he knows the show must always go on.

Speaker 13 That's why he works behind the scenes, ensuring every light is working, the HVAC is humming, and his facility shines.

Speaker 13 With Granger's supplies and solutions for every challenge he faces, plus 24-7 customer support, his venue never misses a beat. Call quickgranger.com or just stop by.

Speaker 13 Granger for the ones who get it done.

Speaker 1 This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdahl.
The setup for this next segment is that words have meaning, and sometimes the ways words are used doesn't really match what those words mean.

Speaker 1 The word of the day today is saving or savings in the plural, as in Elon Musk and his operatives say their government cuts so far total $55 billion

Speaker 1 in savings.

Speaker 1 Setting aside for a second the reporting that NPR has done that documents just a quarter of that amount, government saving money that is not spending it isn't saving the way most of us think about it.

Speaker 12 My name is Martha Gimbal.

Speaker 14 I'm the executive director of the budget lab at Yale. There's no dollar that the federal government is spending that isn't going somewhere.

Speaker 14 And so whenever we're talking about cuts, we have to talk about what we're no longer going to be getting

Speaker 14 for those dollars.

Speaker 1 For instance, the savings the Trump administration is promising by cutting or capping funding for research at the National Institutes of Health.

Speaker 14 If we're thinking about living standards moving forward, we have to be really figuring out how to drive productivity, drive innovation, et cetera.

Speaker 14 And we know that one of the things that drives productivity and innovation in the United States is our national commitment to and funding for research.

Speaker 15 I'm Justin Wolfers. I'm a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan.

Speaker 1 The Department of Transportation, you might have seen, just fired a bunch of analysts and economists whose job it was to figure out which infrastructure projects would be the best government investments.

Speaker 15 So you fire those folks, probably save $100,000 in payroll, and in return you might go and invest $400 million in a roads project that doesn't yield much of a benefit.

Speaker 15 You've saved a little bit, but we're all going to be a whole heck of a lot worse off as a result.

Speaker 1 A pause here, if I might, for the idea that government should be run like a business.

Speaker 15 For a business, outlays are almost always a bad thing. Spending more money on your suppliers,

Speaker 15 that hurts your bottom line. But every time the government writes a check to someone's grandmother, we call it Social Security, that's actually the government doing its job.
That's actually a benefit.

Speaker 12 My name is Elena Patel. I'm an assistant professor at the University of Utah and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institute.

Speaker 1 Another item from the headlines is that the Internal Revenue Service has started mass firings today, 7,000 people, mostly in the enforcement division, who had been funded by the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act.

Speaker 12 We know that every dollar that you cut reduces federal revenue. We learned that last year when Republicans tried to cut some of the extra IRA funding.
The CBO scored that as a net revenue loser.

Speaker 1 Saving money and salaries, but losing revenue because every dollar spent on the IRS nets the government well more than a dollar in tax receipts. You roll all of that together.
Here's what you got.

Speaker 12 When you're talking about economic growth, those things are incredibly harmful.

Speaker 1 Two items now from the folder we keep around here labeled, sure,

Speaker 1 you can try to fight the market. First of all, data from Cox Automotive, 9.1% of new car sales in this economy last month were EVs.
That's up from 7.4% January a year ago.

Speaker 1 Also, and second, the share of power in the United States coming from renewable sources in 2024 hit 24%, boosted by a record amount of solar generating capacity.

Speaker 1 That's from a report out today from Bloomberg's Energy Research Group and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy.

Speaker 1 That growth in solar, by the way, was helped along by tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, tax credits that are now in some jeopardy.

Speaker 1 So the industry is figuring out how to get along without them. Marketplace's Henriette reports.

Speaker 6 The solar industry is no stranger to challenges, tariffs on imported panels, labor shortages, long waits to connect new projects to the grid.

Speaker 6 Abigail Ross Hopper is president of the Solar Energy Industries Association.

Speaker 16 Many here call it the solar coaster, kind of up and down and up and down.

Speaker 6 In 2024, the ride was mostly up. Tax credits were available and regulations stayed fairly steady, she says.

Speaker 16 And when that's the case, people are willing to either invest their personal capital and put something on their home or literally hundreds of millions of dollars and build something.

Speaker 6 Whatever happens to the tax credits, solar has something going for it in the energy market, says Dennis Womsted at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

Speaker 17 We've gotten to a point where it's just incredibly cheap to build and it provides electricity that has no variable fuel cost.

Speaker 6 Electricity demand is growing again in the U.S. for the first time in about 15 years as more data centers, manufacturing plants, and EVs suck up more power.

Speaker 6 So Womstead says solar's speed of deployment works to its advantage.

Speaker 17 You can build a solar plant in 12 to 18 months. If you want to build that as a gas plant, it's going to take you four to five years.

Speaker 6 And unlike a natural gas plant or even a wind turbine, solar arrays can be set up pretty much anywhere, says Tara Narayanan at Bloomberg NEF.

Speaker 7 You can also have solar...

Speaker 6 projects that are a lot smaller and can you know be on a field uh can be in slightly less sunny parts of the country so if congress rolls back tax credits that have benefited the solar industry, other factors, Narayanin says, may work in its favor.

Speaker 6 But the industry is still on that solar coaster, says Abigail Ross Hopper at the Solar Energy Industries Association.

Speaker 16 It feels a little bit like, you know, when you're kind of going fast around a corner and you're banking up on the side, right?

Speaker 16 It feels a bit like that.

Speaker 6 And she says they're waiting to see if they'll go up or down. I'm Henriette for Marketplace.

Speaker 1 Three words, people. Marketplace morning report.
Two more words. David Broncaccio.
He and the gang get out of bed real early to get you everything you need to know to start your business day.

Speaker 1 Check it out.

Speaker 1 It's been a maybe not great start for real estate here in 2025. We mentioned a couple of things the other day.
Homebuilder sentiment was down. That's from the National Association of Homebuilders.

Speaker 1 And housing starts, the Census Bureau reports, were down in January over a year ago. But what about the people who did buy the past couple of years? Monique Coleman is one of them.

Speaker 1 She bought a newly built home in Charlestown, West Virginia, back in 2023. We had her on back then.
Here is the update.

Speaker 9 Oh my God, the last year has been crazy, if I can say crazy insane. I really think I went into home ownership with like rose-colored glasses, thinking, oh my God, I'm living the American dream.

Speaker 9 And then the next thing you know, my windows all have to be replaced. Then after that, my toilet's got to be replaced.

Speaker 9 There's like little simple things that people are like, You can just shut off the water. And I'm like, What do you mean? And they're like, counterclockwise.
And I'm like, Wait, take it back.

Speaker 9 And I'm watching YouTube videos and I'm trying to do all the things. So, my workaround has been to use my neighbors.

Speaker 9 Like, I literally put an ad in my Facebook group, and somebody's husband came to my house to put together a sofa. But what she did not tell me was that she was sending her children.

Speaker 9 So, I got her husband and her kids over at my house putting together my sofa.

Speaker 9 I am in a different financial mindset than I was when I, you know, started saving because now I am building wealth. Now I have like money market accounts.

Speaker 9 And now I have, you know, IRAs and things like that. That honestly, if it never would have started with the home ownership, I probably never would have even been thinking about that.

Speaker 9 The interest rates, I'm always checking just to see, like, hey, right now it's a six. When it gets to a three, do I want to refinance? Or is it that time to sell?

Speaker 9 In my mind, I am either going to do one of two things.

Speaker 9 I am going to put a for rent sign out in front of this thing and put it for rent and then, you know, get a management company because hello, landlord, I am not.

Speaker 9 Or, you know, sell it, right? Take my equity and then keep it moving.

Speaker 9 I really feel like me moving to Charlestown, even though the housing situation has been crazy, the experience that it's been for me and my daughter has been great. I found a church home.

Speaker 9 I found a community of people that I can hang out with. I can be myself.
I think home ownership is not for the week. I think that I'm happy that I did it because yes, I have a lot of equity now.

Speaker 9 I said I was going to buy this house and I did it. So on that front, I feel accomplished.

Speaker 1 Mooney Coleman, living for now in Charlestown, West Virginia.

Speaker 1 This final note on the way out today, which is, I'm reasonably sure, this week's sign the apocalypse is upon us.

Speaker 1 With the caveat that James Bond movies have been through the years misogynist and boring and sometimes just plain bad, I am relatively sure the latest development is not an improvement.

Speaker 1 The family that has long controlled the franchise has sold creative control to Amazon. And that means Jeff Bezos now controls who plays James Bond, who writes the script, and when the movies get made.

Speaker 1 I am just telling you right now and right here, if Bezos casts himself, which you can totally see happening, I'm out.

Speaker 1 John Buckley, John Gordon, Noia Carr, Diantha Barker, Amanda Peacher. Come on, he would totally do it.
Stephanie Seek are the marketplace editing staff. Amir Babawi is the managing editor.

Speaker 1 I'm Kyle Risdall. We will see you tomorrow, everybody.

Speaker 1 This is APM.

Speaker 10 You've finally broken loose from work. Three friends, one tea time,

Speaker 12 and then the text.

Speaker 10 Honey, there's water in the basement.

Speaker 10 Not exactly how you pictured your Saturday. That's when you call us, Cincinnati Insurance.
We always answer the call because real protection means showing up, even when things are in the rough.

Speaker 10 Cincinnati Insurance, let us make your bad day better.

Speaker 10 Find an agent at cinfin.com.