Federal data website outage raises concerns among advocates
Family Law
A federal website that informs the public about what information agencies are collecting and allows for public comment went down last weekend, and it has only been partially restored. The outage has raised concerns among advocates who already were troubled by the disappearance of data sets from government websites after President Donald Trump began his second term.
The https://www.reginfo.gov/public/ website went offline at the end of last week and was partially restored this week. Data was missing after Aug. 1, according to dataindex,us, a collective of data scientists and advocates who monitor changes in federal data sets.
As of Thursday, the website’s landing page said, it was “currently undergoing revisions.” Emailed inquiries to the Office of Management and Budget and General Services Administration weren’t returned on Thursday.
In February, the Centers 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 last month in The Lancet medical journal.
Former Census Bureau official Chris Dick, who is part of the dataindex.us team, said Thursday that no one is quite sure what is going on with the regulatory affairs website, whether there was an update with technical difficulties because of staffing shortages from job cuts or something more nefarious.
“This is key infrastructure that needs to come back,” Dick said. “Usually, you can fix this quickly. It’s not super normal for this to go on for days.”
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Thai National Sentenced, Faces Deportation for Operating Immigration Fraud Scheme
Nimon Naphaeng, 36, a native and citizen of Thailand, who resided in Wakefield, R.I., was sentenced Monday to 27 months in federal prison for running an immigration fraud scheme that defrauded more than 320 individuals, most of them immigrants, of at least $400,000, and perhaps more than $518,000.
The scheme included the unauthorized filing of false asylum applications on behalf of individuals who did not request, nor authorize, the applications.
“U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services does not tolerate immigration fraud of any kind,” said Susan Raufer, director of the USCIS Newark Asylum Office. “We are proud of our role in uncovering this fraud scheme and bringing the perpetrator to justice.”
At sentencing, U.S. District Court Chief Judge William E. Smith ordered a provisional amount of restitution of $400,000. The final amount of restitution will be determined subject to additional victims being identified and additional court filings over the next 90 days. According to court documents already filed by the government, restitution in this matter may exceed $518,300. During the investigation, the government seized $285,789.31 from Naphaeng. The forfeited funds will be applied toward restitution for victims of Naphaeng’s crimes.