When Evidence Still Exists but Accountability Weakens

Over the past year, a series of regulatory changes across federal agencies have quietly altered how evidence is defined, how harm is demonstrated, and how accountability is enforced.

None of these changes repealed existing laws. None required congressional approval. Most were implemented through administrative or procedural shifts that received little public attention. Taken individually, they appear technical. Taken together, they point to a broader pattern: the standards for proving harm have been raised, while the obligation of institutions to act on established evidence has weakened.

This shift shows up across multiple domains. In civil rights enforcement, statistical disparities are no longer sufficient on their own to demonstrate discrimination, placing greater emphasis on proving intent, a standard that is far harder to meet in practice. In environmental policy, public explanations of climate change have been reframed in ways that soften causal clarity without changing the underlying science. In public health, evidence-based communication has increasingly leaned toward uncertainty framing even where the scientific record remains robust.

At the same time, key categories of health and demographic data have been restricted or removed from routine federal collection. When populations are no longer fully counted, disparities become harder to track, patterns harder to establish, and harm harder to demonstrate. What cannot be measured cannot be enforced.

The result is not the disappearance of rights, but their quiet weakening. Rights that exist on paper but require extraordinary time, resources, or persistence to exercise are less accessible in practice.

I explore this pattern in more detail, including why it leads to public exhaustion rather than healthy skepticism, in a longer essay published on Substack.

Read the full essay on Notes from a Messy World