Nicole M. Bennett, Indiana University A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board reported an unusual spike in potentially sensitive data flowing out of the agency’s network in early March 2025 when staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency, which goes by DOGE, were granted access to the agency’s databases. On April 7, the Department of Homeland Security gained access to Internal Revenue Service tax data. These seemingly unrelated events are examples of recent developments in the transformation of the structure and purpose of federal government data repositories. I am a researcher who studies the intersection of migration, data governance and digital technologies. I’m tracking how data that people provide to U.S. government agencies for public services such as tax filing, health care enrollment, unemployment assistance and education support is increasingly being redirected toward surveillance and law enforcement. Originally collected to facilitate health care, eligibility for services and the administration of public services, this information is now shared across government agencies and with private companies, reshaping the infrastructure of public services into a mechanism of control. Once confined to separate bureaucracies, data now flows freely through a network of interagency agreements, outsourcing contracts and commercial partnerships built up in recent decades. These data-sharing arrangements often take place outside public scrutiny, driven by national security justifications, fraud prevention initiatives and digital modernization efforts. The result is that the structure of government is quietly transforming into an integrated surveillance apparatus, capable of monitoring, predicting and flagging behavior at an unprecedented scale. Executive orders signed by President Donald Trump aim to remove remaining institutional and legal barriers to completing this massive surveillance system.

DOGE and the private sector

Central to this transformation is DOGE, which is tasked via an executive order to “promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization.” An additional executive order calls for the federal government to eliminate its information silos. By building interoperable systems, DOGE can enable real-time, cross-agency access to sensitive information and create a centralized database on people within the U.S. These developments are framed as administrative streamlining but lay the groundwork for mass surveillance. Key to this data repurposing are public-private partnerships. The DHS and other agencies have turned to third-party contractors and data brokers to bypass direct restrictions. These intermediaries also consolidate data from social media, utility companies, supermarkets and many other sources, enabling enforcement agencies to construct detailed digital profiles of people without explicit consent or judicial oversight. Palantir, a private data firm and prominent federal contractor, supplies investigative platforms to agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Defense, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Internal Revenue Service. These platforms aggregate data from various sources – driver’s license photos, social services, financial information, educational data – and present it in centralized dashboards designed for predictive policing and algorithmic profiling. These tools extend government reach in ways that challenge existing norms of privacy and consent.

The role of AI

Artificial intelligence has further accelerated this shift. Predictive algorithms now scan vast amounts of data to generate risk scores, detect anomalies and flag potential threats. These systems ingest data from school enrollment records, housing applications, utility usage and even social media, all made available through contracts with data brokers and tech companies. Because these systems rely on machine learning, their inner workings are often proprietary, unexplainable and beyond meaningful public accountability.

Sometimes the results are inaccurate, generated by AI hallucinations – responses AI systems produce that sound convincing but are incorrect, made up or irrelevant. Minor data discrepancies can lead to major consequences: job loss, denial of benefits and wrongful targeting in law enforcement operations. Once flagged, individuals rarely have a clear pathway to contest the system’s conclusions.

Digital profiling

Participation in civic life, applying for a loan, seeking disaster relief and requesting student aid now contribute to a person’s digital footprint. Government entities could later interpret that data in ways that allow them to deny access to assistance. Data collected under the banner of care could be mined for evidence to justify placing someone under surveillance. And with growing dependence on private contractors, the boundaries between public governance and corporate surveillance continue to erode. Artificial intelligence, facial recognition systems and predictive profiling systems lack oversight. They also disproportionately affect low-income individuals, immigrants and people of color, who are more frequently flagged as risks. Initially built for benefits verification or crisis response, these data systems now feed into broader surveillance networks. The implications are profound. What began as a system targeting noncitizens and fraud suspects could easily be generalized to everyone in the country.

Eyes on everyone

This is not merely a question of data privacy. It is a broader transformation in the logic of governance. Systems once designed for administration have become tools for tracking and predicting people’s behavior. In this new paradigm, oversight is sparse and accountability is minimal. AI allows for the interpretation of behavioral patterns at scale without direct interrogation or verification. Inferences replace facts. Correlations replace testimony. The risk extends to everyone. While these technologies are often first deployed at the margins of society – against migrants, welfare recipients or those deemed “high risk” – there’s little to limit their scope. As the infrastructure expands, so does its reach into the lives of all citizens. With every form submitted, interaction logged and device used, a digital profile deepens, often out of sight. The infrastructure for pervasive surveillance is in place. What remains uncertain is how far it will be allowed to go. Nicole M. Bennett, Ph.D. Candidate in Geography and Assistant Director at the Center for Refugee Studies, Indiana University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Laura Dee, University of Colorado Boulder

Controlled burns

Red skies in August, longer fire seasons and checking air quality before taking my toddler to the park. This has become the new norm in the western United States as wildfires become more frequent, larger and more catastrophic. As an ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, I know that fires are part of the natural processes that forests need to stay healthy. But the combined effects of a warmer and drier climate, more people living in fire-prone areas and vegetation and debris built up over years of fire suppression are leading to more severe fires that spread faster. And that’s putting humans, ecosystems and economies at risk. To help prevent catastrophic fires, the U.S. Forest Service issued a 10-year strategy in 2022 that includes scaling up the use of controlled burns and other techniques to remove excess plant growth and dry, dead materials that fuel wildfires. However, the Forest Service’s wildfire management activities have been thrown into turmoil in 2025 with funding cuts and disruptions and uncertainty from the federal government. The planet just saw its hottest year on record. If spring and summer 2025 are also dry and hot, conditions could be prime for severe fires again.

More severe fires harm forest recovery and people

Today’s severe wildfires have been pushing societies, emergency response systems and forests beyond what they have evolved to handle. Extreme fires have burned into cities, including destroying thousands of homes in the Los Angeles area in 2025 and near Boulder, Colorado, in 2021. They threaten downstream public drinking water by increasing sediments and contaminants in water supplies, as well as infrastructure, air quality and rural economies. They also increase the risk of flooding and mudslides from soil erosion. And they undermine efforts to mitigate climate change by releasing carbon stored in these ecosystems. In some cases, fires burned so hot and deep into the soil that the forests are not growing back. While many species are adapted to survive low-level fires, severe blazes can damage the seeds and cones needed for forests to regrow. My team has seen this trend outside of Fort Collins, Colorado, where four years after the Cameron Peak fire, forests have still not come back the way ecologists would expect them to under past, less severe fires. Returning to a strategy of fire suppression − or trying to “go toe-to-toe with every fire” − will make these cases more common.

Proactive wildfire management can help reduce the risk to forests and property. Measures such as prescribed burns have proven to be effective for maintaining healthy forests and reducing the severity of subsequent wildfires. A recent review found that selective thinning followed by prescribed fire reduced subsequent fire severity by 72% on average, and prescribed fire on its own reduced severity by 62%.

But managing forests well requires knowing how forests are changing, where trees are dying and where undergrowth has built up and increased fire hazards. And, for federal lands, these are some of the jobs that are being targeted by the Trump administration. Some of the Forest Service staff who were fired or put in limbo by the Trump administration are those who do research or collect and communicate critical data about forests and fire risk. Other fired staff provided support so crews could clear flammable debris and carry out fuel treatments such as prescribed burns, thinning forests and building fire breaks. Losing people in these roles is like firing all primary care doctors and leaving only EMTs. Both are clearly needed. As many people know from emergency room bills, preventing emergencies is less costly than dealing with the damage later.

Logging is not a long-term fire solution

The Trump administration cited “wildfire risk reduction” when it issued an emergency order to increase logging in national forests by 25%. But private − unregulated − forest management looks a lot different than managing forests to prevent destructive fires. Logging, depending on the practice, can involve clear-cutting trees and other techniques that compromise soils. Exposing a forest’s soils and dead vegetation to more sunlight also dries them out, which can increase fire risk in the near term.

In general, logging that focuses on extracting the highest-value trees leaves thinner trees that are more vulnerable to fires. A study in the Pacific Northwest found that replanting logged land with the same age and size of trees can lead to more severe fires in the future.

Research and data are essential

For many people in the western U.S., these risks hit close to home. I’ve seen neighborhoods burn and friends and family displaced, and I have contended with regular air quality warnings and red flag days signaling a high fire risk. I’ve also seen beloved landscapes, such as those on Cameron Peak, transform when conifers that once made up the forest have not regrown.

My scientific research group and collaborations with other scientists have been helping to identify cost-effective solutions. That includes which fuel-treatment methods are most effective, which types of forests and conditions they work best in and how often they are needed. We’re also planning research projects to better understand which forests are at greatest risk of not recovering after fires. This sort of research is what robust, cost-effective land management is based on. When careful, evidence-based forest management is replaced with a heavy emphasis on suppressing every fire or clear-cutting forests, I worry that human lives, property and economies, as well as the natural legacy of public lands left to every American, are at risk. Laura Dee, Associate Professor of Ecology, University of Colorado Boulder This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

K. Dara Hill, University of Michigan-Dearborn Five years after the pandemic forced children into remote instruction, two-thirds of U.S. fourth graders still cannot read at grade level. Reading scores lag 2 percentage points below 2022 levels and 4 percentage points below 2019 levels. This data from the 2024 report of National Assessment of Educational Progress, a state-based ranking sometimes called “America’s report card,” has concerned educators scrambling to boost reading skills. Many school districts have adopted an evidence-based literacy curriculum called the “science of reading” that features phonics as a critical component. Phonics strategies begin by teaching children to recognize letters and make their corresponding sounds. Then they advance to manipulating and blending first-letter sounds to read and write simple, consonant-vowel-consonant words – such as combining “b” or “c” with “-at” to make “bat” and “cat.” Eventually, students learn to merge more complex word families and to read them in short stories to improve fluency and comprehension. Proponents of the curriculum celebrate its grounding in brain science, and the science of reading has been credited with helping Louisiana students outperform their pre-pandemic reading scores last year. In practice, Louisiana used a variety of science of reading approaches beyond phonics. That’s because different students have different learning needs, for a variety of reasons. Yet as a scholar of reading and language who has studied literacy in diverse student populations, I see many schools across the U.S. placing a heavy emphasis on the phonics components of the science of reading. If schools want across-the-board gains in reading achievement, using one reading curriculum to teach every child isn’t the best way. Teachers need the flexibility and autonomy to use various, developmentally appropriate literacy strategies as needed.

Phonics fails some students

Phonics programs often require memorizing word families in word lists. This works well for some children: Research shows that “decoding” strategies such as phonics can support low-achieving readers and learners with dyslexia. However, some students may struggle with explicit phonics instruction, particularly the growing population of neurodivergent learners with autism spectrum disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. These students learn and interact differently than their mainstream peers in school and in society. And they tend to have different strengths and challenges when it comes to word recognition, reading fluency and comprehension. This was the case with my own child. He had been a proficient reader from an early age, but struggles emerged when his school adopted a phonics program to balance out its regular curriculum, a flexible literature-based curriculum called Daily 5 that prioritizes reading fluency and comprehension. I worked with his first grade teacher to mitigate these challenges. But I realized that his real reading proficiency would likely not have been detected if the school had taught almost exclusively phonics-based reading lessons. Another weakness of phonics, in my experience, is that it teaches reading in a way that is disconnected from authentic reading experiences. Phonics often directs children to identify short vowel sounds in word lists, rather than encounter them in colorful stories. Evidence shows that exposing children to fun, interesting literature promotes deep comprehension.

Balanced literacy

To support different learning styles, educators can teach reading in multiple ways. This is called balanced literacy, and for decades it was a mainstay in teacher preparation and in classrooms. Balanced literacy prompts children to learn words encountered in authentic literature during guided, teacher-led read-alouds – versus learning how to decode words in word lists. Teachers use multiple strategies to promote reading acquisition, such as blending the letter sounds in words to support “decoding” while reading. Another balanced literacy strategy that teachers can apply in phonics-based strategies while reading aloud is called “rhyming word recognition.” The rhyming word strategy is especially effective with stories whose rhymes contribute to the deeper meaning of the story, such as Marc Brown’s “Arthur in a Pickle.”

After reading, teachers may have learners arrange letter cards to form words, then tap the letter cards while saying and blending each sound to form the word. Similar phonics strategies include tracing and writing letters to form words that were encountered during reading. There is no one right way to teach literacy in a developmentally appropriate, balanced literacy framework. There are as many ways as there are students.

What a truly balanced curriculum looks like

The push for the phonics-based component of the science of reading is a response to the discrediting of the Lucy Calkins Reading Project, a balanced literacy approach that uses what’s called “cueing” to teach young readers. Teachers “cue” students to recognize words with corresponding pictures and promote guessing unfamiliar words while reading based on context clues. A 2024 class action lawsuit filed by Massachusetts families claimed that this faulty curriculum and another cueing-based approach called Fountas & Pinnell had failed readers for four decades, in part because they neglect scientifically backed phonics instruction. But this allegation overlooks evidence that the Calkins curriculum worked for children who were taught basic reading skills at home. And a 2021 study in Georgia found modest student achievement gains of 2% in English Language Arts test scores among fourth graders taught with the Lucy Calkins method. Nor is the method unscientific. Using picture cues with corresponding words is supported by the predictable language theory of literacy. This approach is evident in Eric Carle’s popular children’s books. Stories such as the “Very Hungry Caterpillar” and “Brown Bear, Brown Bear What do you See?” have vibrant illustrations of animals and colors that correspond with the text. The pictures support children in learning whole words and repetitive phrases, suchg as, “But he was still hungry.”

The intention here is for learners to acquire words in the context of engaging literature. But critics of Calkins contend that “cueing” during reading is a guessing game. They say readers are not learning the fundamentals necessary to identify sounds and word families on their way to decoding entire words and sentences. As a result, schools across the country are replacing traditional learn-to-read activities tied to balanced literacy approaches with the science of reading. Since its inception in 2013, the phonics-based curriculum has been adopted by 40 states and the Disctrict of Columbia.

Recommendations for parents, educators and policymakers

The most scientific way to teach reading, in my opinion, is by not applying the same rigid rules to every child. The best instruction meets students where they are, not where they should be. Here are five evidence-based tips to promote reading for all readers that combine phonics, balanced literacy and other methods. 1. Maintain the home-school connection. When schools send kids home with developmentally appropriate books and strategies, it encourages parents to practice reading at home with their kids and develop their oral reading fluency. Ideally, reading materials include features that support a diversity of learning strategies, including text, pictures with corresponding words and predictable language. 2. Embrace all reading. Academic texts aren’t the only kind of reading parents and teachers should encourage. Children who see menus, magazines and other print materials at home also acquire new literacy skills. 3. Make phonics fun. Phonics instruction can teach kids to decode words, but the content is not particularly memorable. I encourage teachers to teach phonics on words that are embedded in stories and texts that children absolutely love. 4. Pick a series. High-quality children’s literature promotes early literacy achievement. Texts that become increasingly more complex as readers advance, such as the “Arthur” step-into-reading series, are especially helpful in developing reading comprehension. As readers progress through more complex picture books, caregivers and teachers should read aloud the “Arthur” novels until children can read them independently. Additional popular series that grow with readers include “Otis,” “Olivia,” “Fancy Nancy” and “Berenstain Bears.” 5. Tutoring works. Some readers will struggle despite teachers’ and parents’ best efforts. In these cases, intensive, high-impact tutoring can help. Sending students to one session a week of at least 30 minutes is well documented to help readers who’ve fallen behind catch up to their peers. Many nonprofit organizations, community centers and colleges offer high-impact tutoring. K. Dara Hill, Professor of Reading and Language Arts, University of Michigan-Dearborn This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.