“Why would you not want an independent and unbiased entity producing and revising the data that you need to be trusted by your citizens and federal entities?”

—Carla Minet, Executive director of the Center for Investigative Journalism, Puerto Rico

Join the American Statistical Association in petitioning Governor Rosselló and the Puerto Rico Legislature to save PRIS.

It was able to do all this successfully because, in addition to its official independence, PRIS’s Executive Director, Mario Marazzi-Santiago, an economist with degrees from Harvard, the London School of Economics, and Cornell who had previously worked at the Federal Reserve in Washington DC, was given quasi-judicial powers to enforce data access. PRIS became a powerful advocate for transparency in government, helping the media gain access to information, says Carla Minet, Executive director of the Center for Investigative Journalism in Puerto Rico, via email. And while efforts to create a local equivalent to a freedom of information act failed, “PRIS has been an important source of data for journalists,” she says, “not only providing reliable datasets and support for understanding them, but also as a consultant and referral for other sources of information.”

Though underfunded relative to the scale of its task with a budget around $2 million a year ($3 million a year less than the law mandating the Institute’s creation stipulated), PRIS has become a world class institution, something that Puerto Rico should be immensely proud of and grateful for. It democratized data instead of playing politics with the numbers. Uniquely for Puerto Rico, it had an independently appointed board of directors, despite being part of the executive branch of government. And that’s why, say observers, it ran afoul of Puerto Rico’s political culture.

First, in 2010, there was an attempt to remove Marazzi-Santiago over his demand that the Labor Department publish the Consumer Price Index; then, last year, Governor Ricardo Rosselló Nevares dismissed four members of the Institute’s seven independently appointed board of directors, a move that was declared “null and illegal” in early March of this year by Puerto Rico’s Superior Court after an appeal by Marazzi-Santiago.

But the real shock for Americans must surely be the Puerto Rico government’s handling of the death toll from Hurricane Maria. Instead of working with PRIS, the Department of Public Safety went at it alone, and insisted that its figure—64 deaths as of December 29—was the official death toll. An analysis by Santos, with data independently supplied by PRIS, showed that the excess death for September and October—the number of people dying this year compared to the same months in previous years—was 25 percent higher, meaning an additional 1,085 people had died, almost all probably due to the effects of the hurricane. Recent data, provided by PRIS indicates that the total deaths for November are 6.4% higher than the expected average.

These numbers are higher than earlier estimates by CNN, Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism, and the New York Times, with the estimate for November suggesting that relief efforts were not equal to the scale of the crisis. Indeed, the scale of the discrepancy between the real and the official figures led the government to promise an independent review of the death toll. But instead of going to PRIS or even working with PRIS, the government announced that a team from Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University would do the review at a cost of at least $1.4 million. Roberto Rivera, a statistician at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez points out that no-one knows how or why this team was chosen, but that opposition politicians quickly focused on Rosselló Nevares father, Pedro, as having taught at the same school.

On the face of it, excluding a national statistics office from collecting mortality data makes no sense; but then, why would PRIS be involved when the government intends to end its existence as quickly as possible? “It’s been one of the main areas of criticism [of Puerto Rico], that we don’t have verifiable and good statistics,” Rosselló Nevares, recently told Science magazine about the reorganization plan. “Let’s just fix it by consolidating all of these data-driven entities into one, and then let’s take it completely out of local government for it to be managed.”

As Santos notes, this literally doesn’t make sense. PRIS isn’t broken, it’s just underfunded and ignored by the current ruling party; moreover, it is already external and independent. Under the Governor’s plan, statistics will be beholden to whichever political party is running the Economic Development and Commerce department. “Why would you not want an independent and unbiased entity producing and revising the data that you need to be trusted by your citizens and federal entities?” asks Minet. “The governor’s claim, unfortunately, seems to be motivated by the eagerness to control PRIS politically, and it raises lots of red flags and questions. If you surveyed citizens, the press, federal agencies, and even many Puerto Rico government agencies about what should the government do with PRIS, they would all agree that it should be given more resources to do more.”

“Both main political parties prefer to place ‘people of confidence’ as heads of main offices,” explains Rivera. He also dismisses the argument that dismantling PRIS will save the cash-strapped government money, noting that PRIS has saved Puerto Rico sums vastly greater than its cost; besides, he says, “data based decision making is not a luxury.”

The view from Washington DC is that, whatever the government’s motivations or aspirations, dismantling PRIS looks like a really bad idea. On February 8, Sen Elizabeth Warren wrote to the U.S. Government’s Office of Budget and Management (OMB) to voice her concerns, noting that the privatization of PRIS “contradicts recommendations from a bipartisan Congressional Task Force on Economic Growth in Puerto Rico, which stated that PRIS should ‘continue to protect its independence’ from political influence.” On February 2, a bipartisan group of 15 members of the House wrote to the OMB (cc’ing Rosselló Nevares) with similar concerns, and pointing out that PRIS had been “a key ally of the federal statistical agencies as a highly professional, autonomous, and apolitical organization.”

Part of the problem is that as a territory and not a state, Puerto Rico does not fall under the jurisdiction of federal statistical monitoring, even as it is obligated to provide those agencies with reliable data. It has to go it alone. But a broader and more problematic issue, according to Rivera is that politicians and the public just don’t understand the value of good official statistics. “People respect Marazzi for his genuine willingness to make things better, [and for] putting politics aside,” he says, “But many do not appreciate the value of making decisions based on empirical data.” People are also mentally exhausted, he says, by the combination of the recession, the hurricanes and their seemingly endless impact, and the scale of the government’s reorganization plan, which seeks to implement many far-reaching changes, from establishing charter schools to privatizing the power company to dismantling the tourist board. It’s hard to find the bandwidth to understand what is at stake with PRIS and its staff of 12, let alone rally against it. “The people,” says Rivera, “are overwhelmed.”

“I am concerned that an institution that has given so much to the population of Puerto Rico will disappear,” says Santos, “and we will go back to a model where data is a commodity.” In fact, he says, the future may be worse than the past, noting the territory’s disastrous history of privatization, the subject of his masters’ thesis. Where is the guarantee that a private company will provide objective data when its contract comes through political patronage, he asks? “If the government loses control of our data,” says Santos, “we are lost.”