Recent executive moves by President Donald Trump are making data collection about sexual orientation and gender identity at the national level more difficult. This could have serious implications from health care to violence prevention to policy and law, advocates noted.

It also affects economic indicators, as there aren’t as many reports that study those effects on LGBTQ people.

“It’s not like we have a long history of doing this research,” Ilan Meyer, Ph.D., a distinguished senior scholar of public policy at the Williams Institute, said in an interview. Meyer declined to disclose his own sexual orientation.

The Williams Institute is an LGBTQ think tank housed in the UCLA School of Law.

One of its briefs from earlier this year, for example, looked at changes in the Trump administratio

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