After the Trump administration ordered hospitals to change how they report coronavirus data to the government, effectively bypassing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, officials at the CDC made a decision of their own: Take our data and go home…

While Democrats and health care groups spent Thursday blasting the Trump administration over the missing dashboards, which tracked critical data on coronavirus hospitalizations, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services insisted that they were just as shocked when the CDC’s data disappeared from public view.

“No one came out of our conversations believing that CDC was going to stop doing analysis,” said one administration official who was involved in plans for shifting the data-reporting responsibilities away from CDC. The official, who requested anonymity, said the 24-hour disappearance of the agency’s dashboards was an unwelcome surprise.