U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette was among the Democratic lawmakers last week who requested the U.S. Government Accountability Office investigate the Trump Administration’s July directive to change hospitals’ data reporting process during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We are concerned these repeated changes to reporting efforts represent yet another attempt by the Trump Administration to sideline CDC during the national public health emergency,” wrote DeGette, who chairs the oversight and investigations subcommittee of the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Other signatories of the Aug. 19 letter were the chair of the full committee, U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., and the health subcommittee chair, U.S. Rep. Anna G. Eshoo, D-Calif.

In July, the Trump Administration directed hospitals to cease using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s web portal to report numbers for patients, beds, available ventilators and staffing, and instead to use a non-public database from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“While HHS has stated CDC will have access to the data that is made available in HHS Protect, in bypassing CDC, the new reporting processes raise transparency concerns around how the data may be reviewed and its vulnerability to manipulation to hide the severity of the pandemic,” the lawmakers wrote in their letter. They asked the GAO to look into the administration’s decision-making process and HHS’s plans for the data.

Around the time the representatives sent their letter, Deborah Birx of the White House Coronavirus Task Force announced that the new reporting mandate was an “interim” method and the CDC would build a “revolutionary new data system” to resume collecting information.