Public access to government data and websites has been increasingly limited after President Donald Trump took office. According to a New York Times analysis, more than 8,000 web pages across more than a dozen U.S. government websites have been taken down. These include the Center for Disease Control, the Census Bureau, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Food and Drug Administration and more. Some removals stem from presidential executive orders that target diversity, equality and inclusion initiatives or “gender ideology extremism.”
Despite the Trump administration restricting access to these government sites and its underlying data, organizations and individuals have been working to preserve this data.
Here are just a few of the efforts that part of an ongoing effort to preserve public information:
The End of Term Archive, a partnership of organizations including the Internet Archive, Stanford University Libraries, Common Crawl Foundation, University of North Texas Libraries and Webrecorder, captures and saves U.S. Government websites at the end of presidential administrations. For the 2025 transition, the group archived more than 500 terabytes of data from the .gov domain.
At the Department of Justice, a database detailing the vast array of criminal charges and successful convictions of January 6 rioters was removed, according to a report from Donie O’Sullivan and Katelyn Polantz at CNN. Fortunately, this database was mostly preserved through the Internet Archive. The Lawfare blog also uploaded some prosecutions and Jan. 6-related indictments to DocumentCloud.
Several pages on the Center for Disease Control have also been removed, including information on LGBTQ+ rights, HIV and adolescent health, reports Will Stone and Selena Simmons-Duffin from NPR. But thanks to efforts from users at the Internet Archive, these datasets have been collected and preserved as of January 28.
The Public Environmental Data Project is committed to preserving and providing public access to federal environmental data, including the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index and Environmental Justice Index, as well as the and Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, released by the Council on Environmental Quality in December 2024. PolicyMap, an organization dedicated to curating and standardizing data from across hundreds of siloed public sources, has also committed to maintaining this data on their site.
A new preservation initiative led by a librarian with the help of International Association for Social Science Information Service and Technology, Research Data Access and Preservation association and Data Curation Network has been launched with updates available on Bluesky.
Do you know of other efforts to preserve government data? Let us know at news@muckrock.com. We are updating this article with more resources as we find them.
Photo credit: Screenshot of The White House’s 404 page.