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Two weeks ago, when the new administration instructed agencies to scrub content related to âgender ideologyâ from government websites, federal workers scrambled to comply, temporarily, and in some cases permanently, taking pages offline so that they might be monitored for language related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. As reported by Popular Information this week, the National Security Agency is reportedly now executing a purge of pages that contain terms including âprivilegeâ and âbiasââa dragnet that is also affecting âmission-relatedâ work, according to a source and documents. The discussion around so-called âbanned words,â as well as the deletion of datasets inconsistent with the administration’s ideology, has left data archivists concerned.
The news media has been busy keeping track of many of the webpages that have gone dark. At the beginning of this month, the New York Times put the number of removed pages at eight thousand; Wired is periodically scanning more than a thousand government domains for their accessibility. Such projects may prove especially useful down the line, not just to the public, but to the media industry itself: journalists rely on government information in their coverage, when tracking rates of incarceration, say, or investigating the effects of environmental hazards on communities. The Timesâ tally found that the US Census Bureau, which journalists use for official population statistics, had three thousand pages removed as part of the purge earlier this month. Roughly the same number of pages were removed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The purge isnât proceeding without pushback, however. Earlier this week, after an advocacy group for doctors sued the administration on the grounds that the removal of health data was harming their ability to treat patients and address public health emergencies, a federal judge ordered agencies including the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration to restore webpages, siding with the advocacy group and ruling that the decision had been made without an opportunity for recourse. And for some in civil society, the wider purge has been a call to arms: digital librarians, environmental researchers, and volunteers are archiving and uploading federal data that risks being targeted. Last week, for example, Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab released over three hundred thousand datasets from a government domain that had been harvested during 2024 and 2025.
The idea of archiving government data is not new to this administration. According to James R. Jacobs, a US government information librarian at Stanford University, itâs not unusual for government agencies to make changes to their websites, particularly during changes of administration, resulting in plenty of broken URLs. âThose kinds of things happen all the time,â he said. âThe Web is a messy place.â Initiatives like the End of Term Archive have sought to capture such changes since at least 2008. Trumpâs first term in office then spurred a wave of new initiatives: In 2017, for instance, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) documented how the administration was deleting webpages and fact sheets related to President Obamaâs Clean Power Plan. Around the same time, a Silencing Science Tracker was created to track government attempts to restrict or prohibit scientific research.
What is different under the current administration is the scope and micromanagement of website changes, as well as the outright deletion of datasets that researchers, physicians, urban planners, and, again, journalists rely on. According to Lynda Kellam, one of the organizers behind an archival coordination coalition called the Data Rescue Effort, changes made by the Biden administration tended to be on the White Houseâs official page and other high-level sites. âThey weren’t changing datasets themselves,â she said. âThe difference is that we are seeing data being removed from studies that don’t match up with the ideology of the administration.â And so groups like Kellamâs are gearing back up. âThis pace of takedown has been much quicker than it’s been in the past,â she said. âSo weâre trying to make sure we are able to respond quickly to what’s happening.â
According to Jacobs, the issue is not just that data is disappearing, but that agencies could lose the funding to collect it. âIf this administration decides that climate change is no longer a focus of the federal government, then they won’t fund the activities of those agencies that are collecting that data,â he said. Indeed, climate data has been a particularly vulnerable target. Last month, the Trump administration removed access to the Council on Environmental Qualityâs Climate and Economic Justice Screening Toolâa public resource that allowed users to see on a map which places in the US face disproportionate climate and pollution burdens. Shortly after the tool was taken offline, the EDGI posted an âunofficial but functional copyâ of the tool.
Of course, certain industries stand to benefit from slashed federal data transparency. As reported by The Lever, chemical-lobbyist groups are attempting to jump on the wave to hide safety records from public view, asking Lee Zeldin, Trumpâs pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, to roll back oversight of facilities that are at the highest risk for chemical disasters, and to âimmediately shut downâ a government website that identifies where these facilities are located. The Lever reports that Zeldin may prove to be an ally for these groups. And potential resistance within the EPA may be thin: career staff who oversee the enforcement of pollution regulations have reportedly been demoted and will be replaced with political appointees who have worked as lawyers and lobbyists for the oil and chemical industries.
Journalists are in a position to spotlight the changes and deletions of federal data and who may profit from them. Some newsrooms have even jumped into the archival action themselves: The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom that reports on gender, politics, and policy, has preserved previously accessible official documents including research studies on teens and reports on violence against Native American women. By preserving such information, newsrooms are not only aiding themselves and other journalists, but are showing data archivists where to dig and supporting countless scientists whose work the current purge has devalued. âThis assumption that we can just get rid of [data] if it doesn’t meet our political ideology is what I find really frightening,â Kellam said. âItâs a real pushback on the tremendous work that scientists and social scientists have done for decades in these institutions.â
Other notable stories:
- In yesterdayâs newsletter, we noted that an Associated Press reporter had been barred from the Oval Office on the grounds that the outletâs style guide does not fully reflect Trumpâs recent order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. At a briefing yesterday, Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, suggested that the AP was being held âaccountableâ for spreading âliesâ; meanwhile, an AP reporter was barred from another media availability with Trump. The agency is now threatening legal action on First Amendment grounds. The AP was called on for a question at Attorney General Pam Bondiâs first press conference yesterday, but the other questions went to the right-wing outlets Fox News, Newsmax, and the Daily Caller. (Meanwhile, the rotating ânew mediaâ seat at Leavittâs briefing was filled by the CEO of Rumble, a right-wing video platform.)
- This weekâamid reports that Trump has spoken to Vladimir Putin and is getting started on talks to end the war on Ukraine (which critics fear will amount to a capitulation)âthe US traded a jailed Russian cybercriminal for a US teacher who had been in prison in Russia. Then, yesterday, Belarus, a Russian ally, freed a US citizen and two other prisoners, in what the New York Times described as a sign that Alexander Lukashenko, the countryâs leader, is seeking warmer relations with the West. (We wrote about Lukashenko recently.) One of those released was Andrey Kuznechyk, a journalist with the US-funded international broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; RFE/RL hailed the news, while noting that another of its journalists, Ihar Losik, is still jailed in the country.
- Recently, we wrote in this newsletter about growing right-wing attacks on Wikipedia, noting criticism from Elon Musk and reports that the Heritage Foundation is planning to identify volunteer editors seen as âabusing their power.â Now 404 Mediaâs Jason Koebler reports that the foundation that owns Wikipedia is building tools that it hopes will keep its editors anonymous and thus protect them against harassment and lawsuits; the site has already used some of the tools in countries with authoritarian governments. Meanwhile, Ken Bensinger reports, for the Times, on Musk and his alliesâ efforts to recast journalism about people in the administration as âdoxxingâ worthy of criminal investigation.
- For CJR, Matthew L. Wald, a longtime former transportation safety reporter at the Times, reflects on the tragic recent collision of a passenger jet and military helicopter in Washington, DC, and what it revealed about how the public consumes news about air disasters in an age of abundant online information but diminished beat journalism. âIt was once hard to imagine that a plane crash would be captured on video. Now itâs hard to imagine that it wouldnât be,â Wald writes. Some of the footage is valuable, but âwe still need qualified expertsâand time to ferret out all the detailsâto break down the tape.â
- And six former junior college football players who featured in Last Chance U, a docuseries that initially focused on the playersâ program at East Mississippi Community College, are suing Netflix, which distributed the series, and other parties, alleging that the show portrayed them in a false light and profited from their appearances without compensating them. The players are alleging that the creators of the series took advantage of them and âpesteredâ them to sign contracts without making them aware of the commercial value of the footage. A.J. Perez has more for Front Office Sports.
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