Inside the race to archive the US government’s websites
MIT Technology Review | February 7, 2025 | Scott J. Mulligan
Over the past three weeks, the new US presidential administration has taken down thousands of government web pages related to public health, environmental justice, and scientific research. The mass takedowns stem from the new administration’s push to remove government information related to diversity and “gender ideology,” as well as scrutiny of various government agencies’ practices.
USAID’s website is down. So are sites related to it, like childreninadversity.gov, as well as thousands of pages from the Census Bureau, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Office of Justice Programs…
Other organizations are taking a specific angle on data collection. For example, the Open Environmental Data Project (OEDP) is trying to capture data related to climate science and environmental justice.
In addition to tracking what’s happening, OEDP is actively backing up relevant data. It actually began this process in November, to capture the data at the end of former president Biden’s term. But efforts have ramped up in the last couple weeks. “Things were a lot calmer prior to the inauguration,” says Cathy Richards, a technologist at OEDP. “It was the second day of the new administration that the first platform went down. At that moment, everyone realized, ‘Oh, no—we have to keep doing this, and we have to keep working our way down this list of data sets.’”
This kind of work is crucial because the US government holds invaluable international and national data relating to climate. “These are irreplaceable repositories of important climate information,” says Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. “So fiddling with them or deleting them means the irreplaceable loss of critical information. It’s really quite tragic.”