As Inauguration Day draws closer, members of the current administration and incoming President’s transition teams prepare for the massive turnover. One of the major areas that’s sure to change is what federal government webpages say. And that raises the question: what happens with all of the existing information on federal websites?
At the close of the last five presidential terms, a collaborative effort called the End of Term Web Archive has sought to answer this question with a simple mission to collect, preserve, and make publicly accessible what’s on United States government websites at the end of presidential administrations. The effort is currently spearheaded by the Common Crawl Foundation, Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), Internet Archive, Stanford University Libraries, and University of North Texas Libraries.
Why is this necessary? When presidential administrations turn over, it’s not just the White House website that changes, but also the information available on webpages across all federal agencies. Administrations have different appointed officials, different priorities, and, increasingly, different ways of talking about specific issues. For example, after the Trump administration took office in 2017, there were stark changes in how federal agencies talked about climate change.
The End of Term Archive project aims to “crawl” federal government websites and receives nominations from the public on which webpages to archive–saving the webpage as if it was frozen in time. This effort enables researchers, journalists, and members of the public to see what information was available on federal webpages at the end of each administration and allow for comparison between administrations.
Efforts like the End of Term Archive proved especially important under the last Trump administration, when science-based information about environmental issues was censored from federal websites. According to a report by EDGI, the Trump administration changed and/or removed information on federal websites related to issues like water pollution and climate change approximately 1,400 times. One-fifth of these changes were made to webpages related to regulations, and half of these involved removing information from agency websites, like fact sheets and guidance documents.
Censorship of science-based information not only hampers the public’s ability to understand and participate in a rulemaking process, but it could also result in weaker public health regulations. The public has a right to science-based information that can impact their health and safety, and the needle should be moving toward more access to the science that shapes government decisions, not less.
If you are interested in ensuring information currently on federal websites is preserved and accessible, you can nominate websites that end in .gov (or federal content on .mil and .com websites or on social media) to be archived here. You can also access data from the past crawls here.
In addition to preserving information on websites, there are also efforts to save data available on federal webpages. EDGI, which was formed in 2016 to document changes to federal environmental data, is accepting nominations for federal environmental and climate data to preserve. You can submit your nomination here and follow EDGI for updates on the data and resources they develop to enhance public access to federal environmental data. If you want to volunteer to support EDGI’s efforts, you can sign up here.
Finally, the Data Liberation Project (DLP) is another effort to “liberate” government data to the public. The team behind DLP submits Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for a number of federal datasets and documents, and makes them available to the public. You can find the datasets and documents (as well as data they have requested) on their website, and you can also nominate data for them to request here.
By engaging in these efforts, you can help ensure that science-based information—especially data that are used for decisions that impact the health and safety of people and our planet—are accessible and protected from political interference. The important work done by our government on our behalf shouldn’t be allowed to simply disappear.