Home » post » Federal information scrubbing has begun. Please support the End of Term Archive and Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI)

Our mission

Free Government Information (FGI) is a place for initiating dialogue and building consensus among the various players (libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, journalists, etc.) who have a stake in the preservation of and perpetual free access to government information. FGI promotes free government information through collaboration, education, advocacy and research.

Federal information scrubbing has begun. Please support the End of Term Archive and Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI)

It seems that the scrubbing of public information and communication from Federal government websites has begun. But along with erasing information that the new administration does not like (mostly centered on climate change and the environment, science, health, DEI, civil rights, immigration, and the like), they have also signed a raft of executive orders overturning policies from the previous administration (here’s a track of all the executive orders signed in recent days) and purged up to 18 Inspector generals (IGs) from across the federal government. IG’s are meant to be independent government watchdogs who conduct investigations and audits into malfeasance, fraud, waste or abuse by government agencies and its personnel. So it seems pretty clear that the new administration wants to a) hide or delete information it doesn’t agree with; and b) make sure there are no watchdogs in place within agencies who could report on fraud, waste, or abuse by the new personnel being put in place by president Trump.

Luckily, there are librarians and NGO watchdog groups on the case. Ben Amata, Government Information Librarian at Sacramento State University, has started to track the issue in his new libguide Government Information: Eliminated, Suspended, Etc. His contact is on the libguide so please send him any news articles about the disappearance of federal information.

Our friends at the Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI) are busy archiving public environmental data as they did in 2016 during the first Trump administration.

The End of Term Archive is once again harvesting and preserving the .gov/.mil web domain as it has done since 2008 regardless of each president’s political party.

And all kinds of non-profit organizations like the umbrella watchdog group Democracy2025 are gearing up to “analyze Trump-Vance administration actions, support legal challenges, and provide resources for the pro-democracy community.”

Here are but a few examples of news items I’ve seen in the last few days. Feel free to leave us a comment pointing to other examples.

Scope of the communications hold on federal health agencies expands. Chris Dall, January 23, 2025. Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy CIDRAP, University of Minnesota.

The memo, sent to heads of operating divisions on January 21, orders recipients to “Refrain from publicly issuing any documents (e.g., regulation, guidance, notice, grant announcement) or communication (e.g., social media, websites, press releases, and communication using listservs) until it has been reviewed and approved by a presidential appointee,” through February 1.

The memo also bars participation in any public speaking engagements and sending documents intended for publication in the Office of the Federal Register.

Trump’s anti-DEI order yanks air force videos of Tuskegee Airmen and female pilots. Reuters (25 Jan 2025)

“…Donald Trump’s order halting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives has led the US air force to suspend course instruction on a documentary about the first Black airmen in the US military, known as the Tuskegee Airmen, a US official said on Saturday.

Another video about civilian female pilots trained by the US military during the second world war, known as Women Airforce Service Pilots, or Wasps, was also pulled, the official said…”

Trump pardoned the January 6 convicts. Now his DOJ is wiping evidence of rioters’ crimes from the internet. Donie O’Sullivan and Katelyn Polantz, CNN (January 26, 2025)

“As President Donald Trump this week sought to rewrite the history of his supporters’ attack on the US Capitol, a database detailing the vast array of criminal charges and successful convictions of January 6 rioters was removed from the Department of Justice’s website.

The searchable database served as an easily accessible repository of all January 6, 2021, cases prosecuted by the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.

…Parts of the database were still accessible Sunday through the Internet Archive.

…The FBI — representing another leg of the Justice Department — also took offline its compendium of wanted Capitol rioters. Some of those individuals were fugitives or rioters who hadn’t been identified, and the FBI had posted images and other information of the suspects it was still seeking.

Thousands of pages that were part of the database now appear to be inaccessible. Details of January 6 cases are still accessible on the DOJ’s website in the form of press releases about charges and convictions. They are also still available through court records and services such as Pacer.”

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


1 Comment

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Archives