In another strike against access to public information and the historical record, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recently announced that they will be “retiring” the EPA web archive on December 31, 2026. The Biden administration attempted to shut down the archive in 2022, citing “burdensome financial upkeep.” Thankfully, the Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI), the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH, and a coalition of environmentalists, historians, and librarians were able to put enough public pressure on the EPA and the Biden administration that they postponed the web archive’s retirement.
As Brewster Kahl of the Internet Archive has often said “Don’t trust a publisher to do a librarian’s job.” And we will not do that. Archive.epa.gov has been web harvested many times over the last 10 years in the Wayback Machine. And hopefully in the near future EPA archive will be added to the Internet Archive’s full text collection search along with End of Term Archive, EOT videos, .gov PDFs and more.
“The EPA Is Quietly Killing its Web Archive.” Rachel Santarsiero. Mother Jones. October 23, 2026.
In a little-noticed webpage update, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced a plan to decommission its online web archive at the end of the year, a move that would wipe tens of thousands of publicly available environmental resources from the web. The discreet banner notice comes in stark contrast to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s recent public takedowns of the agency’s power plant pollution standards and federal methane regulatory system.
“The EPA’s online archive makes information about a wide variety of environmental issues and past policies available to the public, dating back at least 20 years,” said Gretchen Gehrke, co-founder of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI). “This information is irreplaceable, and if the archive is decommissioned, that information will be lost forever.”
For decades, the web archive has been an unparalleled resource for researchers, legislators, policymakers, and the public writ large. It houses everything from fact sheets and environmental reports to agency policy changes and regulatory actions, making it a tool for “democratic oversight,” according to Gehrke, who for ten years has been tracking changes to vulnerable federal environmental data.
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