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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.”
EDGI’s new public comments initiative
Every once in a while, I get a question from a researcher about finding public comments for some regulation administered by an executive agency. All public comments, whether submitted electronically or in paper form, are now made available for public viewing in the electronic public docket at Regulations.gov, but that was not always the case. And past comments on proposed regulations, while potentially interesting from a research standpoint, aren’t the real point of the whole commenting process. The real point is that Commenting on proposed regulations is a key part of our participatory democratic process. But this process is often arcane and confusing and takes effort to track the process and even know that a commenting period is open.
Things are about to get much more transparent and understandable. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) has just rolled out their Public Comments Initiative. They’ve created guides to better understand the entire process, including how to write effective public comments, research recommendations for writing public comments, tracking on public comments, and other ways to engage with and influence government agencies and their regulatory process. And to top it off, they are starting a public policy initiative with suggestions to improve the entire process. Check it out.
Thanks EDGI!
John Oliver again nails it re environmental racism. Oh and EPA is sunsetting its online archive
John Oliver is a national hero, always talking about issues of importance in clear and exasperatingly funny ways. Take last night’s show in which he highlighted “environmental racism” – a term used to describe environmental injustice that “occurs within a racialized context both in practice and policy” (thanks wikipedia!). He clearly shows the connection with historical “red lining” — in which people of color were, through official government policy(!), denied the ability to purchase homes in certain areas and therefore kept segregated in many cities — and current environmental policy which often designates those same areas as “sacrifice zones” where heavy industry, toxic waste and superfund sites tend to be located.
Oliver does a great job in analyzing government policy, states that the Biden Administration has said publicly that it will focus on environmental justice — EPA even has an environmental justice website! — but also notes that the administration is not meeting its promises on this front and needs to do more.
One thing he failed to mention — and I don’t blame him because it is after all tangential to the issue of environmental racism — is that the EPA plans to sunset its online archive! According to the Verge article — which cites our pals at the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI)!:
Come July, the EPA plans to retire the archive containing old news releases, policy changes, regulatory actions, and more. Those are important public resources, advocates say, but federal guidelines for maintaining public records still fall short when it comes to protecting digital assets.
It’s clear, as Oliver notes, that it’s going to take really big steps to address environmental racism. Local environmental groups will continue to be critical in pushing for changes in government policy and regulation, but they will continue to need access to environmental government information and that’s where librarians can and should do everything in their power to assist in addressing this horrible problem.
EDGI Releases Dataset of Federal Environmental Website Changes Under Trump
Thanks to the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) for releasing the Federal Environmental Web Tracker. This tool is a public dataset of searchable records of approximately 1,500 significant changes to federal agency environmental webpages under the Trump administration, these changes were almost always precursors or responses to policy changes. These changes came from a “list of 25,000 federal Web pages related to climate, energy, and the environment, including pages for 20 federal agencies such as EPA, NOAA, and NASA.” Here’s the Tracker’s explanatory page for more context and background.
EDGI continues to do important work in tracking the federal .gov Web domain. EDGI’s work goes hand in hand with the work of the End of Term Web Archive which has harvested the .gov/.mil Web space every 4 years since 2008 and is now deep into its 2020 harvest. And we’re still accepting nominations, so go to the End of Term Nomination Tool hosted by the University of North Texas (UNT) library. Help us collect a snapshot of the federal Web domain!
Today, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) publishes searchable records of approximately 1,500 changes to federal agency environmental webpages under the Trump administration. For four years, EDGI’s website monitoring team has identified and catalogued significant changes to federal websites using their open source monitoring software. EDGI’s Federal Environmental Web Tracker makes records of significant changes publicly available.
The information that’s available on federal websites can have important policy implications. As EDGI has often reported over the past four years, changes to the information that’s available on federal websites are almost always precursors or responses to policy changes. Federal websites provide information that the public is likely to access before commenting on a proposed rule to learn about current regulatory efforts, the science underlying a new policy decision, or likely impacts of a proposed rule. The information found (or not found) on a federal website can impact public participation in regulatory processes.
In the weeks after Trump’s election in November 2016, newly-formed EDGI compiled a list of 25,000 federal web pages related to climate, energy, and the environment, including pages for 20 federal agencies such as EPA, NOAA, and NASA. First using proprietary software and then building and using novel open source software, EDGI has compared versions of these web pages weekly since January 2017. This new dataset represents the documented changes that EDGI’s website monitoring team flagged as significant in some way over the past four years.
EDGI’s Federal Environmental Web Tracker gives journalists, academic researchers, and the public data that can be used to provide insight, documentation, and analysis of the information policies and priorities of the Trump administration.
The Federal Environmental Web Tracker will be updated quarterly as EDGI continues to monitor federal environmental websites.
EDGI releases 2019 annual report
The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) has just released its 2019 annual report. Check out what they’ve been doing over the past year in terms of archiving data, environmental data justice, interviewing and policy project, and website monitoring. props to EDGI for a year well-worked!
From the report…
EDGI’s Archiving Working Group continues to build on its grassroots Data Rescue efforts that involved events in over 40 cities and towns across North America and ended in mid-2018. Our archiving work has: ● Enhanced the public accessibility of downloaded data ● Established partnerships with software companies, QRI and Protocol Labs, to develop “Data Together,” a set of protocols and technologies for decentralizing data storage online ● Advanced a collaboration with Science 2 Action to build systems to better identify still vulnerable federal datasets and effectively copy them ● Launched the beta-version of our Environmental Impact Statement search tool in consultation with the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
and more…
Archiving is perhaps the most-changed of EDGI’s areas of work. A year ago, Archiving was the home of a lot of direct work: hosting large data-archiving events and building software tools to support the identification and storage of data. But in the last year, Archiving has become more reflective, quieter, and theory-focused. Archiving continues to hold the data that was harvested in previous years, but now the group gives most of its attention to thoughtful design of data archiving technologies. There are two main reasons for the shift in focus. One is highly pragmatic: the sheer bulk of volunteer labor required to continuously host events and build software tools was unsustainable. The second reason is more a mark of our organization’s maturation. EDGI’s core strength is not in its capacity to do work; rather, it is in its ways of being, doing, and thinking. EDGI’s unique value is its interdisciplinary site at the crossroads of justice, environment, data, and technology . As such, Archiving has been focusing on Data Together, an ongoing and inclusive conversation between EDGI and partners QRI and Protocol Labs, both of whom are building foundational technology for storing data in a decentralized internet. All of the partners think daily about data provenance and ownership and sharing models. The first annual Data Together meeting, in August 2018, yielded the Data Together mission: Data Together empowers people to create a decentralized civic layer for the web, leveraging community, trust, and shared interest to steward data they care about. The group also completed the first “semester” of a monthly reading group. Through carefully curated reading lists and 90-minute group discussions, the partners covered the topics of: the decentralized web; ownership; commons; centralization vs. decentralization vs. peer-to-peer or federation; privacy; and justice. This is a place for partners to seat their work in broad, theoretical contexts. We anticipate that the Archival functions within EDGI will continue to change as the organization continues to learn.
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