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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.”
House Staff Report on Political Interference with Coronavirus Response
The staff of the House Select Subcommittee On The Coronavirus Crisis has issued a 15 page report that documents 47 separate instances of political interference with the federal response to the coronavirus crisis.
press release:
- Select Subcommittee Analysis Shows Pattern of Political Interference by the Trump Administration in Coronavirus Response Press Release (Oct 2, 2020).
Today’s staff analysis found at least 47 separate incidents of political interference in the Administration’s coronavirus response spanning from February through September 2020. These incidents have impacted every major facet of the Administration’s public health response and appear to be increasing in number and severity as the election draws near.
report [PDF, 15pp]:
- The Trump Administration’s Pattern Of Political Interference In The Nation’s Coronavirus Response, Select Subcommittee On The Coronavirus Crisis, Staff Analysis (Oct 1, 2020).
The analysis demonstrates that over the last eight months, the Administration engaged in a persistent pattern of political interference—repeatedly overruling and sidelining top scientists and undermining Americans’ health to advance the President’s partisan agenda.
The Administration’s interference has occurred both in public view and in private, led by President Trump, Vice President Pence, White House officials, and political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and other agencies. The apparent goal of this unprecedented, coordinated attack on our nation’s public health agencies during the pandemic was, in the President’s words, to “play it down.”
CA state agencies misapply ADA law, documents vanish from CA websites
File this under the law of unintended consequences. A California law passed in 2017 designed to make sure CA government agency websites were accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has had an unintended negative effect on CA agency Websites. The law simply states:
11546.7. (a) Before July 1, 2019, and before July 1 biennially thereafter, the director of each state agency or state entity, as defined in subdivision (e) of Section 11546.1, and each chief information officer appointed under Section 11546.1, shall post on the home page of the state agency’s or state entity’s Internet Web site a signed certification from the state agency’s or state entity’s director and chief information officer that they have determined that the Internet Web site is in compliance with Sections 7405 and 11135, and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, or a subsequent version, published by the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium at a minimum Level AA success criteria.
Sounds good right? But according to this Sacramento Bee article “Documents vanish from CA websites as state applies ADA law” this has happened:
Dozens of wildfire reports disappeared from Cal Fire’s website as this year’s fire season began.
Thousands of water science reports vanished from the Department of Water Resources website.
More than 2 million documents, ranging from environmental impact reports to internal human resources guides, went missing from remote corners of Caltrans’ website.
The documents are disappearing from public view as California state departments work to comply with a 2017 law aimed at improving compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
It seems that some CA departments are choosing to take down thousands of documents rather than make them machine-readable or otherwise accessible. I’m sure this negative press will spur the CA government to provide more funding to state agencies to update their Websites. But in the meantime, if you’re looking for something published by the CA government, check out the Archive of the California Government Domain, CA.gov.
Terabytes of Enron data have quietly gone missing from the Department of Energy
This is yet another disturbing example of data loss documented by our friends at MuckRock. Evidently, a large amount of data from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) having to do with the infamous Enron Corporation has gone missing and even FERC staff do not know where it went.
How many examples will we need to post before libraries and archives get with the program and try and figure out ways to collect, archive, preserve and give access to born-digital information posted on .gov sites? And how does this particular example of data loss NOT happen again in the brave new world of open government data (aka H.R. 4174 the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 which was recently signed into law and described by Alex Howard)? If you’re as concerned as I am, you’ll contact FERC and request a copy of their data for your library.
Government investigations into California’s electricity shortage, ultimately determined to be caused by intentional market manipulations and capped retail electricity prices by the now infamous Enron Corporation, resulted in terabytes of information being collected by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. This included several extremely large databases, some of which had nearly 200 million rows of data, including Enron’s bidding and price processes, their trading and risk management systems, emails, audio recordings, and nearly 100,000 additional documents. That information has quietly disappeared, and not even its custodians seem to know why…
…While terabytes of information has disappeared, up to 4,516 documents remain available through a pair of predefined searches of FERC’s eLibrary. While FERC claims that they, not Lockheed Martin or CACI, do offer a trio of Enron datasets on CD, FERC has not responded to repeated requests for these datasets sent over the past two months.
via Terabytes of Enron data have quietly gone missing from the Department of Energy • MuckRock.
Some facts about the born-digital “National Collection”
April 9, 2022 / Leave a comment
We want to contribute a couple of facts and context about the born-digital “National Collection” to help inform the discussions on the priorities of GPO and FDLP libraries at the upcoming spring 2022 Depository Library Conference as well as discussions surrounding the work of the all-digital FDLP task force.
We believe these facts lead to an unavoidable conclusion: GPO and FDLP need to explicitly state a strong priority of how to deal with unpreserved born-digital government information.
Here are the facts.
Who produces born-digital government information?
We have been examining data from the 2020 End-of-Term crawl. We found (not surprisingly) that, by far, the most prominent types of born-digital content on the web are web pages (HTML files) and PDF files. We counted just unique web pages and PDF files from the government web in EOT20 and found more than 126 million web pages and more than 2.8 million PDF files for a total of more than 129 million born-digital items. More than 80% of that content is from the executive branch.
What is GPO preserving?
GOVINFO: There are roughly 2 million PDFs in Govinfo. These items are secure and preserved in GPO’s certified trusted digital repository. By our count, 74% of the born-digital PDF content in Govinfo is from the judicial branch, 24% from the legislative branch, and only 2% from the executive branch. In other words, GPO devotes almost 3/4 of its born-digital preservation space to the judiciary, which produces only about 2% of all born-digital government information. Conversely, GPO devotes only 2% of its born-digital preservation space to the executive branch, which produces more than 80% of born-digital government information.
FDLP-WA. The FDLP Web Archive on the Internet Archive’s Archive-It servers had 211 “collections” or “websites” when we counted earlier this year. Most of the content of the FDLP-WA is from the executive branch (by our count, it only includes 3 congressional agencies and one judicial agency). GPO describes its web harvesting as targeted at small websites. By our count, using the EOT20 data, there are 23,666 “small” government websites and altogether they contain only .06% of the public information posted on the government web. By contrast 99% of Public Information on the government web is hosted by 1,882 “large” websites, none of which GPO is targeting.
GPO also stores some copies of some cataloged web-based content on its permanent.fdlp.gov server. We do not have exact figures on the quantity of content stored, but we do know that, on average, GPO catalogs just over 19,000 titles a year. As a percentage of just the PDFs on the government web in 2020, that is less than 1% per year.
GPO has a few “digital access” partnerships (NASA, NLM, GAO and a couple of others), but there’s only 1 digital preservation stewardship agreement: with University of North Texas (UNT) libraries (check out the difference between a “digital access partner” and a “digital preservation steward” here).
Although we do not have data on how quickly content on the web is altered or removed, one study determined that 83% of the PDF files present in the 2008 EOT crawl were missing in the 2012 EOT crawl.
Conclusions
GPO is doing a good (though not comprehensive) job of preserving born-digital content from the judicial and legislative branches but, by our rough estimate, this accounts for only about 15% of born-digital government information.
GPO is preserving very, very little of the born-digital content of the executive branch, which is where about 80% of born-digital publishing is being done.
To ensure the preservation of this executive branch born-digital government information, GPO needs an active program to acquire and preserve it. Depository Library Council (DLC) should create a strong statement recognizing this huge gap in digital preservation and recommending that GPO prioritize developing plans for addressing it.
Authors
James A. Jacobs, University of California San Diego
James R. Jacobs, Stanford University
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