Accessing Public Data Removed from US Government Websites

Accompanying the flurry of executive orders since January 20, 2025, is the removal of government agency websites, webpages, and publicly-funded data from government websites—many of which have been available for years across multiple administrations.

As health information professionals serving your stakeholders, many of you have likely found alternate web links as needed for researchers, students, or clinical staff. The following are the most comprehensive sites members have shared with us.

• This University of California San Diego LibGuide provides helpful links on executive actions and other changes being made by the Trump administration, by multiple news, nonprofit, and other organizations. Includes data rescue projects.
• The Internet Archive’s End of Term 2024 collection on the Wayback Machine offers views and many documents and data sources from pre-election government websites.
• The Journalist’s Resource, a project of Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, has provided a curated list of non-government data alternatives and archives for former government health websites
• The Data Rescue Project (originally started on BlueSky with resources shared on Google) shows current collaborative data rescue efforts, tracks the status and availability of resources, and offers downloads of rescued data.
• The Library Innovation Lab at the Harvard Law School Library recently announced the publicly available gov archive repository for files collected between November 19, 2024, and February 6, 2025. Files are updated daily on Source Cooperative.
• DataLumos is a crowd-sourced Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research archive for government data resources, housed at the University of Michigan. The ICPSR is an international consortium of academic institutions and research organizations that primarily serves the social science research community. We found IMLS and Department of Education statistical data.
• Some specialty organizations and commercial sites have archived specific data relevant to their audience. An example is TheSkimm, a digital media company, that indicates it is dedicated to creating change for women and is hosting full content from reproductiverights.gov.

Have additional suggestions for resources we should share? Please let us know!