Since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the government’s mass removal of data and policies it finds objectionable has illustrated just how quickly data can disappear from the internet, and it has sparked renewed interest in preserving information online among digital archivists.
Thousands of pages from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website were taken down in January to comply with Trump’s executive orders, although some of the pages are back online following an order from a federal judge. Other taken-down sites include Justice Department web pages related to the January 6, 2021, Capitol breach; information about care for transgender patients on Healthcare.gov, a gender diversity page on the TSA’s website, and sexual orientation and general identity discrimination pages on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Census Bureau’s websites, as well as many others across the government.
While it is not uncommon for presidential administrations to delete or change government web pages, the second Trump administration seems to have taken down more content than usual, according to Mark Graham, the director of the Wayback Machine.
The Wayback Machine, which the nonprofit Internet Archive operates, is a tool designed to help preserve online data, and it has been used in the past when new presidents’ administrations took down information from past administrations. The site allows users to enter a URL and, if the page has been archived, see what it looked like in the past, dating back to the database’s founding in 1996.
“I think that many have reported that the scope of what we’re seeing this time – about certain websites being taken offline, certain material on web pages being removed – is greater than it has been in past changes of administration,” said Graham.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
“Whenever there’s a change in office – regardless of which parties or administrations are outgoing and incoming – it’s really important that we preserve government websites and information as a record,” said Rebecca Frank, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information. “And while there’s perhaps a greater sense of urgency at the moment, the work that’s happening is not brand new.”
Travel back in time on the internet with the help of archives
After entering a URL into the Wayback Machine, a user can see all the times the archive’s crawlers have saved the site and can then choose a timestamp to visit.
The crawlers – computer programs, not insects – scour the web to collect data and save web pages. Users can also manually preserve a page by entering a URL on the Save Page Now section of the Wayback Machine site. The database contains more than 916 billion web pages, according to the site’s homepage.
The Internet Archive, in collaboration with partners such as the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) and Stanford University Libraries, also offers the End of Term archive, which compiles and saves content from government sources at the end of every presidential term, dating back to 2008.
There are also many other archival sites, including several that specifically focus on government data preservation.
“Preserving digital information is a challenge,” said Frank. “It requires active work, both to decide to preserve it, to capture it, and then to keep that information findable, accessible, and usable over the long term.”
On February 6, the Harvard Law Library Innovation Center released an archive of data.gov, the government site that provides research data to the public, containing datasets from 2024 and 2025. The organization has previously released other archival tools, such as Perma.CC, which allows users to create permanent URLs of a site they wish to archive.
“We’ve built this project on our long-standing commitment to preserving government records and making public information available to everyone,” the lab wrote in a blog post.
EDGI has also been working to preserve government data online. Soon after Trump’s inauguration, his administration took down a digital tool that showed which places in the US face a disproportionate level of pollution. EDGI and other members of the Public Environmental Data Partners coalition uploaded a copy of the tool using data the groups had archived. Gretchen Gehrke, a co-founder of EDGI, said in a statement that its coalition is “mobilizing resources to archive critical federal data.”
Online content is especially vulnerable to being lost to history
Physical materials are relatively easy to preserve. Books, for example, are printed in many copies. And once they are printed, the content inside cannot easily be altered.
Information on the internet, however, is much easier to lose. Content on a web page can be changed in inconspicuous ways, or pages can be taken down altogether.
Additionally, the internet is based around the URL, a resource that only provides the location of information – not the information itself.
“It’s like, you know your house address,” Graham explained. “But wait, 10 years ago, someone else lived there. How would you know that? All you know is the house address.”
While independent archives like the Wayback Machine can help preserve otherwise inaccessible pages, Johnny Hadlock, executive director of the National Association of Government Archives & Records Administrators, said in a statement that “government agencies must proactively incorporate archiving into their workflows to protect their online presence.”
A report from Pew Research released last May found that 38% of web pages available to view in 2013 were no longer accessible 10 years later. The analysis also found that about one in five government web pages contain at least one broken link, which often occurs when a linked web page is taken down.
“So much of what happens in the world is digital, and those records are sometimes government records, sometimes research data,” Frank said, “But they’re valuable, and we should take care of them.”
CNN’s Matt Stiles contributed to this report.
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