End of Term blog

Sharing news and commentary on the urgent effort to save public research websites as Trump cuts access

The Week of July 14, 2025

The Duke Chronicle. Fulbright board members announce their resignation, citing accusations of the program's politicization by Trump

In a decision not taken lightly, eleven out of twelve members resigned from the Fulbright board last month. With history as a bipartisan organization, the board attempts to represent the whole of the United States, however, they claim the current administration’s actions are ‘“antithetical to the Fulbright mission and the values, including free speech and academic freedom, that Congress specified in the statute.”’ -acs

The Week of June 16, 2025

TheLogic. Internet Archive Canada preserves Canada's web history, and more

Internet Archive Canada may have launched back in 2006, but its importance really became evident shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump’s first election win in 2016. -gjw

WA State Nurses Assn. Health groups in Washington sue as the federal government deletes vital health data and resources

John Bramhall, MD, PhD, of the Washington State Medical Association warns “These executive-ordered website deletions were driven by ideology, not by science or evidence.” Urging medical professionals to recognize wiping of data as an attack on science, patients, and the medical system at large. -gjw

PBS. Ex-Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden talks getting fired by Trump and the legacy of scholarship

Former Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden first woman and first African-American to lead the National library, details her time at the LOC, citing struggles with the White House and the importance of libraries for all generations. -gjw

Brookings. Deleted US government data creates performance challenges in policy and research

Taxpayer-funded data has disappeared. Now "policymakers are trying to find ways to make sure that people still have access to that data," but there's a still long road ahead in the struggle for comprehensive information and methodology. -gjw

The Appeal. Trump DOJ Erases Trans People from Crime Data Surveys

The federal government will no longer collect data about the gender identity of people who experience violent crime or sexual misconduct. -gjw

The Week of May 5, 2025

IEEE Spectum. Saving public data: more than snapshots

Digital archivists combine efforts to preserve complex government sites. -gjw

Brown Daily Herald. Brown librarians, professors lead effort to archive government data under threat by Trump administration

Frank Donnelly, the head of geographic information systems and data services at the Brown University Library has been working to archive this data being lost to shutdowns. Donnelly said since Trump’s inauguration, “librarians (were) forming different groups across the country to make sure that we had backups of a lot of federal data sets.” -gjw

The Week of March 24, 2025

Forbes. USAID website is offline

USAID’s website, usaid.gov, displays a message stating the server cannot be reached as of March 22, 2025. -gjw

NPR. As Trump administration purges web pages, EOT rushes to save them

Radio interview and transcript. NPR’s Emma Bowman interviews Mark Graham and Brewster Kahle on the effort to save government websites and data.

NPR/KCBX. Reporter Emma Bowman’s article explains what’s at stake re EOT

Six weeks into the new administration, Internet Archive had cataloged some 73,000 web pages that had existed on U.S. government websites that were expunged after Trump's inauguration. The Internet Archive is currently the only place the public can find a copy of an interactive timeline detailing the events of Jan. 6, a product of the congressional committee that investigated the Capitol attack, and has since been taken down from their website.

New Yorker. Can guerrilla archivists save the country’s files from DOGE?

“This is how we know about our country,” social scientist Lynda Kellam told the New Yorker. “People who support the ‘drain the swamp’ mentality don’t seem to understand how much the government does.” Kellam described the vulnerable data as “irreplaceable.” - gjw

NYT. Vast quantities of climate and environmental information have been removed from official websites

Hundreds of volunteers, including EOT Harvest members Internet Archive and EDGI, are working to download government data recreate the digital tools that allow the public to access that information.

The Week of March 17, 2025

WaPo. Curating reality is an old political game, but Trump’s sweeping statistical purges are part of a broader attempt to reinvent truth

Trump has created a smoke-and-mirrors version of reality that counters the evidence, from taxpayer-funded government data, that could frustrate his ambitions. -gjw

The Week of March 10, 2025

Washington Post. Photos are disappearing, one archive at a time

[Indirectly related to the EOT effort] As photographers try to find homes for their work, traditional archives (hard copy photos, negatives, and slides) are also vanishing, especially in local journalism, where generations of photographers built shared visual records of community history. - gjw

Clean Technica. US Cultural Revolution: Bonfire of NASA, NOAA, EPA, CDC, & USDA Climate Programs

NASA, NOAA, NIH, National Science Foundation data and budgets slashed as if Mao's Cultural Revolution lives on. - acb

Columbia Journalism Review. Fighting the Great Federal Website Purge

By preserving such information, newsrooms are not only aiding themselves and other journalists, but are showing data archivists where to dig and supporting countless scientists whose work the current purge has devalued. - acb

AP. Judge tells agencies to restore webpages and data removed after Trump’s executive order

Removing important information from the CDC and FDA websites is delaying patient care, hampering research and hindering doctors’ ability to communicate with patients, the plaintiffs’ attorneys argued in a court filing. - acb

CivilRights.org. Why We Must Stop Trump’s Attempts to Erase Our Communities

These rollbacks do not merely threaten the integrity of scientific research — they undermine the fundamental goals of our federal statistical system to produce and share timely, relevant data while ensuring accuracy, credibility, objectivity, and confidentiality. Eliminating critical data allows for agencies to absolve themselves of accountability, obscures population-policy impacts, and worsens inequities. Without trusted data to make decisions, mistrust and disinformation can proliferate. - acb

GWU National Security Archive. Disappearing Data: Trump Administration Removing Climate Information from Government Websites

Community-led advocacy groups, archivists, and universities scramble to download climate resources and datasets. EPA, NOAA, and CEQ all targets of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. End of Term Web (EOT) Archive and Internet Archive's (IA) Wayback Machine crucial in preserving web data.download climate resources and datasets. EPA, NOAA, and CEQ all targets of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. End of Term Web (EOT) Archive and Internet Archive's (IA) Wayback Machine crucial in preserving web data. - acb

The Week of February 23, 2025

Internet Archive Blog. EOT Update: 500 terabytes of material, more than 100 million unique web pages preserved so far

Coverage includes websites in the .gov and .mil web domains, as well as government websites hosted on .org, .edu, and other top level domains.

As an added layer of preservation, the 2024/2025 EOT Web Archive will be uploaded to the Filecoin network for long-term storage. Separate from the EOT coalition, this is part of the Internet Archive’s Democracy’s Library project. -gjw

MIT Technology Review. Inside the race to archive the US govt websites

“I consider the actions of the current administration an assault on the entire scientific enterprise,” says Margaret Hedstrom, professor emerita of information at the University of Michigan. -gjw

CNN. What the White House takes down, Wayback Machine puts back up

A model of understatement: “the second Trump administration seems to have taken down more content than usual.” Cue the Wayback Machine. -gjw

Fierce Pharma. CDC’s ‘Wild to Mild’ flu vaccine campaign muzzled amid HHS handover

According to snapshots collected by the Internet Archive, at some point between Feb. 14 and Feb. 18, the Wild to Mild webpage was wiped of its information and resources. - gjw

The Verge. The mad dash to protect environmental data from Donald Trump
“Trump’s second term in office could pose a bigger risk to information about climate change and pollution on federal websites, advocates warn” - gjw

Freedom of the Press Foundation. Here’s how you can help save government data and research

President Donald Trump’s administration has been quick to purge information about “vaccines, veterans’ care, hate crimes and scientific research, among many other topics” from thousands of federal government websites. - gjw

Harvard-Shorenstein Center. Researchers rush to save federal health databases disappearing from government websites

Researchers and students at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health have been scraping and downloading data related to health equity from U.S. government agency websites before they disappear. Their goal is to make the data publicly available through repositories such as the Harvard Dataverse and the Wayback Machine.

Nat’l Security Archive. Trump kills climate science information

Advocacy groups, archivists, and universities scramble to download climate resources and datasets; EPA, NOAA, and CEQ all targets of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. End of Term Web Archive and Internet Archive's Wayback Machine crucial in preserving web data. -gjw