Disappearing Federal Data

Starting in January 2025, many federal websites and datasets have been taken offline to comply with various executive orders. Most notably, information and data from the CDC, EPA, and NIH have disappeared. Much of the data that has been targeted so far is related to health disparities among different demographics and social identities, especially race, gender, and sexuality. Because these factors are often considered in health research, many large and broad-scope data sets are being affected. There is evidence that federal data on education that touches on disparities in outcomes among different groups may also be in the process of being taken offline. It's possible that even data that remain accessible online may have been scrubbed, corrupted, or otherwise altered. 

Find out more about missing or altered federal data:

The Journalists Resource: overview of the current situation from the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School.

Environmental Data and Governance Initiative: advocacy group for access to environmental data and information. 

Coherent Digital: Coherent Digital's mission is to preserve endangered information.

Data Rescue Project: Clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points for public US governmental data that are currently at risk. See the Resources page for a continuously updated list of tools, data sources, library guides related to data rescue efforts. 

The Data Rescue Tracker: Overview of who is downloading dataset and from which government websites. 

The Data Liberation Project: Governmental data that has recently been made available to the public. 

End of Term Crawl: Internet Archive cache of government web sites prior to presidential inaugurations.

GovWayBack: Access historical versions of U.S. government websites from before January 20, 2025.

Klaxon Cloud: Sign up for email notifications whenever there is a change or update to websites you follow. 

Harvard Library Innovation Lab: Access to major datasets from data.gov, PubMed, and federal GitHub repositories.

Please recommend links and other resources to be added to this page by emailing researchservices-g@mtholyoke.edu or reaching out to any contact in Research Services.