Reprinted from ThinkProgress, By Joshua Eaton. –
The Trump administration has taken thousands of government records offline since taking office. We’re getting them back.
Since President Donald Trump took office in January, thousands of government records that were previously public have gone offline—from a massive database of records on animal welfare at the Department of Agriculture to climate change data across the government.
The move has confirmed some of the worst fears of scientists who raced to back up government data on climate change ahead of Trump’s inauguration. Those efforts have archived terabytes worth of data on private servers. But government records on everything from labor violations to animal welfare are still at risk of being taken offline or destroyed altogether.
That’s why ThinkProgress is launching Disappearing Data, a project to recover government data that’s been taken offline.
We’ve already filed Freedom of Information Act requests for six disappeared websites. And we’ve already scored a victory: In response to requests by ThinkProgress and others, the Environmental Protection Agency posted a snapshot of its website as it existed on January 19.
We’ll FOIA new websites and datasets as they go offline. And we stay on top of the requests listed here until we make this data public again.
To do that, we’ll need your help. If you notice that government data has gone offline, email ThinkProgress reporter Joshua Eaton at jeaton@thinkprogress.org.
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