In the first 100 days of President Donald J. Trump’s second term, several government agencies have begun the process of removing or altering public data from their websites coinciding with executive orders coming out of the White House.

In response to executive orders that are putting critical government data at risk, librarians, academics and data scientists have collaborated to archive and restore public data to aid in ensuring that the American people will continue to be able to access vital information as a part of their constitutional rights.

According to The New York Times, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has removed over 3,000 pages of publicly available data including research articles based on preventing chronic disease, sexually transmitted disease treatment, and drug overdose prevention training. The CDC has been among one of the largest data removal projects of any federal agency.

Similarly, an approximated 3,000 pages of data have been removed from the U.S. Census Bureau’s website. Articles providing details regarding the research and methodology of how the U.S. Census is conducted were a major portion of what has been removed from the U.S. Census Bureau’s website.

While the CDC and Census Bureau have removed the most data among government agencies, other agencies are removing data to keep up to date with the recent executive orders.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has removed hundreds of pages of crucial information that spans across departments. A program that has been affected is Head Start, a program under HHS, serving children from low-income families.

The New York Times reported that Head Start removed data related mental health and family stability, including articles on preventing postpartum depression, and articles focused around helping families living in poverty establish routines.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) removed approximately 180 pages of data. Data removed from the DOJ included annual reports on state level hate crimes.

L.G.B.T.Q. communities which were previously represented in data and trend analysis by the DOJ have now been disregarded as the DOJ removed resources and data surrounding L.G.B.T.Q related hate crimes.

Other federal administrations that were affected by data being removed from webpages included the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), where press announcements regarding American’s access to the National Disaster Distress Helpline was removed. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also removed data regarding increasing diversity in clinical trials.

Removals of data and research from government websites has broader implications as much of the data removed from government websites is a result of policy driven directives relating to a slew of executive orders signed by the Trump administration over the past 100 days.

Many of these executive orders have reshaped the approach to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), as well as a shifted focus on gender ideology.

In an executive order signed on Jan. 21, 2025, the Trump administration aimed to end all DEI programs for federal agencies. Executive Order 14173, titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit Based Opportunity” eliminated all federal DEI programs.

This executive order also removed DEI related training, hiring and content from official government websites, which was a driving factor in the decisions by so many government agencies to remove data that was primarily serving groups that are affected by the ending of DEI programs on the federal level.

The Trump administration also signed an executive order relating to gender ideology and “biological truth” on Jan. 20, 2025.

Executive Order 14168 titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” requires all federal agencies to recognize only binary gender based on biological sex, this resulted in the removal of references to gender identity and transgender people from government websites like the CDC, and Health and Human Services.

These directives have had an effect on not only data on government websites, but also in academic spheres, where many rely on federal research collaborations to propel programs at universities and local programs.

Dr. Nanette Marcum – Dietrich is a professor of Environmental Science at Millersville University in Millersville PA. Dr. Dietrich works in environmental science as a professor, as well as a STEM researcher. Recently, Dietrich experienced how this executive order affected a grant she had been working on.

Dietrich had been working on a grant with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). According to Dr. Dietrich, she and her team had to review their proposal to ensure that the language complied with new directives coming out of the recent executive orders.

“We needed to purge the proposal of any trigger words, it was difficult and part of it seemed trivial,” Dietrich said.

Dietrich also reflected on her experience with a National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant from 2019.

“Using Industry Representatives to Increase Female Enrollment” was an effort to increase the diversity in STEM in the local area, primarily targeting women to enter into high paying STEM fields. The grant had been approved in 2019 but following executive orders relating to DEI, Dr. Dietrich and her team had to make some adjustments.

“After January 20, probably sometime in February we got an email saying that our grant which is completed was a part of the mentor connect,” Dietrich said, “the mentor connect repository was being removed because it violated DEI policies – we have targeted females.”

Even though executive orders are creating a space online where data is being removed from the websites of important government agencies, there are many Americans who are working together to preserve data that has been removed.

In response to the Trump administration’s efforts to remove public data from government websites, a team of librarians American University in Washington D.C. have come together to create a guide for students, faculty, and the general public to learn more about the data that has been removed from government websites since January.

As a part of the American University Library website, librarians Jessica Breen, Gwendolyn Reece, Olivia Ivey and Sarah Gilchrist have provided an archival solution to the data that is being removed by government agencies.

The group of librarians put together a subject guide titled “Government Information Data Rescue.”

The guide outlines archives of government data, archives of government websites, advocacy organizations, alternative sources and data rescue activist tools.

Librarians across the nation were able to anticipate that publicly available data would be removed from government websites before it even happened, the guide editors said.

“This was expected that there would be changes and that they would be fairly significant,” Breen said, “so people had been prepared for the potential that this could happen, but the speed and breadth was really unusual and frightening.”

American University School of Communications librarian Derrick Jefferson had a similar experience while talking to one of his colleagues about data being removed from federal webpages.

“When I reached out to a dear friend of mine, he was like, ‘you know we have been stockpiling information for months, because we saw this coming’,” Jefferson said, “Good people are doing that work to preserve what is being lost.”

The process to archive information became a collaborative project spanning across institutions in the United States.

“The birth of the lib guide was taking stuff that other people had been working on,” Reece said, “to coordinate among the information they had compiled and trying to make that more available to our community.”

According to the guide editors it had become clear that much of the data that was being removed from government websites was a direct result of executive orders targeting federal DEI initiatives.

In reference to data regarding L.G.B.T.Q. individuals, Reece said, “We were beginning to get panicked calls from faculty who used this research.”

“We need a place to put it you know, so there was just a bunch of stuff that happened early on that was important, some of this is normal, and some of it is not normal,” said Reece when talking about why the library guide was created.

Gilchrist alluded to how the use of generative AI has also come up as a driving factor in the removal of data from government websites. With the recent executive orders, the New York Times found that there is a list of words and phrases being removed from government websites, research, and articles.

Some of the words on the list provided by the New York Times includes “climate crisis,” “women,” “advocacy,” and “gender.”

“It is a computer tool that is going through and looking for certain words and not looking at the context,” Gilchrist said, “that presents problems further down the road because as researchers the way we have named data helps us find continuity.”

In reflecting on the process of archiving data, Reece talked about her plans to continue her work on data archiving over the summer. “What I am hoping to do over the summer is to go to see what information out of what we have archived is unique versus if it is already in somebody else’s repository,” Reece said, “if it is unique we will make it publicly available.”

The issue of ethics comes up when the government is removing data that was once publicly available, especially in times when people are seeking out this data for archival purposes.

“I think there’s a question there about what happens if the entity that you are concerned about is the government,” Breen said, “are they going to continue to have this data? Are they going to continue to make it accessible?”

“That’s something where, you know, I don’t think an independent entity can ethically do that, even if they could get their hands on the data,” Gilchrist followed up with.

There are also concerns about what data will continue to be collected, and what data will not be collected over the next four years while Trump remains in office, primarily relating to the data collection by the Census.

“The Census Bureau goes out and counts people, and that sort of data will go away when the census is told not to collect a particular variable,” Breen said, “but the vast majority of the data that people are concerned about is data that’s actually generated by research and stopping the funding of organizations has completely stopped that research under federal guidelines.”

The editors of the library guide at American University hope that people can access their guide and take away vital information that has been removed from the government websites as a sort of community building structure.

“We just want to be part of a larger project that will help in that respect too, it can act as a sort of place for hope,” Reece said, “Through recognizing that this is a community effort, it can help us reengage as citizens in the work instead of hoping that someone else does it, we can have some agency.”

Gilchrist reflected on how archiving data does not only act as a source of hope for researchers, but it can also act as a way to make a larger problem feel smaller and more centralized.

“Sometimes it feels overwhelming when we are looking at how many problems there are,” Gilchrist said, “so in a way this paves a way that can help us focus in on those areas which we can help and which we have control.”

The act of archiving data can be used as a method to create change across universities, especially universities that have been losing federal funding. American University is classified as an R1 research university by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, this recognizes AU as a university with high research activity, but other universities in the United States are struggling to fund research after recent federal funding cuts.

“There are universities that are facing financial problems so much so that they are having to get rid of database access and information,” Ivey said, “this can help fill that gap.”

Jefferson’s job during this time of archiving and preserving information has taken the form of connecting his colleagues with each other, and with data they are searching for.

“Even though my focus is not on data, I have connected several of my colleagues with librarians at AU, and other institutions who were really like mavericks and vanguards about compiling data,” Jefferson said.

Jefferson reflected on how data from government websites was created for the people, and the ways in which federal data has shaped decades of scholarship and academic learning for students.

“To have that stuff taken away from you, snatched away from you feels unethical,” Jefferson said, “to American university, to scholarship, to academia, and to the work that we really want our scholars and students to be utilizing.”

Jefferson feels like the data that was once publicly available should remain publicly available, alluding to the removal of public information as a removal of freedom from the American people.

“It is frustrating when this administration has kind of coopted freedom, and you know it all feels king of big brotherly and the things that we really took for granted are being violated,” Jefferson said.

As previously noted by the guide editors and the investigations done by the New York Times, a lot of the data removal efforts have disproportionally targeted minority groups, Jefferson reflected on how the data that has been removed focused on marginalized groups, but information about white, cisgendered, and Christian people has remained in circulation on federal websites.

“It feels broken. It feels timely, it feels all of the feels,” Jefferson said, “to that end, good, I would say good, because your body is telling you that this isn’t right, in alignment with how things kind of ought to be.”

Researchers and librarians are not the only ones facing discomfort as federal agencies are removing information from their webpages, journalists are also taking the hit as they have relied on government data to be used in reporting.

Aarushi Sahejpal is a data journalist and a professor of journalism at American University. Sahejpal uses data every day in his professional life.

“We are employed because we talk to people about their experiences and we look at the ways that society s impacting all facets of life,” Sahejpal said, “but one of the ways that we show the scale and magnitude of it is through data sets.”

Sahejpal reflected on how costly and time consuming it can be to maintain data sets, so the government was doing journalists and the public a service by maintaining all this data on their agency websites. “One of the mandates of the federal government is to provide information to the civic, to the people,” Sahejpal said, “maintaining these data sets can be very expensive, it can be very costly, but if the government does it for us like they ought to, that allows reporters to do a lot better.”

Sahejpal has experienced first-hand how archiving and providing data to the public is necessary, through his work with The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project. Sahejpal says that data is important for the American people to be able to access, especially when the nation is in a time of crisis, like the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

“One of my biggest jobs in journalism was creating a data set because the CDC did not release that information about the pandemic,” Sahejpal said, “it was so hard, so time consuming, but sometimes reporters can fill those gaps.”

Sahejpal reflected on his role in creating that data set as not only being of journalistic value, but it also helped state governments identify where to deploy resources.

“I think our responsibility is greater now, not just to report on whatever limited amounts of data we have, but to call and write about the fact that we don’t have all the information,” Sahejpal said, “I think our responsibility and our honor is a lot greater now.”