University of Kwazulu-Natal

Finding Government Data Locating Deleted Government Data

Bonisiwe Shabane
-
finding government data locating deleted government data

Ask a Librarian | Hours & Directions | Mason Libraries Home This guide will help you to locate U.S. Federal Government data that may have been removed or redacted following the Presidential Executive Orders that went into effect on January 31, 2025. Use the menu on the left to navigate to different sections of this guide. Please note this issue is ongoing and continues to evolve. This guide will be updated regularly as new information becomes publicly available.

Dedicated groups of librarians and others around the country have actively engaged in data rescue efforts to search for data assumed at risk and send the datasets and documentation to secure repositories where it... The Data Rescue Project and similar initiatives work to preserve and protect government data that could be lost or altered due to political or institutional changes. These groups—often made up of scientists, librarians, archivists, and volunteers—identify vulnerable datasets (like those stored on government websites) and back them up to secure, publicly accessible online repositories. Their goal is to ensure that researchers, policymakers, and the public can continue to access accurate and reliable data for science, education, and decision-making, even if official sources become unavailable or are changed. The Data Rescue Project (DRP) is a coalition of data-librarian organizations aimed at coordinating and communicating efforts to preserve access to public U.S. government data that is currently at risk.

They recognize people are confused about where to go and what is happening. The DRP created a Data Rescue Tracker, which is a collaborative tool built to catalog existing public data-rescue efforts and provides consolidated overviews of which group or organization is downloading and preserving specific datasets. This guide was originally compiled by the librarians at American University in Washington, DC. The original guide can be viewed here:American University Data Rescue Guide This LibGuide is a living document that is continually being edited and improved. Much of the original content was derived from a Google document titled “Data Rescue Efforts,” which circulated in February 2020.

The collaborative group behind that document has since grown into the Data Rescue Project. We gratefully acknowledge their foundational work and the ongoing, collective efforts of the data preservation community. Below is a concise guide to help you locate US federal government data that may have been removed or redacted following the Presidential Executive Orders that went into effect on January 31, 2025. Please note that this guide only covers how to find removed information. For current or active government data, you should use Data.gov, which remains the best resource for discovering existing federal data. Before you begin searching for rescued data, it's a good idea to double-check that the information is truly gone from official sources:

If you have confirmed that the data or information is missing, move on to archival resources. Beginning in January 2025, many federal datasets, websites, and other previously accessible resources, across agencies, are being taken offline to comply with executive orders. In some cases, press releases or data documentation have been removed; in others, entire datasets have been taken down. Evidence is growing that even datasets that remain accessible on an agency’s website may have scrubbed, corrupted, or otherwise altered information. Learn more about missing, altered or restored federal data: New York Times (02/11/25): Judge Orders C.D.C.

to Temporarily Restore Deleted HHS, CDC & FDA Web Pages. The temporary restraining order was granted in response to a lawsuit filed against the federal government by Doctors for America (DFA), a progressive advocacy group representing physicians, and the nonprofit Public Citizen, a consumer... Previously restored pages include the Atlas Tool, used by policymakers to track rates of infectious diseases such as HIV and STIs; pages that explained the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, which monitors adolescent health;... Silencing Science Tracker: joint initiative of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, tracking government attempts to restrict or prohibit scientific research since the November 2016 election Administrative transitions can involve changes to federal government websites. Sometimes these changes imply modifying the access to data.

This guide is meant to assist researchers finding government datasets that may no longer be available on official federal websites. A specialized archive that preserves U.S. Government websites during presidential administration transitions. The collection includes preserved websites from administration changes since 2008. The most comprehensive web archive available, containing over 916 billion archived web pages. This resource allows users to view historical versions of websites and access content that may no longer be available online.

An integrated platform providing census and survey data globally. Notable collections include: A crowd-sourced repository focusing on government data preservation, featuring collections from: These are preserved data sets that UMD researchers have identified as being important to their research. Want to recommend another data set? Send us an email at libresearchdata@umd.edu.

© 2022 University Libraries, University of Maryland. Privacy Policy | Give Now | Website Feedback | Web Accessibility Since a flurry of executive orders were issued in early 2025, thousands of datasets and webpages have been removed from federal government websites. The removals have focused on content relating to both topics that have been the subject of executive orders (e.g. gender, structural inequality, climate science, and public health) and content on other topics that uses vocabulary common to research on the topics targeted by the orders. This guide provides a workflow for researchers needing access to data that has been removed.

Most US federal government datasets are still available on data.gov, if you have not heard specific reports that a dataset has been removed or moved, begin searching by name or topic on data.gov. If the data is not indexed on Data.gov and you know which government agency produced the information, check their website directly. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine indexes many (but not all) .gov webpages. It works best if you have the exact url for the old page - you may be able to find this from cached google search results, citations, etc. Please recommend resources to be added to this guide by emailing libref@eckerd.edu. Thank you to our colleagues from the Oberlin Group of Liberal Arts College Libraries group for their thoughtful collaboration on this guide.

After January 20, 2025, federal data, webpages, and other previously accessible sources of government information normally available to researchers and the public began to disappear in order to comply with executive orders. This is an evolving situation. To learn more about missing or altered federal data: The Journalists Resource is an overview of the current situation from the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School. This guide highlights changes to health-related resources on governmental websites. Please be aware that changes are being made to websites where researchers have historically accessed clinical and research information, and data are being removed.

While these websites may still be available, please be aware of information integrity concerns. This guide includes external links to information preservation resources where information is being archived. Please note the date of the archive, as up-to-date information may not be available. For guidelines, see the Information on Practice Guidelines tab. For missing data, see the Links to Missing CDC & Other Data box on this page. Starting on January 20, 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 targeted data is related to health disparities based on race, gender, and sexuality, factors often considered in health research. Federal data on education that touches on disparities in outcomes among different groups is also at risk. Some data that remain accessible online may have been scrubbed, corrupted, or otherwise altered. This guide is designed to help the MHC community: 1) understand the current data landscape; 2) locate US federal government data that may have been removed; 3) gain awareness about data advocacy and rescue... This section provides strategies for retrieving missing or altered federal data and for locating archived versions of government websites.

Begin by searching data.gov to confirm whether the data is truly unavailable. It's possible that the dataset has been relocated. 2. Use the Internet Archive Wayback Machine:

People Also Search

Ask A Librarian | Hours & Directions | Mason Libraries

Ask a Librarian | Hours & Directions | Mason Libraries Home This guide will help you to locate U.S. Federal Government data that may have been removed or redacted following the Presidential Executive Orders that went into effect on January 31, 2025. Use the menu on the left to navigate to different sections of this guide. Please note this issue is ongoing and continues to evolve. This guide will b...

Dedicated Groups Of Librarians And Others Around The Country Have

Dedicated groups of librarians and others around the country have actively engaged in data rescue efforts to search for data assumed at risk and send the datasets and documentation to secure repositories where it... The Data Rescue Project and similar initiatives work to preserve and protect government data that could be lost or altered due to political or institutional changes. These groups—often...

They Recognize People Are Confused About Where To Go And

They recognize people are confused about where to go and what is happening. The DRP created a Data Rescue Tracker, which is a collaborative tool built to catalog existing public data-rescue efforts and provides consolidated overviews of which group or organization is downloading and preserving specific datasets. This guide was originally compiled by the librarians at American University in Washing...

The Collaborative Group Behind That Document Has Since Grown Into

The collaborative group behind that document has since grown into the Data Rescue Project. We gratefully acknowledge their foundational work and the ongoing, collective efforts of the data preservation community. Below is a concise guide to help you locate US federal government data that may have been removed or redacted following the Presidential Executive Orders that went into effect on January ...

If You Have Confirmed That The Data Or Information Is

If you have confirmed that the data or information is missing, move on to archival resources. Beginning in January 2025, many federal datasets, websites, and other previously accessible resources, across agencies, are being taken offline to comply with executive orders. In some cases, press releases or data documentation have been removed; in others, entire datasets have been taken down. Evidence ...