University of Kwazulu-Natal

Government Information Data Rescue Environmental News Bits

Bonisiwe Shabane
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government information data rescue environmental news bits

This guide, developed by American University librarian Jessica Breen, is designed to help locate US federal government data that may have been removed or redacted following the Presidential Executive Orders that went into effect... It includes links to government data and website archives, advocacy organizations, alternative information sources, and tools for data rescue activists. Swathes of scientific data deletions are sweeping across US government websites – with decades of health, climate change and extreme weather research at risk. Now, scientists are racing to save their work before it's lost. Some of them are in the US. Others are scattered around the world.

There are hundreds, many even thousands of people involved across multiple networks. And they keep a damn close eye on their phones. No one knows when the next alert or request to save a chunk of US government-held climate data will come in. Such data, long available online, keeps getting taken down by US President Donald Trump's administration. For the last six months or so, Cathy Richards has been entrenched in the response. She works for one of several organisations bent on downloading and archiving public data before it disappears.

"You get a message at 11 o'clock at night saying, 'This is going down tomorrow'," she says. "You try to enjoy your day and then everything goes wrong. You just spend the night downloading data." Richards is a data and inclusion specialist, and civic science fellow at the Open Environmental Data Project (OEDP), a non-profit based in Hudson, New York. Her organisation is a founding member of the Public Environmental Data Project (PEDP), which emerged in 2024 to safeguard data under the Trump administration. In the early hours of a March morning, librarian Julia Martin got word that a government data server containing critical climate information was at risk of going offline.

Since President Trump’s return to office, his administration has purged more than 8,000 government web pages and 3,000 datasets — scrubbing climate, health and environmental justice information from sites run by the Environmental Protection... Martin, director of information services at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, sprang into action. Fortunately, EDF had already been participating in the End of Term Web Archive project, a national initiative to preserve public government websites during presidential transitions. Through this effort, Martin knew where to find archived data and how to use existing aids to assess what had already been saved. That advance work paid off. Rather than scramble to recover lost data, Martin discovered that much of the material had already been captured.

While EDF initially planned to back up recent updates, the government ultimately renewed the server contract — making additional downloads unnecessary. But the availability of these archives ensured EDF and other organizations that depend on this data could keep working without disruption. In a high-stakes digital tug-of-war, a scrappy network of scientists, archivists and volunteers is racing to rescue climate and environmental data — vital information that can save lives and help steer the planet toward... Groups like the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI), the Data Rescue Project and Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab are working to preserve critical federal datasets as the Trump administration purges information that runs counter... Behind the scenes, a decentralized army of volunteers is preserving key federal information piece by piece. From university libraries to kitchen tables, they’re using tools like the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and Harvard’s Perma.cc to capture disappearing content.

Harvard’s Environmental and Energy Law Program helps archive complex datasets through its Dataverse repository, while the End of Term Archive sweeps up entire websites during presidential transitions. Email: ka025@bucknell.edu Office: Bertrand 107A Phone: 570.577.2423 Email: cmp016@bucknell.edu Office: Bertrand 107D Phone: 570.577.1068 Email: jbhm001@bucknell.edu Office: Bertrand 109 Phone: 570.577.2055 This work is a copy of the guide titled "Government Information Data Rescue" by the American University Library (2025). It is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

This guide is a living resource for those concerned about access to publicly available government data. The current situation is in flux; we, along with many other academic institutions and the library and archives community, are monitoring the situation. This guide will be updated as we identify additional resources. Data rescue is a movement among scientists, researchers and others to preserve primarily government-hosted data sets, often scientific in nature, to ward off their removal from publicly available websites. While the concept of preserving federal data existed before, it gained new impetus with the election in 2016 of U.S. President Donald Trump.

As Trump reemerged in 2025, there were renewed concerns about the need for data rescue.[1] The concept of harvesting and preserving federal web pages began as early as 2008, at the conclusion of President George W. Bush's second term, under the name "End of Term Presidential Harvest."[2] Soon after Trump's election, scientists, librarians and others in the U.S. and Canada—fearing that the administration of Trump (who had denied the validity of the scientific consensus on the existence of climate change[3]) would act to remove scientific data from government websites[4]—began working to preserve... Quickly, the concept of data rescue became a grassroots movement, with organized "hackathon" events at cities across the U.S.

and elsewhere, often hosted at universities and other institutions of higher education. The Guerrilla Archiving Event: Saving Environmental Data from Trump was a meeting arranged by two professors at the University of Toronto in December 2016,[5][6] in an effort to pre-emptively preserve US government climate data... 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 This page focuses upon data rescue efforts by a variety of organizations.

Some of these pre-date Trump's second term in office. The Government Information Data Rescue guide from librarians at American University includes a very helpful primer on how to check for missing data. Data Rescue Project The Data Rescue Project is a coordinated effort among a group of data organizations, including IASSIST, RDAP, and members of the Data Curation Network. Serves as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points for public US governmental data that are currently at risk. See what data is currently being saved with their new Data Rescue Tracker. You can follow the Data Rescue Project on Bluesky Social.

Gathers data, builds tools and collaborates with reporters to provide access to public records. Some projects have been archived by the Stanford Digital Repository, which ensures their long-term preservation. Provides a repository of hundreds of thousands of pages of original government materials, information on how to file requests and tools to make the requesting process easier. An initiative to identify, obtain, reformat, clean, document, publish, and disseminate government datasets of public interest. Call the Wilson Library front desk to get help by phone during open hours, or leave a voicemail for next-day follow-up. Use the web form to email us.

We respond within 1 to 2 business days. Real people, no bots. All day and night, with help from librarians everywhere.

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