Research Guides Data Resources Tools Disappearing Federal Data

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Oct 27, 2025, 3:27 AM

research guides data resources tools disappearing federal 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 Various datasets, resources and information have been removed from federal agencies, including the CDC, NIH, and EPA to comply with recent executive orders from the Trump administration that eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs... In large part, the data that has been impacted is public health data related to marginalized groups. Some access to data (specifically data on HHS, CDC, and FDA)that was removed has since been restored after a temporary restraining order.

Even as data is restored is unclear whether that data may have been scrubbed of certain datapoints or whether access to the data will remain in the future. One role researchers can play in protecting their own data is to self-archive their data into open respositories. Davidson College Library Research Guides © YEAR are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. 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: Beginning in January 2025, many federal datasets, websites, and other previously accessible resources are being taken offline to comply with executive orders, most notably Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC), Environmental Protection Agency... Much of the data targeted is ostensibly related to health disparities among different demographics, especially race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Because these variables are important factors in health research, however, many large and broad-scope data sets are affected. 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 or altered federal data: The Journalists Resource: overview of the current situation from the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI): an advocacy group for access to environmental data. Data Rescue Efforts: an evolving list of crowd-sourced efforts to preserve and maintain accessibility to data. The website for the Data Rescue Project, which evolved from this data rescue initiative is now available at: https://www.datarescueproject.org/about-data-rescue-project/ and the Data Rescue Tracker is available here: https://www.datarescueproject.org/data-rescue-tracker/ This guide has been created in response to recent and ongoing removal of federal datasets, websites, and other digital resources.

It is a work in progress and will be updated as new archives and repositories are surfaced. Many of the resources linked here have been identified by the Data Rescue Project and LibGuides from other colleges and universities. If you need assistance using any of the resources linked here, or these resources don't meet your needs, please reach out to your Research & Instruction Librarian. Recent executive orders and federal agency actions have raised questions about the future of publicly available government data, what can and can’t be published, and how the future of government-funded research will play out. So far, this has impacted some federal health data, USDA climate change information, Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) libraries, and more. A new presidential administration typically brings significant changes to federal government websites.

What is not typical, however, is the pressure faced by executive agencies in the second Trump administration to remove data and take down websites that conflict with the president's political views as outlined in... It has become increasingly common for government data sets that were previously publicly available to be removed. Some of these datasets may be altered and made available again, while others may remain offline indefinitely. Below is a list of non-governmental resources that have some US government-produced data. Please feel free to contact me if you need any help finding US government information. 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 provides recommendations on where to find data and websites from U.S. government departments that have unexpectedly become inaccessible. 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.

Research Guides Data Resources Tools Disappearing Federal Data

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