University of Kwazulu-Natal

Where To Find Lost Or Removed Federal Datasets

Bonisiwe Shabane
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where to find lost or removed federal datasets

Ask a Librarian | Hours & Directions | Mason Libraries Home Have a question we haven't answered yet? Starting in the early months of 2025, access to a variety of federally-created and/or federally-hosted datasets has been limited or removed due to various Presidential Executive Orders. Researchers from a variety of disciplines use this data, and continued access is key to their work. Librarians, among others, have worked to gather, organize, and share where these datasets have been archived or are currently hosted. This page serves as a resource for some of this information but is by no means complete.

If you have questions about locating a particular dataset, or finding data on a topic, either federal or not, please reach out to us at librarydataservices@umass.edu. The Data Rescue project is a collaboration between several data organizations, many of which are also library-adjacent. They include IASSIST, RDAP, and members of the Data Curation Network. They maintain the Data Rescue Tracker, which tracks specific datasets that we taken down from public sites, and where it is hosted currently. It also shows sets that are yet to be archived but which are in progress. 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. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is the largest web archive, capturing snapshots of websites across the internet over time. It allows you to view websites as they appeared on specific dates in the past. 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 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. 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. Starting in late January 2025, researchers began noticing that some federal government datasets that used to be publicly accessible are no longer available on government websites. Datasets have disappeared from the websites of the CDC, EPA, NOAA, NIH, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Energy, Food & Drug Administration, and more.

Universities, scholarly organizations, and individuals have worked to rescue access to data. This libguide provides further information about the current situation and ongoing data rescue efforts, along with suggested resources for researchers. This libguide is being continuously updated; if you have suggestions for additional information to include on this library guide, please email the details to libref@pugetsound.edu. If you need assistance locating data, please reach out to any of the Collins liaison librarians. The Government Information Crisis Is Bigger Than You Think It Is blog post by Free Government Information CDC removes gender, equity references in public health material from WaPo

This guide provides access to and information about United States government data and webpages that have been removed since January 2025. It is divided into Environmental Data, Health and Medical Data, Other Data, and Government Websites. A list of groups working to rescue government data is also available.These resources are intended for research purposes and will be updated as new information is available. If you are have data resources to share, please contact your subject librarian. When searching for government data that may have been removed, search in this order: Not sure what dataset you need?

Here are some search tips. Your subject librarian can also help you with this. For help evaluating data quality, the Data Quality Literacy Guidebook is a good place to start. As you search for information, save your sources, particularly datasets and government publications. Note the date you were last able to access a source in case it isn’t available later. Check the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and other repositories for removed data sources or websites.

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.

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