Boley Blog

Where to Find Removed Federal Websites and Data

Since the beginning of the second Trump administration thousands of federal webpages have seen changes or been taken down, with whole agency websites offline at least temporarily, and multiple datasets removed from public view. The reasons for a democracy to preserve governmental information are many, and there are established processes regarding laws and regulations. Digital government information archiving is not as well organized.

This quick guide points to resources providing access to U.S. federal government websites and datasets as they existed prior to changes and deletions following the January 20 change in administrations.

Website Archives

Wayback Machine (Internet Archive)
Have a url of a government website? Enter it in the Wayback Machine or search by keyword and gain access by date to all versions of that page drawn from the Internet Archive's crawls, including the End of Term crawls. Once in, all links from the archived version of a page will be to archived pages when available.
:: For quick access install the Wayback Machine Browser Extension.

End of Term Crawls (Internet Archive)
Search or (if you've a free 250 or so terabytes of hard drive space) download the Internet Archive's full crawls of the U.S. federal government web. See the End of Term Web Archive for more information and to nominate additional URLs for archiving.

Federal Depository Library Program Web Archive (U.S. GPO)
Selected U.S. Government Web sites archived in their entirety.

Congressional and Federal Web Harvests (National Archives and Records Administration)
Search or browse copies of U.S. House and Senate websites for every Congress since the 109th (2006).

Archived Presidential White House Websites (National Archives and Records Administration)
The preserved White House website of Biden's Presidency as well as those of all prior U.S. Presidents back to 1994.

Dataset Archives

Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab
Ongoing effort to preserve the over 300,000 datasets available on data.gov. Access to the full data and metadata is in progress. UPDATE: A complete archive of data.gov datasets, updated daily, is now available.

Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI)
Ongoing efforts to preserve public environmental data, including the EPA's Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) database and the Council on Environmental Quality's Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST).

Public Environmental Data Project
Coordinated effort at preserving and providing public access to federal environmental data, including the EPA's Environmental Justice Screening Tool, EPA EJScreen.

Resources

Data Rescue Effort (IASSIST)
See this excellent Google Doc providing regularly updated links to archived government websites, datasets, self-archiving tools, and other relevant resources. There are more archives to explore and much more work is being done to preserve this information. From the International Association for Social Science Information Service and Technology (IASSIST).

Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions (Just Security)
This public resource, updated seemingly daily, tracks legal challenges to Trump administration actions. Sort by topic, type of executive action, date filed, and date of last update.

Ask a Librarian
Need a hand searching for archival information? Members of the Lewis & Clark Law School community are always welcome to ask a law librarian. There are also expert government documents departments and librarians at your local academic library. See this list of FDLP libraries for contact info.

Aware of an archive we've left out? Send us a note at lawlib@lclark.edu.