Finding & Preserving Government Data

In January 2025, the federal government began taking down webpages, datasets, and other publicly accessible resources.  Changes to government websites are a relatively standard practice among administrations, and there are existing organizations and systems in place, such as the Internet Archive's End of Term Crawl initiative and the National Archives Archived Presidential White House Websites collection (see links below), that archive federal websites at the end of a presidential term.

This time, however, there is a broader scope of valuable resources that were or are likely to be taken down and either deleted or edited.  Many of these resources, which include data from the CDC, EPA, and NIH, among other agencies, are frequently utilized by researchers, and were taken down in efforts to comply with executive orders related to DEI, environmental justice, and gender.

We are committed to assisting Trinity community members using federal data whose work may be impacted by these changes. This guide provides examples of potential alternative sources for federal data, and resources and tools for those interested in supporting data rescue efforts. If you have questions or need additional help beyond what is provided by this guide, please reach out to one of our librarians for assistance.

Much of the content for this guide was derived from a crowdsourced "Data Rescue Efforts" Google Doc created by the Data Rescue Project, which they have since added to their new website.  Links to the original live Google Doc and the Data Rescue Project's website are provided below.