Within days of taking office, the Trump administration began to clear federal population data (a wide range of topics including public health, education, and climate), complying with the president’s ban on “gender ideology” and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives from government websites.
Over the past five months, more than 3,000 taxpayer-funded data sets (authorized by Congress) have been collected by federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Center for Education Statistics, and the Census Bureau, have been captured by crossfires.
According to the above administration’s description, the White People Environmental Quality and Economic Justice Screening Tool is a White House Environmental Quality and Economic Justice Screening Tool, an interactive map of the U.S. Census District, “the burden of pollution caused by underinvestment and excessive pollution caused by pollution.”
This is the type of detailed, comprehensive data scholars rely on to write this article, paper, article and books that often help inform public policy. Without access to other datasets and the scope of other datasets, researchers in the United States and beyond will not be able to determine social, economic and technological trends and the information needed to forge potential solutions.
“Deleting that data is deleting a lot of human knowledge,” said Cathy Richards, a citizen science researcher and data inclusion expert. “A lot of science is about innovations in what people have done before. New scientists use data they have never seen before, but they are using the knowledge in front of them to create something better. I don’t think we understand the impact at all.” [that] Delete 50 years of knowledge about future science. ”
That’s why she and many other relevant academic librarians, researchers and data trends are collaborating (many as unpaid volunteers) to keep as much data as possible on non-government websites. Some of the groups involved include OEDP, data rescue projects, maintenance research and culture, Internet archives, terminology archive ends, and Data.gov archives operated by Harvard Law School library.
For OEDP’s Richards, data protection efforts began just after Trump won the election in November.
She and her colleagues remember how Trump was a climate change denied in 2017 (mostly the environment) that they wanted to be consistent from any data that ensured to be targeted during his second term. The OEDP was launched in 2020 in response to the first Trump administration’s environmental policy, which prioritized fossil fuel extraction and compiled about 200 potentially fragile federal datasets, and researchers say it is crucial to continue its work. They collected and downloaded as many data sets as possible in the last two months of 2024 and the first few weeks of 2025, as many as possible before Trump’s inauguration, and then moved it to a stable, independent and publicly accessible webpage.
“It took some time,” Richards said, noting that not all datasets and their accompanying metadata are easy to replicate. “Each is very different. Some require scratching. In one case, I have to manually download 400 files and click on each file every few minutes.”
Despite their progress, OEDP’s small team was unable to retain all the datasets on the list by late January. Once Trump is in office, research concerns will soon begin scrubbing federal data.
Compared with 2017, “the data began to decline very quickly.” “We started getting emails from people saying that these sites are no longer valid and it’s scary because they need it to finish the paper.”
As of this month, OEDP has completed archives of approximately 100 datasets, including the CDC’s pregnancy mortality surveillance system, the Census Bureau’s U.S. Community Survey, and the White House’s climate and economic justice screening tool. Since it can do dozens of work, it also communicates with other data protection efforts to ensure that work is not duplicated and that researchers and the public can maintain as much data access as possible.
“Break trust”
Prior to Trump’s inauguration, there were 307,851 data sets available on Data.gov. One month later, the number dropped to 304,621. In addition to data response efforts, the rewards have also aroused strong protests from the research community.
As scientists who rely on this data to understand the causes and consequences of demographic changes in individuals and communities, and as taxpayers supporting the collection, dissemination and storage of these data, we are very worried. “The American Population Association and the Association of Population Association and Population Centers released in early February. “Removing data from a secure portal maintained by federal agencies, or even temporarily deleting data, undermines trust in U.S. statistical and scientific research institutions and puts the integrity of these data at risk. ”
Since then, federal judges ordered the government to restore many deleted data sets (such as Sunday, data). For example, the CDC’s social vulnerability index has been in communities that may need support since 2007 during or after natural disasters and returned online in February. However, it now has a warning label from the Trump administration, which claims that the information does “reflect biological reality” and therefore the government “rejects it.”
Richards of the OEDP remained skeptical about the return of some data, speculating that the government might change it to better fit its ideological narrative before it resumes. So, firstly, capture the data before capturing the data “It is important for us to have a benchmark proof that this is the case from January 18 to 19.”
Long-time academic data librarian Lynda Kellum is helping run a data rescue project (with the help of hundreds of volunteers, about 1,000 federal data sets have been completed, which also shows that she is “slightly pessimistic” about the future of data collection. This is not only because the Trump administration has fired thousands of federal workers who have done data collection, canceled billions of dollars in research contracts and deleted the collection of public data; it is also because the government’s Department of Efficiency has access to protected personal data contained in some of these data sets.
“How do we talk to people about what protections are and how the data collected by the government is undermining this trust,” she said. “For example, someone sent us a message asking us why we should participate in the U.S. community survey when they (confidential, legally protected) data…these protections still exist, but there will be doubts about whether these protections are going to be what has happened in the past five months and whether these protections will continue.”
Some legal protections are already eroding. On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court supported the Trump administration’s determination that Doge should now have information collected by the Social Security Agency, including social insurance numbers, medical and mental health records, and family court information. (The case will now go to the federal court of appeals in Virginia, which will decide on its case.)
Henrik Schönemann, a digital history and humanities expert at Humboldt University in Berlin, helped run the historical and cultural initiative to maintain conservation, which has also archived large amounts of federal data since January, said efforts to rescue federal data collection are crucial to the global research community. “Even if the United States falls, we’re still here, we still need that data,” he said. If this political moment passes, “hopefully having this data can help [the United States] reconstruction. ”
Although Schönemann believes that independent federal data protection efforts can effectively resist the dictatorship of the U.S. slideshow is a “fantasy”, he thinks it’s better than nothing.
“It is building communities and showing people that something can be done for it,” he said. “Maybe this empowerment may lead them to feel competent in other areas and give people hope.”
