Thousands of datasets from Data.gov have disappeared since Trump’s inauguration. What’s going on?

Since President Trump was sworn into office, almost three thousand datasets have disappeared from Data.gov, the U.S. government’s repository of open data.

According to 404 Media, online archivist communities discovered since Trump took office on Jan. 21, the number of datasets on Data.gov has decreased to 305,564 from 307,854 datasets. Screenshots of Data.gov’s homepage archived in the Wayback Machine show the number of datasets one day before (Jan. 20) and nine days after (Jan. 30) the Trump administration began.

The outlet spoke with digital archivists who are working to identify what was deleted and why. But the answer is more complex than straight up propagandist data scrubbing. “While some of the deletions are surely malicious information scrubbing, some are likely routine artifacts of an administration change, and they are working to determine which is which,” said the investigation.

The reason for why datasets have disappeared could be link rot, i.e. links that no longer work because the URL has been changed, or data has been migrated somewhere else. There isn’t a regulated system for how federal agencies archive their data in the repository, and some agencies might have simply archived datasets on their own sites instead.

Changes in presidential administrations have led to datasets being deleted in the past, either on purpose or by accident. When Biden took office, 1,000 datasets were deleted according to the Wayback Machine, via 404 Media’s reporting. That said determining whether deletions were done on purpose or as a collateral effect of changing administrations is an arduous process that requires manual research of each archive.

But what was scrubbed is, in itself an indication of the government’s plans. During President Trump’s first presidency, the administration removed or changed large chunks of climate change information. And in his current presidency, he instructed federal agencies in an executive order to delete information about gender identity and DEI initiatives — part of Trump’s promise to end “wokeness.”

The outlet reports that deleted datasets “disproportionately” come from environmental science agencies like the Department of Energy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).