Beginning in January 2025, many federal datasets, websites, and other previously accessible resources are being taken offline to comply with executive orders, most notably CDC, EPA, and NIH data. Much of the data targeted is ostensibly related to health disparities among different demographics, especially race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Because these variables are important factors in health research, however, many large and broad-scope data sets are affected. 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 or altered federal data:
The Journalists Resource: overview of the current situation from the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School
Environmental Data & Governance Initiative: advocacy group for access to environmental data
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Please recommend resources to be added to this guide.
If you need access to alternative data sets, reach out to your library liaison – we will do our best to support you.
Data Rescue Efforts: an evolving list of crowd-sourced rescue efforts and lists of at-risk data
Data Rescue Tracker: consolidated overview of who is downloading which dataset from which government websites
Data Liberation Project: governmental data that was previously unavailable or unusable to the public
End of Term Crawl: Internet Archive cache of government web sites prior to presidential inaugurations
GovWayback: simple method for accessing historical versions of U.S. government websites from before January 20, 2025
Klaxon Cloud: track changes and get alerts from websites you care about
Harvard Library Innovation Lab: an effort from the Harvard Law School Library to provide access to major datasets from data.gov, PubMed, and federal GitHub repositories
The Wesleyan Library has a local data repository (Figshare) which can preserve your data in the short and medium term. Learn more about Figshare and other Wesleyan data management resources at: Managing Research Data at Wesleyan
Contact James Guerrera-Sapone for more details or assistance.
