Now wouldn’t seem like the best time to embark upon research involving the federal government. First, there’s the shutdown, which began October 1, 2025, and which precludes the addition of any new information on sites belonging to a wide variety of agencies and programs closed down during the budget fight as websites are not updated.
And then there’s the unrelated wiping out of dozens of websites for Offices of the Inspector General–sites that contained oversight reports and whistleblower portals–that came after the Office of Management and Budget pulled the plug on funds for the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, or CIGIE.
“Shuttering CIGIE will eviscerate transparency in our federal government,” former chair of CIGIE and former Inspector General for the Interior Department Mark Greenblatt, said in a statement.
But perhaps of greater concern, and of an impact that may last generations, is the loss of vast collections of data used by scientists and researchers in government, academia, the private sector, the media, and the general public. In February, nearly 8,000 webpages, including those with open access data, were removed during a purge driven by President Trump’s orders targeting diversity initiatives and “gender ideology.” This is public data that had been broadly available to the public.
As a blogpost from Academy Health, a national organization for health services researchers, policymakers, and health care practitioners and stakeholders, explains, “the federal government has long served an important role in facilitating the generation, analysis, and stewardship of public data, which researchers, policymakers, and the public rely on to make decisions every day…. Credible data is the backbone of scientific integrity, which previously enjoyed near universal support.”
That phrase “near universal” does a lot of heavy lifting here, since a significant amount of that data has been temporarily or permanently removed by the Trump administration
Although EssentialData.US, Federation of American Scientists (FAS) and Public Environmental Data Partners (PEDP) together cheekily host a Halloween themed google doc “memorializing” the “Dearly Departed Datasets,” a quick perusal of some of the examples on the memorial site proves that the loss is no joke: It includes the termination of a USDA survey on food security, the EPA’s greenhouse gas reporting program, and NOAA’s “billion-dollar disasters” database (and the removal of its future risk index), along with stripping out identifiers like race and gender for other surveys and mapping.
Researchers from a variety of fields scrambled to download and preserve as many datasets as possible, which they have parked at the site of the Data Rescue Project. It’s something.
But we will never know the true cost of the loss of these vital research tools. It is, quite literally, beyond measure.
Jeff Hagan
Communications Director