Research Guides: Public Health: Accessing Purged Federal Agency Datasets

Accessing Purged Federal Agency Datasets

Where to Find All Those Deleted Government Websites In recent days—in response to directives from the Trump administration—thousands of federal agency web pages have been deleted or altered to remove research, reports, and references to everything from vaccines to environmental policy initiatives. According to The New York Times, more than 8,000 pages have disappeared from the websites of agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Census Bureau, the Department of Justice, and the Food and Drug Administration (to name a few). In other cases, sites are still accessible but have had language related to diversity, gender, and climate change scrubbed.
Archived Data and Web Archiving Are you looking for older data that may have been removed from websites or for websites that have been taken down? Are you interested in preserving data that is currently available but may not be in the near future? Welcome to Tisch Library's guide to archived data! This guide includes helpful tips for finding data, links to archived datasets and other relevant information, highlights data archiving projects, and provides information for how to be your own data archivist.
Finding Government Information during the 2025 Administration Transition This guide from the University of Minnesota points to resources that identify and track steps taken by the Trump administration and Congress to scale back or eliminate access to federal government information. It also provides links to groups performing data and website rescue.
Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine Non-interactive datasets hosted on government websites may already be backed up in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which captures webpages.
CDC datasets uploaded before January 28th, 2025 Many datasets have been uploaded to the Internet Archive, and their web pages have been archived on their WayBack Machine. The CDC is one example.
Datasets in Dataverse Data uploaded by the Climate Change and Health Research Coordinating Center (CAFE). Includes CDC's Social Vulnerability Index data. Most of the data included here focuses on health and the environment.
Purged Federal Agency Data Available on PolicyMap On Friday, numerous essential datasets were purged from federal agency websites, including data from CDC PLACES (Population Level Analysis and Community Estimates), the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI), and the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST)—to name just a few. While we don’t know when or if this data will return, we want to assure you that they are still accessible on our platform.

Saving Information: Efforts & How to Help

Call to arms: What government information librarians can do to help save critical federal information from being lost
Data Rescue 2025 Efforts and More These suggestions come from various sources, including IASSIST, RDAP, Data Curation Network, BlueSky, LinkedIn, and others. A librarian at a university is compiling it.
Data Managemnet checklist from MIT Libraries This checklist provides steps you can take to ensure the government data you use in your research remains accessible to you and others.