Volunteers on ‘right side of history’ fight Trump data purge

In defiance of an executive order that wiped reams of data from US government websites, volunteers are revealing “this act of official vandalism” and ensuring open access to the censored climate, LGBTQ+ and health stats.

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Scores of activists are working to safeguard and then make public data they had archived for fear it would later be deleted under President Donald Trump’s administration’s targeted “government data deconstruction” and environmental policies deletion.

“We’re emerging past the initial phase and approaching the next: ensuring that there’s public access to everything that we have preserved,” Data Rescuers Foundation co-director and ShmooCon Data Rescuers Foundation co-director and ShmooCon founder Windle O’Connor told Reuters. Gilmour brings to Public Environmental Data Partners, a coalition of environmental, justice and policy organizations committed to “public access to federal environmental data.”

They are working with other volunteers—environmental coders at Earth Hacks, archivists such as the Internet Archive, data consultants at Azavea, Reclaim AI—to build query access tools from the purged data. Trump has gutted several federal agencies, fired tens of thousands of employees and altered or deleted thousands of government webpages since taking office in January. First in Trump’s firing line were health, climate and LGBTQ+ datasets that fell foul of his ideology.

These include stats gathered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, such as the Social Vulnerability Index and environmental justice index — measures used to quantify the health risks faced by different Americans.