The Trump administration has scrubbed nearly 3,400 federal datasets from the U.S. government’s open data site, Data.gov.
In his first month in office, President Trump has made good on his promise to clean house, with massive slashes in the federal workforce and in publicly accessible data.
Pre-Trump, there were 308,000 datasets available on Data.gov. It’s since dipped to 304,621 as of Feb. 21. That’s 3,379 datasets removed — but what was on those pages?
One researcher told The Associated Press earlier this month that the factual purge has put them in “a mad scramble” to determine what public data has been deleted from government websites and electronic publications.
What datasets, websites has Trump removed?
One of the first executive orders Trump signed required federal agencies to use the term “sex” rather than “gender” in official policies and documents, leading to the widespread removal of websites promoting “gender ideology.”
“You go looking for something, and it’s just not there,” Amy O’Hara, a Georgetown University researcher who is president of the Association of Public Data Users, told the AP.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture was also told to delete pages about climate change, according to an email from the agency’s communications department.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) too, saw some pages go dark, specifically those about HIV.
Another impacted database is the one used to track the misconduct of federal officers, the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database.
Proposed by Trump during his first time in 2020, the database became a reality under former President Biden in 2022. As of September 2024, it held 4,790 records of misconduct.
The Justice Department also confirmed that the website was taken down and said that agencies could not look for or add any information to the database.
Judge orders health datasets restored
A federal judge on Feb. 11 asked government agencies to restore health-related webpages and datasets following Trump’s executive order.
U.S. District Judge John Bates in Washington issued a temporary restraining order at the request of Doctors for America, an advocacy group.
Bates ordered the agencies to restore public access to web pages that were taken down “without adequate notice or reasoned explanation.”
Other websites and datasets have been reactivated, but hundreds of former federal pages are still unaccounted for.
NewsNation’s Steph Whiteside and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
