An anonymous reader highlights a report from 404 Media, revealing that datasets on data.gov—the largest online repository of U.S. government open data—are being removed. According to the site itself, over 2,000 datasets have vanished since Donald Trump took office. Members of the Data Hoarding and archiving communities have noted that on January 21, there were 307,854 datasets available; by Thursday, that number had dropped to 305,564. Many of these deletions occurred right after Trump’s inauguration, as evidenced by archived snapshots from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Jack Cushman, a researcher at Harvard University, has been documenting the datasets on Data.gov both before and after the inauguration, striving to create a comprehensive archive. He explained to 404 Media, “Some of [the entries link to] actual data, while others direct you to a landing page where the data is hosted. The concern is—when items disappear, is it the data itself that’s gone, or just the link to it?”

For instance, the dataset titled “National Coral Reef Monitoring Program: Water Temperature Data from Subsurface Temperature Recorders (STRs) deployed at coral reef sites in the Hawaiian Archipelago from 2005 to 2019,” which belongs to NOAA, is no longer accessible on data.gov but can still be located through a Google search of its title on one of NOAA’s websites. Another NOAA dataset, “Stetson Flower Garden Banks Benthic Coverage Monitoring 1993-2018 — OBIS Event,” appears to have been completely removed from the internet, including data.gov. Additionally, a Department of Energy resource titled “Three Dimensional Thermal Model of Newberry Volcano, Oregon” is no longer available through the Department of Energy but can be found on third-party websites.

Data.gov functions as an aggregator of datasets and research from the entire government, which means it is not a singular database. This complexity makes it somewhat challenging to track the changes occurring within it.