Thousands of destroyed government web pages saved amid Trump purge

Thousands of informational government webpages have been taken down so far in the second Trump administration, including on public health, scientific research and LGBTQ rights. Amid this mass erasure of public information, the Internet Archive is racing to save copies of those deleted resources. The San Francisco-based nonprofit operates the Wayback Machine, a popular tool that saves snapshots of websites that may otherwise be lost forever, and it has archived federal government websites at each presidential transition since 2004. While it’s normal for a new administration to overhaul some of its online resources, the Trump administration’s pace of destruction has shocked many archivists. “There have been thousands and thousands of pages removed,” says Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, who notes that even a page about the U.S. Constitution was scrubbed from the White House website.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We end today’s show with Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, to look at efforts to preserve thousands of government webpages being deleted by the Trump administration.

In this first part of our interview that we do, Mark, if you can tell us what exactly is happening?

MARK GRAHAM: Sure. Let me first give a little bit of context. The Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library with a mission of universal access to all knowledge. About 28 years ago, the founder of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, pressed record on a new media called the web. And we’ve been working very hard every day since getting better at doing just that: archiving much of the public web. We archive more than the web. We archive books and television news and microfiche and microfilm and academic papers, and I could go on and on. But the bread and butter of the operation here, and through the Wayback Machine, is archiving the public web.

What I think we want to focus on today is efforts around archiving and making available material from the U.S. government. So, in 2004, and every four years since, we have, in collaboration with others, focused on archiving much of what is published by the U.S. government before and after each presidential election. This is referred to as the End of Term Archive. You can read more about this by going to EOTArchive.org. So, every four years, we do a deep dive on tens of thousands of government websites and millions and millions of pages.

So, this last time around, we endeavored to do this. We compiled a list of webpages and websites in collaboration with the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration and the U.S. Government Publishing Office. So we had this big list. And before the election, we went through and we worked to archive as much of that material as we could. That was phase one. We did a second phase after the election, and we’re now involved in a third phase of this work, which we started post-inauguration.

AMY GOODMAN: So, can you tell us about what you understand the Trump administration is doing right now, removing thousands of pages related to what?

MARK GRAHAM: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Diversity and gender ideology, as they say, as well as targeted —

MARK GRAHAM: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — scientific research and environmental justice data?

MARK GRAHAM: Yeah, absolutely. There have been thousands and thousands of pages removed, many websites. For example, the USAID site, if you go to it right now, it just basically tells you how you can get your materials if you had been an employee there. A site called ReproductiveRights.gov. I could go on. Many, many sites are just gone. And then, like I said, at least 8,000 — we don’t actually know the number at this time — webpages have been removed. These are webpages that deal with topics like education and health issues, climate change, aviation, weather. There was even a webpage on the White House website about U.S. Constitution that’s not there anymore.

And so, the good news is that we’ve gotten pretty good at this effort. We, as I said, had done a very thorough job of archiving this material. I should also say that we do this work in collaboration with many other organizations. This End of Term Archive is a team effort. We work with Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab, the University of North Texas, Stanford Libraries, the Common Crawl Foundation and EDGI, Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. And I want to highlight the work of EDGI, because what they have historically done is, after the fact, after a change of presidential administration, they’ve gone in and tried to analyze what, in fact, had changed when the new administration came in. So they’re deep doing that work now. We also, at the Internet Archive —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 20 seconds for the segment, Mark.

MARK GRAHAM: Excellent, OK. So, you know, I’d say the Wayback Machine is available to anyone. It’s a free public service at web.archive.org.

AMY GOODMAN: Will it stay up? Will it be — will it stay up?

MARK GRAHAM: It’s stayed up for 28 years, and we’re pretty sure it’s going to stay up for at least 28 more. Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Mark, we want you to stay with us. This is all too important. Mark Graham is the director of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, also part of the End of Term Archive for federal websites. We’ll do Part 2, web exclusive, post it online. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.