First 100 days: The race to save digital records from the Trump administration

[Demovictory9]

https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20250429-first-100-days-race-to-save-digital-records-from-trump-administration-dei



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The first nationwide database tracking federal police misconduct has been impossible to access since late February. And tools tracking climate risks and environmental justice concerns have been scrubbed. Hundreds of employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were fired, and looming funding cuts could eviscerate what many consider the world’s most advanced climate modeling and forecasting systems.

But just as quickly as government data falls victim to Trump's policies, digital archivists, scientists, researchers and citizens swiftly salvage it from the digital grave.

The race to save data from oblivion
“When it all began, [I worked] every morning and every night,” says Lynda Kellam, a data librarian and organiser with the Data Rescue Project, a platform that coordinates efforts between different projects saving public government data. “I used to be able to step away from my computer on the weekend, but now it has been a lot harder not to use the evenings to just check in and see what’s happening,” Kellam admits.

Though it is difficult to predict when the next chunk of government data will be flagged as doomed to disappear, prompting Kellam to jump in with hundreds of other volunteers to save it from oblivion, specific topics are more vulnerable than others. “Direct targets include data with sexual orientation and gender identification variables,” Kellam explains.

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This is not the first time Kellam has participated in efforts to rescue digital data under Trump. She worked with a group called Data Refuge in 2017, but says the scope of deletions is on an unprecedented scale this time around. “There were data rescue efforts [back then] but the data wasn’t disappearing,” Kellam explains. “[And] the focus was on environmental and climate change data. Now it’s a whole breadth of government data, it’s a much wider net, especially when it comes to what I call ‘social’ data, meaning data that involves humans and that doesn’t fit within the ideology of the administration.”

“We definitely haven’t seen anything like the pace that we are seeing data disappear now,” she adds.