Researchers logging onto the website Data.gov in January discovered a digital void where roughly 2,000 data sets were once cataloged. No warning, no explanation — just the quiet deletion of knowledge. Not long after that, historical pages focused on Black soldiers vanished, as did a website about Jackie Robinson and, bizarrely, one about a plane with “gay” in its name.
President Trump’s administration has targeted information curated by government agencies, erasing vast swaths of knowledge. While database updates and website changes are routine, this is probably the first time Americans are witnessing deletion weaponized on a large scale as a political tool. These deletions undermine basic good government — and the historical record. Democratic governments need far more robust legal frameworks and safeguards for data that is essential to citizens’ well-being. Scientific practices may change, policies may shift, and history may be debated, but the record of government should endure, regardless of who holds power.
The administration is seemingly pursuing deletion as a means of control. “It’s kind of like leaving a weed,” Elon Musk said of destroying agencies — and their attendant records. “If you don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it is easy for the weed to grow back.” Mr. Trump has sacked the national archivist and put Secretary of State Marco Rubio in charge. Without separation of powers, the archives are at risk.
The use of apps like Signal, an encrypted messaging service with auto-delete features, showcases how intentional the deletion is. As a 2022 report from a British think tank put it, Signal and similar apps essentially create black holes in democratic accountability, systematically undermining proper record keeping to circumvent public oversight. As if on cue, Trump administration officials used Signal to plan the bombardment of a foreign country. As the French philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote, “There is no political power without control of the archive.”
The consequences of these digital deletions extend beyond inconvenience; many directly threaten health, and if removals continue, they could threaten lives. One lawsuit claims a Chicago doctor serving low-income families could not get access to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention resources to address a chlamydia outbreak at a high school. Another physician, a researcher at the Yale School of Medicine, lost the ability to consult clinical treatment guidelines. The loss of climate models and historical data could lead to people being more vulnerable to extreme weather events.
A vast repository of critical public health information — developed to provide evidence-based guidance to health care providers, medical practitioners, researchers and the general public — is being systematically dismantled. This loss will have profound consequences: preventable deaths, unnecessary illness and deteriorating public health. The elimination of guidelines for marginalized groups can cause certain communities to effectively disappear from official health records, reinforcing discrimination and neglect. This informational void threatens to deepen health disparities and further fragment an already unequal health care system.
Presently, there is no clear way to avoid these impacts. Some of the deletions involving the C.D.C. and Food and Drug Administration were halted in February by a court order, but that probably saved only a small fraction of deleted pages. Solutions vary: The Trump administration’s purge of government databases prompted The New York Times to recommend that concerned readers download their Social Security records, tax histories and medical data. Others have turned to volunteer crisis archiving, emergency preservation efforts designed to scrape public data before it is lost. Some of this is done by ordinary people through forums on Reddit, by established university libraries or by the Internet Archive, an organization that digitizes and stores web pages and other material.
While commendable and valuable, these salvage efforts reveal a fundamental vulnerability: Essential public knowledge is increasingly being rescued by private organizations and volunteer labor operating without sustainable infrastructure. These stopgap initiatives, despite their dedication, cannot function as primary solutions. They operate without the institutional backing, consistent funding streams or legal mandate necessary for comprehensive and democratic long-term preservation.
Simply preserving a data set without its original context or the institutional knowledge that went with it is like collecting plants and animals from a forest but losing the forest itself. You have individual pieces but have lost how they connected, supported one another and functioned as a living community. These data sets have value in part because they are longitudinal in nature; you can plot trends over time. The graphs will now suddenly stop in 2025.
We need a right to remember, and not simply to support researchers. Maintaining an informed citizenry in a democratic society calls for deliberation, transparency and accountability. Archives are essential to that function. Democracies cannot work without clear records of what governments have done and what they are doing. That means that while universities and individuals should study and collate data, they should not have the primary responsibility for preserving public knowledge. Our democratic infrastructure must ensure that public records remain truly public and that they are professionally maintained, under sound democratically approved principles enshrined in legislation and free from ideological interference.
Achieving that goal is not simple. Current archival legislation — in the United States, this largely dates from the Watergate crisis or earlier — was written to govern mainly paper documents and is insufficient for preserving databases and interactive digital systems.
The history of knowledge isn’t a simple story of accumulation. It is one of oscillation — between preservation and destruction, remembering and forgetting. Not so long ago, our fears were of preserving too much information. In 2014 the European Union enshrined a “right to be forgotten”: to be able to remove yourself from an internet devoted to preserving every social media post, photo and scrap of personal information. Now we must focus on the public’s right to remember.
Today’s digital infrastructure — despite its vast capacity — is bound by material limitations, corporate interests and political vulnerabilities. Some loss is inevitable and even necessary. Unlike most of the Trump administration staff members who are executing deletions, archivists are trained to weed, select and sample. What gets preserved and what vanishes should not be decided based on ideology, and whatever we keep must be secured against both political interference and technological decay.
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