Volunteers on ‘right side of history’ fight Trump data purge

Adam Smith, Reuters

In defiance of an executive order that wiped reams of data from US government websites, volunteers are reversing “this act of official vandalism” and ensuring open access to the censored climate, LGBTQ+ and health stats. Scores of activists are working to safeguard and then make public data they had archived for safe-keeping after President Donald Trump’s administration targeted “gender ideology extremism” and environmental policies with deletion. “We’re moving past the initial phase and approaching the next: ensuring that there’s public access to everything that we have preserved,” data scientist Jonathan Gilmour told the Thomson Reuters Foundation via video call. Gilmour belongs to Public Environmental Data Partners, a coalition of environmental, justice and policy organisations committed to “public access to federal environmental data”.

They are working with other volunteers — environmental coders at Earth Hacks, archivists such as the Internet Archive, data consultants Fulton Ring — to build new public access tools from the purged data. Trump has gutted several federal agencies, fired tens of thousands of employees and altered or deleted thousands of government webpages since taking office in January. First in Trump’s firing line were health, climate and LGBTQ+ datasets that fell foul of his ideology.

These include stats gathered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, such as the social vulnerability index and environmental justice index — measures used to quantify the health risks faced by different Americans.

Among those working to restore the deleted data are former government workers and staff who were put on leave by Trump. An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employee placed on leave helped make a new map that shows improvements in air pollution monitoring systems and upgrades of aging sewer systems made under environmental justice grants. “It’s miraculous what (we’ve) been able to do — take these tools ... and protect them from this act of official vandalism,” the employee, who requested anonymity to speak more freely, said.

Those who are leading efforts to restore access to the missing data say they are understaffed, underfunded and persist in their work despite risking retaliation from the Trump government, which has targeted lawyers it considered hostile. “There’s certainly a concern of retribution from the administration, but we feel strongly we’re on the right side of history here,” Gilmour said.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment before time of publication.

Rajan Desai and Jeremy Herzog, founders of Fulton Ring, were motivated to volunteer by reports of government censorship. “This is like (George Orwell’s dystopian novel) “1984.” It made it very real for us,” Desai said in a video call from New York. The duo built a new version of the government’s Future Risk Index, showing the cost of climate change to US communities.

The administration removed the original, managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in January. FEMA did not respond to a request for comment before time of publication. The new version resurrects the dead data and also processes it faster and better on smartphones, even fixing some of its old bugs. The aim is to arm ordinary Americans with the sort of valuable information that is currently held in private hands.

“A lot of this disaster data, flooding data (is used by) insurance and financial institutions in some capacity. The only person that seems not to have any visibility into this is the average consumer who might use it to buy a house,” Desai said.

He hopes that by turning these obscure datasets into new and open tools, citizens can make more informed decisions. Getting the data back online is only the first step. It must then be protected from further takedowns, Gilmour said. The coalition is backing up its tools over an array of platforms, including the research site Figshare, Canadian repository Borealis and Harvard University’s Dataverse, an indefinite storage network across 216 locations over 36 countries. A diverse network bolsters protection against a government that might aim to restrict information within its borders. The repository hosts data from research institutes, academics and more, ranging from small Excel spreadsheets to astronomical or biomedical data that are thousands of terabytes bigger, such as a file that can fill four iPhone 16 Pro smartphones.

Another challenge is keeping the records up to date since stagnant data loses relevance every day.

“(Gathering new data) is incredibly labour-intensive when you don’t have the power of an agency or the resources of the US government to request data from the states,” Gilmour said. His volunteer network is fundraising to pay workers, but they know some information will be lost.

There are “tools that include geospatial data from NASA satellites. If NASA stops providing that information, we’re not going to go launch our own satellites,” Gilmour said.