Soon after the new administration arrived, things began to go missing from the White House website.
They weren’t just the partisan policy platforms that typically disappear during a presidential transition. Informational pages about the Constitution and past presidents, up in various forms since President George W. Bush was in office, all vanished.
Thousands of other government web pages had also been taken down or modified, including content about vaccines, hate crimes, low-income children, opioid addiction and veterans, before a court order temporarily blocked part of the sweeping erasure. A Justice Department database tracking criminal charges and convictions linked to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was removed. Segments of data sets are gone, some of the experts who produced them were dismissed, and many mentions of words like “Black,” “women” and “discrimination” have evaporated.
President Trump’s team is selectively stripping away the public record, reconstructing his preferred vision of America in the negative space of purged history, archivists and historians said. As data and resources are deleted or altered, something foundational is also at risk: Americans’ ability to access and evaluate their past, and with it, their already shaky trust in facts.
“This is not a cost-cutting mechanism,” said Kenny Evans, who studies science and technology policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and runs the White House Scientists Archive at the school. “This slide toward secrecy and lack of transparency is an erosion of democratic norms.”
Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said on X that the disposal process was standard practice for old courtesy copies of paperwork that were largely backed up on classified computer systems. In an emailed statement, she did not address concerns about the removed records, but said that the president regularly communicated with news outlets and directly with the public and was “leading the most transparent administration in history.”
“He is adding transparency by exposing the vast waste, fraud and abuse across the federal government and restoring accountability to taxpayers,” she said.
The campaign of deletion does more than amplify the administration’s policy priorities — it buries evidence of the alternatives in a MAGA-branded memory hole. Several information experts said that Mr. Trump’s executive orders have authoritarian overtones, reminiscent of when Russia cloned Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, and stripped it of unflattering material. Information experts and civil rights groups fear that a historical vacuum could jeopardize accountability and breed mistrust, especially in an already hostile political environment for researchers who are trying to fight disinformation.
“There are tectonic plates that are shifting, and it’s a new version of truth that is being portrayed, and that, I think, is the most profound danger we have ever faced as a country,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional scholar and professor emeritus at Harvard Law School.
Even Utah’s Republican lieutenant governor called on Mr. Trump to “bring back our history” after the first American woman to legally vote was removed from the website for Arlington National Cemetery, along with a section on other notable women (her profile is once again available, but the women’s history section is not). References to transgender people disappeared from the National Park Service’s web page for the Stonewall National Monument.
Mr. Trump is not known as an enthusiast of document preservation: Past employees have described his penchant for ripping up documents and flushing papers down the toilet.
But his administration has surfaced some government data. In March, the National Archives released some 64,000 documents about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, including accounting records that contained the Social Security numbers of dozens of government workers from the late 1970s, some of them still living.
The restructuring effort led by Elon Musk through his Department of Government Efficiency, which had been caught in a series of high-profile errors, tried to delete or obscure the mistakes before reversing course last month and adding more details that fact-checkers could use to confirm its claims about the savings it had achieved from canceling federal grants.
The historical record, however, remains under intense pressure and not just from the government.
Mr. Musk has a vendetta against Wikipedia, which the billionaire derided as “Wokepedia” last year. He called the encyclopedia, which is written and edited by volunteers from the general public, “an extension of legacy media propaganda” after an entry described a gesture he had made during Mr. Trump’s recent inauguration as being “compared to a Nazi salute.” Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia, pushed back on the social media platform X, saying “that’s fact. Every element of it.”
Data Foundation, a think tank, said in a report last month that changes in federal evidence gathering are coinciding with similar shifts in the private data sector. Those include more than 2,000 layoffs and other departures in March and several analysis firms shutting down entirely. A year ago, Google also removed links to cached pages from its search results, stripping away a longtime feature that helped researchers and others track changes on websites.
Resources from the government have become especially important as researchers find themselves limited or cut off from data reserves kept by social media companies, said Samuel Woolley, the disinformation studies chair at the University of Pittsburgh.
“The idea that suddenly we no longer need oversight or access to the information that allows us to conduct oversight is worrying,” he said. “Getting rid of public records and people who study things like influence operations amounts to a kind of censorship by omission.”
Outside the government, many archivists are now rushing to preserve endangered material.
The Data Rescue Project, which launched in February, is cataloging preservation efforts and backed up government data sets. Since 2008, the End of Term Web Archive has conducted “a comprehensive harvest” of federal government domains and chronicled changes from administration to administration. Initiatives like the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative and the Open Environmental Data Project are storing copies of government climate data.
Another key participant: The Internet Archive, a 28-year-old nonprofit library housed in a stately former Christian Science church in San Francisco. Some 140 workers, mostly engineers, archive more than a billion URLs a day with help from partners such as Cloudflare, WordPress, Reddit and Wikipedia’s parent organization, Wikimedia. The work is funded through donations and web archiving agreements with more than 1,300 schools, museums and libraries.
The Archive has collected more than 700,000 terabytes of archived web pages as one of the partners working on the End of Term project, identifying more than 150,000 government pages that have gone offline since the inauguration.
“What we’re seeing this time around is unprecedented, both in terms of the scope and the scale of the web-based resources that are being taken offline, and material on those pages that is being changed,” said Mark Graham, the director of the Wayback Machine, a digital repository operated through the Internet Archive.
The Archive has faced difficulties in recent years, such as copyright lawsuits from record labels and book publishers seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages (the organization had a $28 million budget in 2023). It has also been targeted by cyberattacks.
The Trump administration, however, has not been an obstacle. Mr. Musk has called the archive “awesome” and “a public good that should exist,” even as he complained about “a ton of negative” content that concerned him.
In February, government lawyers argued that the removal of information from the C.D.C. website caused limited harm because the scrubbed pages could still be viewed on the Wayback Machine. A federal judge disagreed, noting that the site does not capture every page, and the ones that are archived do not appear on search engines and can only be found using their original URL.
Mr. Graham, an Air Force veteran who can rattle off URLs from memory, said he has worked seven days a week with few breaks since Mr. Trump took office.
“We’ve seen examples throughout history and all over the world where governments attempt to change culture, change the values of a population by changing and/or restricting access to information,” he said. “I think we still see that to this day.”