Shortly after the arrival of the new administration, things began to disappear from the White House website.
They were not only the partisan political platforms that generally disappear during a presidential transition. Information pages on the Constitution and previous presidents, in various forms since President George W. Bush was in office, all vanished.
Thousands of other government web pages had been removed or modified, including content on vaccines, hatred crimes, low -income children, opiate dependence and veterans, before a court order temporarily blocked part of the radical cancellation. A database of the Department of Justice that monitors the accusations and criminal convictions related to January 6, 2021, the attack on the Capitol was removed. The database segments disappeared, some of the experts who produced them have been fired and many mentions of words such as “black”, “women” and “discrimination” have evaporated.
President Trump’s team is selectively eliminating the public record, reconstructing his favorite vision of America in the negative space of purified history, archivists and historians. Since the data and resources are eliminated or modified, even something basic is at risk: the ability of the Americans to access and evaluate their past and, with it, their already confidence in facts.
“This is not a mechanism of cost reduction,” said Kenny Evans, who studies scientific and technological policy at the Baker Institute for Public Policy of Rice University and manages the White House scientists’ archive at school. “This slide towards secrecy and the lack of transparency is an erosion of democratic rules”.
Anna Kelly, spokesman for the White House, said on X that the disposal process was a standard practice for the old scrapping courtesy copies that were largely supported by classified computer systems. In a declaration via E -mail, he did not face the concerns on the removed records, but said that the president regularly communicated with the news and directly with the public and “led the most transparent administration of history”.
“It is adding transparency by exposing the vast waste, fraud and abuse throughout the federal government and restoring responsibility for taxpayers,” he said.
The elimination campaign makes much more than amplifying the political priorities of the administration: it bursts the test of alternatives in a sorceress brand memory. Several information experts said that the executive orders of Mr. Trump have authoritarian shades, which recall when Russia cloned Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, and undressed it of unsatisfied material. Information experts and civil rights groups fear that a historical void can endanger responsibility and generate distrust, especially in an already hostile political environment for researchers who are trying to fight disinformation.
“There are busty plaques that are moving, and it is a new version of the truth that is portrayed and that, I think, is the deepest danger that we have ever faced as a country,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a scholar and professor emeritus at the Harvard law school.
Even the Lieutenant Republican governor of Utah invited Mr. Trump to “report our story” after the first American woman to vote legally was removed from the website for the Arlington National Cemetery, together with a section on other remarkable women (her profile is available again, but the history of women’s history is not). The references to transgender people disappeared from the National Park Service web for the National Stonewall monument.
Trump is not known as enthusiast of the conservation of documents: past employees have described his propensity to snatch documents and blush documents in the cabinet.
But his administration has emerged some government data. In March, the national archives published about 64,000 documents on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, including the accounting records that contained the number of social security of dozens of government employees since the late 70s, some of them still lived.
The renovation effort led by Elon Musk through his department of government efficiency, which had been captured in a series of high -profile errors, tried to eliminate or obscure errors before inverting the course of last month and adding more details that the facts of facts could use to confirm his statements on the savings that he had reached from the dilling federal grants.
The historical record, however, remains under intense pressure and not only by the government.
Musk has a revenge against Wikipedia, which the billionaire mocked as “Wokepedia” last year. He defined the encyclopedia, which is written and curated by volunteers of the general public, “an extension of the propaganda of the Legacy media” after a voice described a gesture that he had made during the recent inauguration of Mr. Trump as “compared to a Nazi greeting”. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, rejected the Social Media X platform, saying “This is a fact. Each element of it”.
Data Foundation, a Think Tank, said in a report last month that the changes in the collection of federal tests they coincide with similar changes in the private data sector. These include more than 2,000 layoffs and other departures in March and several analysis companies that completely close. A year ago, Google also removed the connections to the pages stored in the cache by its research results, eliminating a long -standing function that helped researchers and others track changes on websites.
Government resources have become particularly important since researchers are limited or cut by the data reserves kept by the social media companies, said Samuel Woolley, president of the disinformation studies at the University of Pittsburgh.
“The idea that suddenly we no longer need supervision or access to the information that allows us to conduct supervision is worrying,” he said. “Getting rid of public registers and people who study things like influence operations are equivalent to a sort of censorship for omission.”
Outside the government, many archivists are hurrying to preserve the material in the process of extinction.
The data saving project, launched in February, is cataloging the storage efforts and backup of government data sets. Since 2008, the end -of -term web archive has conducted “a complete harvest” of sectors of the federal government and changes told by the Administration to the Administration. Initiatives such as the initiative for data and environmental governance and the project of open environmental data are archived copies of the government’s climatic data.
Another key participant: the Internet archive, a 28 -year -old non -profit library hosted in a majestic Christian scientific church of San Francisco. About 140 workers, mostly engineers, store more than one billion URLs per day with the help of partners such as Cloudflare, WordPress, Reddit and the mother organization of Wikipedia, Wikimedia. The work is financed through donations and web storage agreements with over 1,300 schools, museums and libraries.
The archive has collected over 700,000 terabyte of web pages archived as one of the partners who work on the end -term project, identifying over 150,000 government pages that have been offline from the inauguration.
“What we are seeing this time has no precedent, both in terms of scale and web resources scale that are taken offline and material on those pages that are changed,” said Mark Graham, director of the Wayback machine, a digital depot managed through the Internet archive.
The archive has faced difficulties in recent years, such as the causes of the copyright of record labels and publishers of books that seek hundreds of millions of dollars in damage (the organization had a budget of $ 28 million in 2023). It was also targeted by computer attacks.
The Trump administration, however, was not an obstacle. Mr. Musk defined the “fantastic” archive and “a public good that should exist”, even if he complained of content “a ton of negative” that concerned him.
In February, the government’s lawyers claimed that the removal of information from the CDC website caused limited damage because the rubbed pages could still be displayed on the Wayback machine. A federal judge did not agree, noting that the site does not capture all the page and filed those do not appear on search engines and can only be found using their original URL.
Mr. Graham, a Air Force veteran who can hit the URLs from the memory, said he worked seven days a week with a few breaks since Trump entered office.
“We have seen examples throughout history and throughout the world in which governments try to change culture, change the values of a population by changing and/or limiting access to information,” he said. “I think we still see it until today. “