The White House frames the past by erasing some of it

As soon as the new administration arrived, things began to disappear from the White House website.

They were not just partisan policy platforms that generally disappear during the presidential transition. Since President George W. Bush took office, the constitution and past presidential information pages have all disappeared in many ways.

Thousands of other government web pages have also been removed or revised, including content on vaccines, hate crimes, low-income children, opioid addiction and veterans, before the court order temporarily blocked some of the erased items. The attack on the Capitol has been removed from the Department of Justice database tracking criminal charges and convictions linked on January 6, 2021. Segments in the dataset disappeared, some of the experts who created them were rejected, and many references of words such as “black”, “female”, and “discrimination” have evaporated.

President Trump's team is selectively stripping public records and reconstructing the vision of America's preferences in a negative space of cleansed history, archivists and historians said. The basics are at risk as data and resources have been deleted or changed. The ability to access and evaluate the past of Americans, and with that, their already unstable trust.

“This is not a cost-saving mechanism,” said Kenny Evans, who studies science and technology policy at Rice University's Institute of Public Policy and runs the White House Scientist Archives at the school. “This slide towards this lack of secrecy and transparency is the erosion of democratic norms.”

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in X that the disposal process was a standard practice of copying old courtesy documents and was backed up primarily on classified computer systems. In an email statement, she did not address concerns about deleted records, but the president regularly communicated with the news outlet and the public in person, saying that he “leads the most transparent administration in history.”

“He's adding transparency by exposing vast waste, fraud and abuse across the federal government and restoring accountability to taxpayers,” she said.

The removal campaign does more than amplify the administration's policy priorities. This fills the MAGA branded memory holes with evidence of alternatives. Several information experts said Trump's executive order has authoritarian overtones reminiscent of when Russia cloned Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, and stripped it of surprising material. Information experts and civil rights groups fear that the historic void could put accountability at risk. It fosters mistrust, especially in a political environment that is already hostile to researchers trying to combat disinformation.

“There's a shifting tectonic plate, a new version of the truth depicted, and I think it's the deepest danger we've ever faced as a country,” said Lawrence H. Trib, a constitutional scholar and professor at Harvard Law School.

Even Utah's Republican Lieutenant Governor, urging Trump to “restore our history” after the first American woman to vote legally was removed from the Arlington National Cemetery website. References to transgender people disappeared from the National Park Service website at Stonewall National Monument.

Trump is not known as a document preservation enthusiast. Past employees have described his preferences of tearing documents under the toilet and washing them down.

However, his administration has surfaced some government data. In March, the National Archives released 64,000 documents regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This includes accounting records that included social security numbers for dozens of government workers since the late 1970s.

Through government efficiency, which has been caught up in a series of high-profile errors, Elon Musk-led restructuring efforts attempted to remove or obscure mistakes before turning back the course last month, adding details that could be used to confirm claims about the savings that Fact Checker achieved after cancelling federal grants.

However, historical records are under intense pressure not only from the government.

Musk has revenge on Wikipedia. Last year, Wikipedia ridden the billionaire “Wokepedia.” He described the gestures he made during Trump's recent inauguration, “comparing with Nazi salutes,” and then called out an encyclopedia that he wrote and edited, “an extension of legacy media propaganda,” written and edited by volunteers by the public. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, pushed back the social media platform X and said, “That's the truth. Everything about it.”

The Data Foundation, a think tank, said in a report last month that changes in federal evidence will gather It coincides with a similar shift in the private data sector. These have more than 2,000 layoffs and other departures in March, as well as several analytics companies halted altogether. A year ago, Google removed links to cached pages from search results, removing a long-standing feature that helped researchers and others track changes to their website.

Government resources are especially important as researchers limit or block data sanctions held by social media companies, said Samuel Woolley, Disformation Research Committee Chairman at the University of Pittsburgh.

“The idea that suddenly, there's no more need for surveillance or access to information that allows us to do so,” he said. “Removing public records and people studying things that are influential is equivalent to a kind of censorship by omission.”

Outside the government, many archivists are rushing to maintain the endangeredaster.

The Data Rescue Project, launched in February, catalogs preservation efforts and supports government datasets. Since 2008, the end of the semester web archive has implemented a “comprehensive harvest” of the federal realm, documenting changes from management to administration. Initiatives such as the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative and the Open Environmental Data Project store copies of government climate data.

Another important participant: the 28-year-old non-profit library, Internet Archives, housed in the majestic former Christian Science Church in San Francisco. With the help of around 140 workers, mostly engineers, and with the help of partners such as CloudFlare, WordPress, Reddit and Wikimedia, the parent organization of Wikipedia, we archive over 1 billion URLs a day. The work is funded through donations and web archival agreements with over 1,300 schools, museums and libraries.

The archive collects over 700,000 terabytes of archived web pages and identifies more than 150,000 government pages that have been offline since the inauguration.

“What we're looking at today is unprecedented in both the scope and scale of web-based resources that are offline, and in terms of both the material on the page being changed.”

The archive has faced difficulties in recent years, including copyright lawsuits from record labels and book publishers seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages (the organization had a budget of $28 million in 2023). It is also the target of cyberattacks.

But the Trump administration was not a hindrance. Musk calls the archives “great” and “the public interest that should exist.”

In February, government lawyers alleged that the removal of information from the CDC website caused limited harm as pages scrubbed on Wayback Machine still appear. The federal judge disagreed, noting that the site does not capture all pages and that the archived pages will not appear in search engines and can only be found using the original URL.

Air Force veteran Graham said he was able to rattle the URL from memory and had taken several breaks since Trump took office and worked seven days a week.

“We have seen examples throughout history around the world where governments try to change cultures and change the value of their population by changing and/or limiting access to information,” he said. “I think we still see it to this day.”