The ‘Wayback Machine’ is preserving the websites Trump’s White House took down

The White House has ordered thousands of government web pages to be taken down over the past month, leaving virtually no trace of some federal agencies’ policies regarding critical topics such as sexual orientation, January 6 cases and discrimination.

The White House has ordered thousands of government web pages to be taken down over the past month, leaving virtually no trace of some federal agencies’ policies regarding critical topics such as sexual orientation, January 6 cases and discrimination. Since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the government’s mass removal of data and policies it finds objectionable has illustrated just how quickly data can disappear from the internet, and it has sparked renewed interest in preserving information online among digital archivists. Thousands of pages from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website were taken down in January to comply with Trump’s executive orders, although some of the pages are back online following an order from a federal judge. Other taken-down sites include Justice Department web pages related to the January 6, 2021, Capitol breach; information about care for transgender patients on Healthcare.gov, a gender diversity page on the TSA’s website, and sexual orientation and general identity discrimination pages on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Census Bureau’s websites, as well as many others across the government. While it is not uncommon for presidential administrations to delete or change government web pages, the second Trump administration seems to have taken down more content than usual, according to Mark Graham, the director of the Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine, which the nonprofit Internet Archive operates, is a tool designed to help with preserving online data, and it has been used in the past when new presidents’ administrations took down information from past administrations. The site allows users to enter a URL and, if the page has been archived, see what it looked like in the past, dating back to the database’s founding in 1996. “I think that many have reported that the scope of what we’re seeing this time – with regard to certain websites being taken offline, certain material on web pages being removed – is greater than it has been in past changes of administration,” said Graham.