This guide will help you to locate U.S. Federal Government data that may have been removed or redacted following the Presidential Executive Orders that went into effect on January 31, 2025. Use the menu on the left to navigate to different sections of this guide.
Please note this issue is ongoing and continues to evolve. This guide will be updated regularly as new information becomes publicly available.
Dedicated groups of librarians and others around the country have actively engaged in data rescue efforts to search for data assumed at risk and send the datasets and documentation to secure repositories where it may be preserved and remain publicly accessible.
The Data Rescue Project and similar initiatives work to preserve and protect government data that could be lost or altered due to political or institutional changes. These groups—often made up of scientists, librarians, archivists, and volunteers—identify vulnerable datasets (like those stored on government websites) and back them up to secure, publicly accessible online repositories. Their goal is to ensure that researchers, policymakers, and the public can continue to access accurate and reliable data for science, education, and decision-making, even if official sources become unavailable or are changed.
The Data Rescue Project (DRP) is a coalition of data-librarian organizations aimed at coordinating and communicating efforts to preserve access to public U.S. government data that is currently at risk. They recognize people are confused about where to go and what is happening. The DRP created a Data Rescue Tracker, which is a collaborative tool built to catalog existing public data-rescue efforts and provides consolidated overviews of which group or organization is downloading and preserving specific datasets.
The Data Curation Network is a professional organization of data curators, data-management experts, data-repository administrators, disciplinary scientists, and scholars representing academic institutions and nonprofit data repositories that steward research data for future use.
DCN-curated datasets—Browse by partner, subject area, discipline, data type, or software language
The Harvard Library Innovation Lab Team is composed of librarians, technologists, lawyers, designers, and more who work out of the Harvard Law School Library.
ICPSR is an international consortium of more than 810 academic institutions and research organizations that provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social-science research community.
Boston University’s School of Public Health’s webpage provides an easy way to search for lost data for datasets across various sites, including the Internet Archive, Harvard Dataverse, Data Rescue Project, Data Lumos, and more.
The Internet Archive’s federal government Wayback page. Access historical versions of U.S. Government websites from before January 20, 2025, with a simple URL change, using the Internet Archive.
To find more resources and subject-specific information, make sure to check out the “Find Data in Your Subject or Discipline” section of this guide!
ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) is a key indexing database for education and the social sciences. ERIC contains documents and reports from think tanks and state departments of education as well as information about journal content. The ERIC Help Desk recently notified users that they will begin to see a significant reduction in its content beginning on April 24, 2025. This change results from the Department of Government Efficiency efforts to "reduce overall Federal spending."
What are the expected impacts?
The America's Essential Data group aims to document "the value that data produced by the federal government provides for American lives and livelihoods." Their team has developed a framework for telling your data story. By crowdsourcing data stories, they hope to illustrate data impact and the explicit value of federal data.
Goals of America's Essential Data:
Additionally, they are currently in the process of developing more tools to examine the broader impact of data loss. In the meantime, they are accepting volunteers in front-end development, web-scraping, or legal research. If you are interested in getting involved, contact them at questions@essentialdata.us.
Research AppointmentsYou can email or make an appointment with the research librarian on this guide, or see all research librarians by subject area.
We offer drop-in research help at the Research Help Desk in Frost, on Level 1.
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