Where to Find All These Remote Government Sites
In recent days—in response to directives from the Trump administration—thousands of federal agency web pages have been deleted or altered to remove studies, reports and links to everything from vaccines to environmental policy initiatives. According to The New York Times , more than 8,000 pages have disappeared from the websites of agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Census Bureau, the Department of Justice and the Food and Drug Administration (to name a few). In other cases, sites are still available but language related to diversity, gender and climate change has been removed.
There are a number of efforts by scientists, researchers, journalists, and advocacy groups to collect and preserve information that has been removed from (or is at risk) from federal websites. For example, CDCGuidelines.com has downloadable PDFs of documents on topics such as contraception, LGBTQIA+ health and intimate partner violence, and the Public Environmental Data Project replicates the Council on Environmental Quality’s remote tool for climate and economic justice checks. The Harvard Dataverse is another public data repository, and the End of Term Archive preserves government websites at risk of change or loss during the transition from one presidential administration to the next.
You can also find deleted pages yourself using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine , which scans and archives websites across the Internet to create a repository of digital information. You can enter a specific URL (if you know it) or search specific collections, such as .gov websites and .gov PDFs, using keywords.
How to Read Remote Websites Using the Wayback Machine
From the Internet Archive home page, enter the URL of the page you want to read into the Wayback Machine search bar. When the results appear, hover your mouse over any calendar date marked with a blue circle and select the time in the pop-up window that indicates when the page was captured. Depending on the page you are looking for, you may need to go back to 2024.
Alternatively, find the collection search bar at the bottom of the page, enter keywords and select a collection from the drop-down list. The Wayback Machine contains collections of .gov pages and PDFs, as well as COVID and end-of-term data.