The move, says one agency worker, will “severely hamper our ability to reach vulnerable people.”

The deletions began shortly after Donald Trump took office. C.D.C. web pages on vaccines, H.I.V. prevention, and reproductive health went missing. Findings on bird-flu transmission vanished minutes after they appeared. The Census Bureau’s public repository went offline, then returned without crucial directories of geographic information. The Department of Justice expunged the January 6th insurrection from its website, and WhiteHouse.gov took down an explainer page about the Constitution. More than 130,000 government pages have gone dark in a purge that one scientist likened to a “digital book burning,” and which has proved as frightening in its imprecision as in its malice.But on this front, at least, the Trump Administration is facing well-organized resistance. It comes from a loose coalition of archivists and librarians who are assembling information arks to ride out the chaos. The Data Rescue Project, founded by a data librarian, now includes more than 400 volunteer backups of government repositories, from the C.F.P.B.’s Consumer Complaint Database to the C.D.C.’s National Immunization Survey. When asked who was contributing to these backups, an administer of the tracker had a simple answer: “Nerds who care.” At the link in our bio, Julian Lucas (jcjules) reports on the volunteer archivists and data hoarders working to save the country’s files from DOGE. Illustration by Erik Carter (@erikinternet).

YouTube video by Jessica Denson

00:00:00.320