‘Things were going dark left and right’: the race to save US government datasets before they’re deleted

Group has banded together to rescue data as Trump administration has removed or altered data on climate change, reproductive health, LGBTQ+ people and more André spent 2025 trying to stay one step ahead of the Trump administration. Every morning, he woke up and downloaded as many government datasets as he could before they were deleted. He continued throughout the afternoon, and sometimes through the night, if a notification from his group chat popped up on his phone saying that a new webpage had been taken down. “We didn’t really know what was going to go down usually until right before it happened,” said André, a computer programmer. He asked not to use his real name to protect himself and his family. “Things were going dark left and right.” In an effort to purge the federal bureaucracy of “woke ideology”, the Trump administration has removed or altered thousands of webpages and data on climate change, reproductive health, international aid, LGBTQ people and more – information that’s used every day to keep people safe, set policy and provide essential services. “The idea that it could be destroyed in a way that seemed really reckless, and almost pointless, r