As you probably don’t know, since it’s not high on most people’s list of holidays, we are in the midst of Sunshine Week. This is an annual collaboration of journalists and various groups to shine a light (hence “sunshine”) on the importance of public records and open government.
In Granite Geek’s world, however, this is more like Eclipse Week.
The Trump administration has been moving to take down public information involving scientific research and data that is gathered at
taxpayer expense. These days, goes the painful joke, the most common federal website hosting data is 404 Not Found.
Assuming you’re not a research scientist, why should you care? Hosting websites isn’t free and maybe the feds should be doing less of it with our tax dollars.
You should care partly because public dollars paid for that information to be collected and some bureaucrats shouldn’t decide on a whim to hide it from us. This is a basic message of Sunshine Week for all government-gathered information. Public information is ours, not theirs.
You should also care because of the type of information we’re talking about. It’s useful to you and me.
More than 3,000 pages from the Census Bureau disappeared in early February, most of which concerned research results and methods. Some may have returned since then as part of the administration’s chaotic do-and-undo approach as some judges try to make them obey the law, but the extent isn’t clear and they could disappear again at any time.
I can’t think of a more basic piece of information needed for business operations, not to mention life decisions like where you want to live, than knowing the makeup of the people who are in this country. Why did the DOGE team make it harder to figure out? Good question.
So much health-related information has been taken down, returned, altered or taken down again from the Centers for Disease Control that it’s impossible to keep track. If you want to know what diseases are coming your way and how best to respond, whether your backyard chickens need to worry about bird flu, or find out a variety of other health information for your family and business – you can no longer be sure you’ll find the answers that you paid to create.
Go to the webpage for the Council for Environmental Quality – a government agency that coordinates federal environmental activities, and the development of environmental policy – and you will be rerouted back to WhiteHouse.gov.
NOAA and the National Weather Service sites are seeing cuts, which could wipe away basic forecasting information that’s used by the private weather apps we’ve all gotten used to seeing. Ignorance is bliss? Not when talking about the weather.
A ton of pages about environmental issues have disappeared or been altered. That includes some excellent mapping tools that your town government might use to make planning decisions, presumably because the tools might be used to find problems that could interfere with somebody’s business plan.
The damage is so widespread that a number of groups have been scrambling to save information before someone at DOGE decides it’s unnecessary. Sites like envirodatagov.org/ have been working to copy and preserve data since the day Trump was re-elected, knowing that his first administration removed federal information it didn’t want to see.
Another site is the End of Term Archive (eotarchive.org) which since 2008 has saved some websites whenever a presidential administration changes. They’ve ramped up efforts this year.
There’s also the venerable Internet Archive (archive.org), which has saved websites of all types since 1996. It has gone from being an interestingly geeky activity to being thrust into the middle of the fight over who gets to control information.
Most of this work is done by volunteers or very small staffs. Many individuals are doing what they can separately. I know one state employee who was told by a federal colleague to download all their data just in case; the colleague then added, “You didn’t hear this from me.”
This is painful but the most painful part is that science depends on a free flow of information. Much of the modern world that we enjoy came about because people shared their successes, their failures and their data, a sharing that led to new understanding. Stopping that free flow undermines our progress in every sense of the word.
It’s also painful because it’s yet another blow to the early belief – really a naive hope, in retrospect – that the internet would free us from this threat. Computer pioneer John Gilmore put it this way in 1993: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
If only.
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