Just weeks after Trump’s inauguration, webpages across federal agencies—from CDC to FDA to the Census Bureau—began disappearing or were changed, typically to remove mention of DEI, accessibility, or 'gender ideology.' These changes make it harder for scientists and health professionals to do their work, and for advocates to hold the Trump administration accountable. If you’re hunting for missing webpages or documents, there are resources available and CSPI may be able to help. 

“To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.” – Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

Why so many agency documents are missing

In early February, thousands of federal agency webpages were removed or manipulated, ostensibly to comply with instructions that federal agencies remove materials pursuant to Trump’s executive orders targeting DEI, accessibility, and “gender ideology.” The changes were disturbingly wide-ranging, from FDA guidance documents to CDC research articles to Census Bureau data sets—an aggressive display of government censorship.

More recently, in response to a Doctors for America lawsuit, a federal judge ordered the Department of Health and Human Services, the FDA, and the CDC to restore certain webpages and data sets to their January 30 appearance. While agencies reinstated pages subject to this order, such as the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index, which uses Census data to identify and quantify communities experiencing social vulnerabilities like poverty and lack of health insurance, the Trump administration added a disclaimer containing misinformation about gender biology. But the Doctors for America lawsuit focuses only on information vital to medical clinicians and researchers. The order did not cover many other removed or altered sources important to public health, including resources that advocates like CSPI use to fight for evidence-based policies.  

For example, we found that “Gender and Age” data tables from What We Eat in America, an interview component of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, that had been available in November 2024 are now gone. Previously, CSPI has used this data to learn about typical population-wide intakes of vitamins and other nutrients—including those that are overconsumed, like sodium—and to evaluate whether specific gender and age groups were at risk of inadequate intakes or overconsumption. Removing reliable data on topics like what Americans eat because it happens to be broken down by gender is nonsensical at best, hateful at worst, and needlessly political. It boggles the mind to think how many similar changes across all federal agency websites could still be undiscovered. And that is part of this administration’s apparent goal: to obscure facts, to manufacture controversy where none need exist, and to create chaos. So much chaos that it is nearly impossible for those trying to maintain order to keep up, and even harder to correct the damage done. 

Where you can find federal documents

Many people and organizations have been busy stemming what damage they can through archiving. Some options for finding archived materials: 

• GovWayback has historical versions of federal websites from before January 20, 2025. You can find them by adding “wayback.com” after .gov URLs.
• End of Term Web Archive preserves federal websites at the end of each presidential administration.  
• The Harvard Law Library Innovation Center has a regularly updated archive of all of data.gov.  
• All CDC data sets published before January 28, 2025, are available via the Internet Archive.  

These resources are enormously helpful but can have shortcomings. In some instances, a web page is archived but documents embedded in it, like agency guidance documents or enforcement letters, are not. With this problem in mind, CSPI began saving federal materials relevant to our policy priorities before the new administration took office. If you’re looking for a particular nutrition, food safety, or health policy material from before January 20, 2025, and can’t find it, reach out to us at policy@cspinet.org. We may have it.