Digital Vanishing Act: How the Wayback Machine Is Preserving Deleted Government Pages

The U.S. government has removed thousands of web pages in recent weeks, wiping out critical information on policies related to gender identity, discrimination, and high-profile legal cases. 

The rapid disappearance of online content has raised concerns among digital archivists, who are now racing to preserve these records before they vanish forever.

Since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the White House has ordered the removal of various government websites. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) took down numerous pages in compliance with Trump’s executive orders. 

While some have been restored following a federal judge’s intervention, many remain offline. The Justice Department erased pages related to January 6 cases, while Healthcare.gov removed guidance on transgender patient care. 

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) deleted a gender diversity page, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) eliminated content on sexual orientation discrimination. 

The Census Bureau and several other agencies also took down significant public resources.

While presidential administrations commonly update or remove government web pages, experts say this administration has gone further than its predecessors. 

Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, has observed an unprecedented scale of content removal. The Wayback Machine, a project of the nonprofit Internet Archive, provides a crucial tool for tracking these changes. 

It allows users to access historical versions of web pages, preserving digital records that might otherwise be lost forever.

Digital archivists have long worked to safeguard online information, but the urgency has increased with the latest wave of takedowns. 

Rebecca Frank, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, stresses the importance of archiving government content. 

“Regardless of the administration, preserving public records ensures accountability and access to information,” she said.

How Digital Archives Work

The Wayback Machine captures snapshots of websites by crawling the internet and saving publicly available pages. Users can also manually submit URLs for preservation. The archive currently stores over 916 billion web pages, offering a vast resource for researchers, journalists, and the general public.

Other archival initiatives have emerged to support this effort. The End of Term Archive, a collaboration between the Internet Archive, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI), and Stanford University Libraries, systematically preserves federal web content at the end of each presidential term. Harvard Law Library’s Innovation Center recently released an archive of Data.gov, the federal government’s open data repository, ensuring continued public access to research datasets.

EDGI has played a key role in restoring lost information. Shortly after Trump’s first inauguration, his administration removed a pollution-tracking tool from an environmental agency’s website. Activists and archivists responded by re-uploading a copy using saved data, highlighting the importance of proactive digital preservation.

The Fragility of Online Information

Unlike printed records, digital content is inherently unstable. Websites can change overnight, and once a page disappears, it can become nearly impossible to retrieve without an archived version. URLs function as addresses, but they do not guarantee the permanence of the information they point to. Graham compares it to an old house: “You know where it stood, but you have no idea who lived there a decade ago unless records exist.”

A 2023 Pew Research study found that 38% of web pages available in 2013 had vanished by 2023. Government websites, often assumed to be reliable sources, are not immune. The study also revealed that 20% of government pages contain broken links, a sign of ongoing content removal and restructuring.

Despite independent archiving efforts, experts argue that government agencies must take responsibility for their digital records. Johnny Hadlock, executive director of the National Association of Government Archives & Records Administrators, urges agencies to integrate archiving into their regular workflows. Without formal preservation policies, vital public records may disappear permanently.

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