Wayback Machine Saves Thousands of Federal Webpages Amid Purge of Government Data Under Trump

Thousands of informational government webpages have been taken down so far in the second Trump administration, including on public health, scientific research and LGBTQ rights. Amid this mass erasure of public information, the Internet Archive is racing to save copies of those deleted resources. The San Francisco-based nonprofit operates the Wayback Machine, a popular tool that saves snapshots of websites that may otherwise be lost forever, and it has archived federal government websites at each presidential transition since 2004. While it's normal for a new administration to overhaul some of its online resources, the Trump administration's pace of destruction has shocked many archivists. There have been thousands and thousands of pages removed," says Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, who notes that even a page about the U.S. Constitution was scrubbed from the White House website.