404 Media – “Datasets aggregated on data.gov, the largest repository of U.S. government open data on the internet, are being deleted, according to the website’s own information. Since Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, more than 2,000 datasets have disappeared from the database. As people in the Data Hoarding and archiving communities have pointed out, on January 21, there were 307,854 datasets on data.gov. As of Thursday, there are 305,564 datasets. Many of the deletions happened immediately after Trump was inaugurated, according to snapshots of the website saved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Harvard University researcher Jack Cushman has been taking snapshots of Data.gov’s datasets both before and after the inauguration, and has worked to create a full archive of the data. Because data.gov is an aggregator that doesn’t always host the data itself, this doesn’t always mean that the data itself has been deleted, that it doesn’t exist elsewhere on federal government websites, or that it won’t be re-hosted elsewhere. Further research will be necessary to determine what has happened to any given dataset, or to see if it turns up elsewhere on a government website. For example, 404 Media found some datasets in Cushman’s analysis that are no longer accessible on data.gov but can still be found on individual agency websites; we also found some datasets that seem to still exist because data.gov links to working websites but give a file-not-found error message when trying to download the file itself.  Disproportionately, the datasets that are no longer accessible through the portal come from the Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of the Interior, NASA, and the Environmental Protection Agency. But determining what is actually gone and what has simply moved or is backed up elsewhere by the government is a manual task, and it’s too early to say for sure what is gone and what may have been renamed or updated with a newer version.”