The Politics of Digital Erasure

The large-scale removal of government datasets from data.gov and beyond following Trump’s inauguration is not just a technical reconfiguration – it is an act of digital governance with serious implications for transparency, due process, and democratic accountability. Data.gov, established in 2009, serves as the United States’ official open data portal, making federal government information accessible to researchers, citizens, and organizations worldwide. When executive orders and political directives alter such public information infrastructure, they reshape access to knowledge, reconfigure institutional memory, and raise urgent governance and constitutional concerns about how public data is controlled, who decides its fate, and what safeguards exist to prevent its manipulation or erasure. This post addresses a central research question: How do political interventions in digital information infrastructures challenge democratic governance, and what mechanisms can protect public data from undue manipulation? We argue that the technical architecture of government information systems has become a crucial site of political power, where the ability to reconfigure digital infrastructure represents a significant mechanism of control – one that requires new frameworks of democratic oversight and international cooperation.

The complexity of digital infrastructure changes

Government digital information systems regularly undergo structural changes – whether through platform consolidation during departmental mergers, migration to new technical systems, or reorganizing digital resources in response to policy shifts. These changes are often driven by evolving institutional needs and technological capabilities, can legitimately alter how public information is stored and accessed.

However, the systematic removal of data raises more fundamental questions about how digital infrastructures are governed and the nature of these alterations. How do we assess the nature and impact of large-scale changes to public information systems? What mechanisms can determine whether access has been removed at the front-end interface level or if deeper infrastructural changes have occurred? Most crucially, can damage to information architectures be reversed, or do certain types of systematic alteration create irreparable harm to both technical systems and their supporting sociomaterial practices?

The mechanics of digital erasure

The current landscape of government information infrastructure demonstrates the complex interplay between technical systems, institutional protocols, and political power. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s WONDER system exemplifies this complexity – a public domain software system designed to promote information-driven decision making by placing timely, useful facts in the hands of public health practitioners, researchers, and the general public. However, recent directives have led to the removal of key terms like “transgender,” “immigrant,” “L.G.B.T.” and “pregnant people” from CDC databases, illustrating how rapidly digital infrastructure can be altered to align with political directives.

These changes were executed through two specific directives: “Executive Order 14168 Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” and “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.”

On the backend, journalists have documented the technical implementation of these changes through GitHub commits showing removals of “forbidden words” under the #RemoveDEI project. Some government databases were completely removed from their domains, including:

• The CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index
• PEPFAR Data Dashboards
• HIV/AIDS National Prevention Information Network

Material consequences of digital erasure

The deletion of critical datasets has significant ramifications, particularly in public health and environmental research. Researchers warn that erasing key datasets obstructs efforts to track health disparities, environmental risks, and disease outbreaks. Multiple federal agencies, including USAID, NASA, National Science Foundation (NSF), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) – have seen data disappear, raising concerns about long-term impacts on scientific research and policy making.

The removals conducted at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) hamper research tools used to quantify disproportionate health risks among marginalized demographics. Health experts warn that they significantly impede the ability to analyze and address systemic health inequalities. Further, the removal of statistics on HIV among transgender people, data on young LGBTQ+ health disparities, and records on infectious disease patterns—including HIV and mpox—directly undermines efforts to combat public health crises, raising concerns that future outbreaks could go undetected or be mismanaged due to missing historical data.

The challenge of preservation

These changes demonstrate how digital infrastructure can be rapidly reconfigured through both visible and less visible technical mechanisms. While established preservation protocols exist to archive government websites across different jurisdictions – such as targeted preservation of .gov domains to comprehensive national web archives – the underlying database infrastructures present more complex challenges. When websites are closed or merged, damage to these information architectures may occur even if the front-end content is preserved. Current web archiving capabilities, particularly for dynamic sites, often cannot capture full database functionalities. Moreover, even when front-end interfaces are successfully preserved, questions remain about maintaining access to and functionality of the underlying databases themselves.

Organizations like End of Term Crawl, EDGI, Harvard’s Library and Innovation Lab, ICPSR, and the Internet Archive Wayback Machine have emerged as crucial actors in preserving U.S. government data outside official channels over the course of the last decade. Archivists, digital librarians and computer scientists working across governmental and academic institutions in the U.S. have coordinated grassroots and large-scale efforts in identifying and curating datasets for systematic and emergency crawls. However, these preservation efforts face inherent limitations – while they can capture ongoing static snapshots, they can struggle to maintain the dynamic nature of updating datasets or to fully document the context of infrastructure changes. Additionally, while these efforts operate with a global outlook, they lack institutional mandates to safeguard government data beyond a U.S. context.

Beyond technical systems: the human element

The governance of digital infrastructure operates across both geographic and temporal dimensions – some changes occur rapidly through executive action or technical implementation, while others unfold gradually through reconfigurations of systems and access protocols. The impact of these changes extends far beyond technical systems. Since infrastructures are fundamentally sociomaterial, damage occurs not only to the materiality of data and its technical components but also to the human networks and practices that sustain these information ecosystems. The forced dismantling of information infrastructures by the very people who built and maintained them creates a unique form of institutional trauma. While direct ethnographic evidence of emotional impact is not available, whistleblower accounts and internal discourse within affected institutions indicate significant harm to the human fabric of information infrastructure.

The temporal dimension of these changes adds another layer of complexity. Some alterations happen swiftly – as with the sudden removal of 2,000 datasets from data.gov – while others unfold gradually through shifting practices and priorities. Both rapid and gradual changes reshape not just current information accessibility but also future information practices. Perhaps most concerning is the potential chilling effect on future reporting and data collection, as targeted removals may discourage the development and maintenance of similar datasets or tracking systems in the future.

Global implications and future questions

While these events emerge from a specific U.S. political context, their implications resonate far beyond national borders. Many of the affected information infrastructures – from public health databases to environmental monitoring systems – are deeply embedded in global networks of knowledge production and policymaking. The removal or alteration of U.S. government datasets can disrupt international research collaborations, policy frameworks, and public health initiatives that rely on this data.

Moreover, these events raise fundamental questions about the governance of government digital infrastructures globally. As public institutions increasingly depend on integrated digital systems, the vulnerability of these systems to political intervention becomes a universal concern. The U.S. case demonstrates how rapidly digital infrastructure can be reconfigured, even within a system with established institutional checks and balances.

For European contexts, including Germany with its strong data protection frameworks, these developments highlight important questions about dependencies on U.S. information infrastructure and the need for robust international standards.

Moving forward, addressing these challenges requires frameworks that consider both technical and sociomaterial dimensions: robust protocols to maintain digital infrastructure integrity during political transitions, technical standards for preserving both front-end access and backend database functionality, comprehensive documentation requirements for changes to government information systems, enhanced protections for public information infrastructure, recognition of the human networks that sustain these systems, and safeguards against the erosion of institutional knowledge and practices.

These events should prompt a broader international dialogue on developing global standards for government digital infrastructure preservation, cross-border protocols for maintaining continuity of critical public information systems, collaborative frameworks for protecting shared digital resources, and mechanisms to ensure public accountability in digital governance.

The ability to reconfigure digital infrastructure – whether through term removals, restriction of access, or wholesale elimination of databases – constitutes a significant mechanism of control. Understanding and governing these technical capabilities is essential for maintaining democratic oversight of public information infrastructure.