Harvard law library acts to preserve government data amid sweeping purges

By Raphael Satter

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A unit of Harvard University's Law Library says it is releasing an archive of more than 300,000 government data sets, aiming to protect vital public information at a time when President Donald Trump's administration is wiping it from the web.

The initiative, announced Thursday by the Law Library's Innovation Lab, is one of several efforts to rescue official figures and government datasets as Trump and his billionaire allies take a wrecking ball to the federal government, yanking thousands of websites offline and in some cases deleting entire agencies off the internet.

Academics and researchers from fields including public health, climate studies and sociology have been left scrambling as the Trump administration scrubs official data. On Sunday The New York Times reported it found that more than 8,000 government web pages had been removed in the aftermath of the presidential transition.

The Innovation Lab said in a statement it had so far managed to preserve 311,000 datasets copied between 2024 and 2025, amounting to 16 terabytes of data. Amanda Watson, the Harvard Law School's assistant dean for library and information services, said her institution's rescue effort was about "upholding our fundamental belief that government information belongs to the public."

The Innovation Lab isn't doing the work alone.

Others that have scrambled to preserve government data include the San Francisco-based Internet Archive, which has been taking systematic end-of-presidential-term snapshots of government websites since 2008, as well as groups such as the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, which rescued an interactive government widget for checking how polluted a given area was - one of many tools knocked offline by the Trump administration.

Jack Cushman, who directs the Innovation Lab, said the government collected an untold amount of data.

"That's everything from 'What is the weather or climate going to be?' to 'How are the crops growing?' to 'How much water is in aquifers' to 'What are people dying of?' to 'What jobs are growing or shrinking," he said.

"The government tracks so many things that help us understand and plan and make sense of what's happening in the world. We wanted to make sure our patrons can get access to all that information."

(Reporting by Raphael Satter; Editing by Leslie Adler)