Guest Post: For When We Put The Pieces Back Together
Today's post is from Rachel Santarsiero, Director of the National Security Archive's Climate Change Project, and creator of the Disappearing Data Chronology.
“SignalGate happened when?!” I thought to myself as I checked and doublechecked my dates. Yes, SignalGate—the political scandal in which Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly added to a Signal group chat with several United States national security leaders—occurred only back in March 2025. I was in the process of drafting the Disappearing Data Chronology, an extensive timeline documenting over a hundred of the Trump administration’s most egregious blows to federal data, information, archival information, and transparency—and March 2025 seemed like a lifetime ago.
2025 was a year marked by unprecedented, rapid, and devastating upheavals. While too numerous to articulate here, sweeping federal layoffs, the gutting of important and progressive initiatives by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and the longest government shutdown all had incredible impacts on daily life in America.
2025 was also a year of unprecedented changes to federal data and information access. Within the first two weeks of the second Trump administration, the White House scrubbed critical resources, language, and datasets from government websites. In the wake of President Trump’s directives for agencies to terminate or remove all programs, documents, and media that promoted “gender ideology” and diversity initiatives, over 8,000 outward-facing webpages and social media accounts across federal agencies went dark in those first two weeks.
As the Director of the National Security Archive’s Climate Change Transparency Project, I immediately became concerned about any and all climate and environmental resources that were being shuttered or reshuffled. In February 2025, I published my first “Disappearing Data” article for the National Security Archive—a sliver of materials on climate change and environmental justice that had gone dark. Some notable ones at that point included removal of the term “climate change” from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) homepage menu, an error message for the State Department’s previous work on tackling the “climate crisis,” a banner message announcing the relocation for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Global Climate Change website, and another error message for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service “Climate Change Resource Center” (the administration is actively working to dismantle the Forest Service altogether).
That summer, we saw even more unprecedented blows to critical data, infrastructure, and legislation. On June 30, 2025, the biggest blow to climate data access to date came when all five National Climate Assessments (NCAs) were removed. These reports were pivotal to state and local levels by policymakers, farmers, and businesses to help prepare for the impact of heat waves, droughts, and floods. One month later, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced he was planning to rescind the agency’s landmark 2009 endangerment finding and later, eliminate its Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program and Greenhouse Gas Inventory. I wrote about these blows and many others in my follow up “Disappearing Data Part II” article in September 2025.
But the losses kept coming, and they were hard to keep track of. Even harder to keep straight were the dozens of important lawsuits challenging the takedowns, including over the removal of critical public health, climate, and social justice datasets.
Around this time, the editors of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) newsletter Passport approached the National Security Archive about creating a chronology of the important losses, and in some cases, restorations(!) to data and archival collections.
At first, the process of creating a sequential timeline of threats to federal data was unwieldy, like trying to wrap my arms around some kind of multi-tentacled creature—one that continued to flail and sprout new tentacles every day. But soon, I started to notice categories in the events: webpage, dataset, or content removals; executive-level directives; archival collection takedowns or releases; and of course, lawsuits. These buckets don’t capture all the entries, but they started to take shape in my brain in ways I thought would be most important to inform the public.
Over the course of just a few weeks, I sorted through mounds of news articles, federal register notices, and court listings to create the Disappearing Data Chronology, a resource I hope will serve journalists, researchers, environmentalists, public health officials, and litigators. Most importantly, I hope this chronology can be a tool for anyone concerned with their public right to know. When I was finalizing the chronology draft, I was stunned to review each entry listed one right after the other. I was devastated and overwhelmed to see just how much we’ve lost—not just data, but also the loss of institutional knowledge after layoffs and the gutting of entities like the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. I was reliving the devastating losses of 2025, when we scrubbed away our history one line at a time.
But this chronology also gives me hope. One of the goals of this administration has been to sow chaos, disorder, and keep its opponents on the defensive. But if turmoil is the point, then order and organization are the antidote, and in that way, there was something strangely satisfying outlining the record of 2025’s most egregious losses. If we can continue to illuminate the historical record of this administration by shedding light on its worst offenses, then we’re not just treading water. We’re fighting back. As Data Rescue Project’s Lynda Kellam wrote in an email, resources like the Disappearing Data Chronology aren’t just necessary for keeping track of what’s going on in the current moment. They’re needed for when we eventually “[put] the pieces back together.”
