Since Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20^th, his administration has systematically shut down US government websites and deleted information relating to many issues, including diversity initiatives, climate change and LGBT+ and Trans issues and policies. Ben Worthy writes that these erasures, and the Trump administration’s lack of transparency, will make it easier for the administration to repress certain groups, and harder for campaigns and journalists to hold it to account.

Information, the saying goes, is power. The US Founding Fathers of the United States, for all their faults, knew this, and made it clear that giving the people information was central to their ‘great experiment’ working. In 1822, James Madison, whose birthday is now the annual celebration of information access in America, wrote, “[a] popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps, both’. Madison argued that ‘Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

There’s been a long struggle for access to information ever since. In the 1960s, campaigners in the US pressured President Lyndon Johnson to pass one of the world’s first Freedom of Information (FOI) Acts, which became law in 1966. In the 2020s governments now have a wealth of information in the form of records, open data and online portals. The world of 2025 is very different from 1966. British librarian and author, Richard Ovenden notes that, in 2019, 18.1 million text messages were sent every minute, as well as 87,500 tweets. Wikipedia has five to six thousand hits per second and the Wayback Machine, has archived 441 billion websites. Trying to control so much information seems impossible.

How the Trump administration is removing and erasing information

Yet, in his first few weeks back in office, Donald Trump’s regime, as part of a broader attack on democracy, is trying to erase parts of the government. So far, since his inauguration on January 20^th, his administration has deleted, removed, and avoided. Several strategies are now being used to darken US government, from erasing information and data by shutting down websites and webpages, taking control of the National Archives, and trying to avoid access laws.

According to analysis by the New York Times, since Trump became President, around 8,000 US government webpages relating to diversity initiatives and “gender ideology” as well as ‘vaccines, veterans’ care, hate crimes and scientific research’ have been removed. Spanish language pages have also been removed.

Photo by Ujesh Krishnan on Unsplash

Climate change is one area being targeted, with data stripped from a range of websites. This includes, for example, the Council on Environmental Quality’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST), a ‘web tool’ which lets those using it see “on a map which places in the US face marginalization and disproportionate climate and pollution burdens”. Another deeply worrying deletion relates to mentions of LGBT+ and Trans issues and policies, where pages have been changed or removed from education to healthcare.

Even the White House website was briefly down following the inauguration; the White House claimed they were simply refurbishing it and had done something similar in 2017. Worryingly, any mention of past Presidents has disappeared, leaving Trump as the one, eternal President.

No transparency

As well as clamping down on data, the Trump administration is seeking to shroud its actions in secrecy. Despite a promise by Elon Musk that ‘We’re going to be very open and transparent’, DOGE, a government advisory committee, has remained in a mysterious legal status regarding access. Campaign groups have already made FOI requests to access DOGE communications but, at the time of writing, DOGE is not subject to FOIA but the Presidential Records Act. Meanwhile, in apparent revenge for the agency’s role in the investigation of classified documents found in his Mar-a-Lago bathroom, Trump has fired the head of the National Archives and installed Secretary of State Marco Rubio in their place.

This isn’t Trump’s first attempt of policy by erasure. In 2017, according to one analysis, ‘the National Park Service removed 92 national parks’ Climate Action Plans from its website, a mixture of orders and ‘self-censorship’. There was also a long running battle over whether his tweets were records under the Under the Presidential Records Act (they were).

All (data) are not lost yet. In a game of deletion and preservation whack-a-mole, various groups are trying to save the data, such as the End of Term Web Archive and environmental groups, who explained simply ‘Trump Removes Access to CEJST, Our New Coalition Restores It’.

What Trump’s data darkness means for democracy

But the attack on information has some profound consequences for American democracy, and whatever Trump is trying to replace it with.

First, this ‘darkness’ makes it harder to hold the Trump administration to account on issues like climate change or minority rights, or to create campaigns against what the government is doing. Many of the big moments in modern US history came from information release and accountability, from the photocopied Pentagon Papers in Vietnam, to the Watergate leaks, the Clinton scandals, and Abu Ghraib. In their daily work investigative reporters draw on government data like that being deleted to run stories on everything from lobbying to diseased meat and ‘erasing information about marginalised groups is particularly dangerous for health outcomes’. Such censorship has a chilling effect on others, who may ‘obey in advance’ by self-censoring before being asked to.

Second, the erasures on both climate change and gender fit with wider policy aims, with Trumps’ executive orders clearly intending to create what is essentially  Jim Crow for Trans people. The ultimate power of the archive is, as historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued in his famous book, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, ‘the power to define what is and what is not a serious object of research and therefore of mention’. Repression is easier if it can’t be tracked, recorded or seen.

Finally, perhaps most worryingly, with shades of George Orwell’s book, 1984, which warned of the consequences of totalitarianism and mass surveillance, the deletion of data makes it hard to prove something ever existed or happened. The erasure helps feed the Trump regimes use of ‘alternative facts’ and weaponisation of ‘fake news’. Just as the totalitarian regimes created their own ‘moral universe’ in the 1930s and 1940s, so too the Trump regime is seeking to create a parallel place where certain groups and issues simply don’t exist.

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