André wakes up each morning with a singular mission: download as many government datasets as possible before they vanish. Throughout 2025, the computer programmer has been part of a frantic effort to archive federal information disappearing at an accelerating pace. Some days the work stretches into the night, triggered by alerts from his group chat announcing that another webpage has gone dark.
"Things were going dark left and right," André said, asking that his real name not be used to protect his family. "We didn't really know what was going to go down usually until right before it happened."
What started as an emergency response has evolved into the Data Rescue Project, a grassroots network of more than 800 volunteers distributed across the globe. Working in their spare time and for no compensation, these data rescuers have become the unofficial archivists of a federal government aggressively scrubbing its digital presence. The administration has removed or altered thousands of webpages containing information on climate change, reproductive health, international aid, and LGBTQ issues as part of what it describes as an effort to purge "woke ideology" from the bureaucracy.
The volunteer effort is driven by a conviction that such information represents critical public infrastructure. "Public data should be a public good, just like roads and bridges," said Lynda Kellam, a university data librarian and founding member of the Data Rescue Project. Sef Kloninger, a former Google engineer who joined the effort, was more direct about the stakes. "A less informed populace is going to be easier to control," he said.
The network draws heavily from librarians and academics, though it also includes open-source programmers, retirees, and others motivated by the scale of what is being lost. When the project launched, volunteers executed a mad dash to download entire agency databases from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration before those sites could be altered or stripped.
As the pace of deletions slowed in the fall, the operation shifted strategy. Rather than simply hoarding data, volunteers began thinking about preservation in the way professional librarians do: making archives discoverable, searchable, and useful. All materials are now uploaded to DataLumos, a public repository hosted by the University of Michigan where users can locate datasets and read metadata explaining what each collection contains.
"You need to have a larger ecosystem where you're saving data and the metadata that goes with it," said Frank Donnelly, who heads geographic information systems services at a university library and began volunteering last winter. "It's one thing just to download and copy some information, but that's not really preserving it."
The scope of what exists to be saved is staggering. Data.gov, the government's own portal for federal datasets, lists at least 500,000 collections. The volunteers cannot save everything. Instead, they prioritize datasets they believe face the highest risk.
By late April, the Data Rescue Project had archived more than 3,000 items across hundreds of federal departments. Their repository has been accessed and downloaded more than 18,900 times. The preserved materials range from individual datasets to entire websites, including a complete archive of NASA webpages and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Feather Atlas, a collection of high-resolution bird feather images.
Some of the most striking rescues have involved data that disappeared entirely. HIFLD Open, a collection of more than 400 critical infrastructure maps used by emergency responders during disasters, was taken down by the Department of Homeland Security last summer. Two separate groups, the Public Environmental Data Partners and Fulton Ring, used archived versions of HIFLD to reconstruct a public tool they are now calling HIFLD Next. Other salvaged materials have been altered rather than deleted, such as CDC data related to queer and transgender populations.
For André, the initial frenzy has eased. He no longer needs to work frantically throughout the day but has shifted toward longer-term projects like designing data storage systems. The work has carried unexpected personal meaning. Years ago, he left factory work after a spine injury left him housebound with chronic pain. "Diving into data rescue helped me take some control and feel like I was actually doing something to help in some way," he said.
What began as a solo salvage operation has crystallized into something larger: a movement around the principle that public data deserves public protection. More than 20 related groups now work on different aspects of data preservation, from the Internet Archive to the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, which documents changes to federal environmental language using archived webpages.
Kellam recognizes the cultural improbability of what has taken hold. "We're not going to have a million-person march on Washington on public data," she noted. "But being able to get people interested in a topic that is somewhat nerdy and niche, I think we've been really successful with that."
Author James Rodriguez: "This is the unglamorous, crucial work that actually prevents authoritarian slide, and it's being done by volunteers who understand that erasing data erases accountability."
Comments