Finding Government Information during the 2025 Administration Transition

This guide will point to resources that identify and track steps taken by the Trump administration and Congress to scale back or eliminate access to federal government information. It also provides links to groups performing data and website rescue.

Context

The 2025 transition between presidential administrations has been a rapidly changing landscape, widely discussed across the news media. 

This guide points to resources and news about accessing federal government information, and the Trump administration's and/or Congress's actions that scale back or eliminate access to federal websites, information, and datasets.  It also provides links to groups performing data and website rescue and archiving.  

Information has been gathered from academic research guides, organizations' public websites, and government information listservs.  

Z link to this guide:  z.umn.edu/govinfo25

Research Guides and Trackers from America's Universities

Impact and Value of Federal Information

America's Essential Data - collecting stories to document the value that data produced by the federal government provides for American lives and livelihoods.

How to Cite Missing Government Info

Regular Citation Guidance

Citing Government Documents:  This research guide provides resources for citing federal, international and United Nations government documents.

Recommendations for Citations of Missing Information

Each citation style has its own best practices for citing online resources that are no longer available.  For individual questions, the best route may be to reach out to your editor (for researchers) or professor (for students) for guidance.  Here, we will compile a list of recommendations that may also be useful to consider:

For websites or documents that have already disappeared:

For websites or documents you want to preserve in case they disappear:

  • Save the webpage you are citing to the Wayback Machine:  use their browser extension (for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or MS Edge)  to make this part of your regular research workflow!
  • Download a copy of the webpage or resource to your own computer.  Government information and websites are in the public domain, so there are no copyright concerns.  Therefore, you could upload your copy to a public personal website or citation library if needed.

 

Last Updated: Apr 11, 2025 5:14 PM