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
- U.S. Government Information: Weekly RoundupProvides current awareness of federal government reports and activities. The page is updated weekly to provide links to important, newsworthy, or interesting material published during the previous week. Sign up for email notifications of updates. From University of California San Diego.
- Journals No Longer Being Indexed By ERICCrowdsourcing effort to figure out which journals are being removed from ERIC. From Michigan State University.
- Federal Government Information After the 2025 TransitionGuide to help understand the shift in government information and resources. From UC San Diego.
- Trump TrackersTracking tools covering a wide range of topics that help track the many changes being made by the Trump administration. From University of California San Diego.
- Silencing Science TrackerCovers media reports of government actions to silence or impede climate (and other) science, including climate-related government censorship. The 2017-2020 data is available in the main table. From Columbia Law School.
- Climate Deregulation TrackerThe Climate Deregulation Tracker identified steps taken by the Trump administration and Congress to scale back or wholly eliminate federal climate mitigation and adaptation measures. The tracker is linked to a database of climate change regulations and two other climate regulation trackers. From Columbia Law School.
- Govspeak ErrorsTracks the ongoing uncertainty of federal websites under the new administration. Frequent link checks provide a working copy of webpages that appear to be down/missing. Continually edited with a final list at the end of the month. From University of California San Diego.
- Government Information: Eliminated, Suspended, Etc.Tracks the Trump Administration's elimination and suspension of access to U.S. federal government information. From Sacramento State University.
- 2025 Administration Transition Information and ResourcesFrom Council on Governmental Relations (COGR), the national authority on federal policies and regulations affecting U.S. research institutions.
- Government Information Data RescueCollection of resources relating to data rescue efforts. From American University.
- Open Energy Data Initiative (OEDI)A centralized repository of datasets aggregated from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Programs, Offices, and National Laboratories.
- Project 2025 Executive Action TrackerMonitors the Trump administration’s implementation of Project 2025, tracking the authoritarian blueprint’s executive action proposals across 20 federal agencies. Access the Tracker directly. Center for Progressive Reform.
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:
- Check the Wayback Machine to see if you can find an archived copy of the web page to cite instead.
- Check our list of other archives and rescue efforts to see if it has been archived elsewhere.
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.