Who controls the past, controls the future

The EPA is quietly killing its web archive

Rachel Santarsiero, Mother Jones

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.​

In a little-noticed webpage update, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced a plan to decommission its online web archive at the end of the year, a move that would wipe tens of thousands of publicly available environmental resources from the web. The discreet banner notice comes in stark contrast to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s recent public takedowns of the agency’s power plant pollution standards and federal methane regulatory system.

“The EPA’s online archive makes information about a wide variety of environmental issues and past policies available to the public, dating back at least 20 years,” said Gretchen Gehrke, co-founder of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, or EDGI. “This information is irreplaceable, and if the archive is decommissioned, that information will be lost forever.”

For decades, the web archive has been an unparalleled resource for researchers, legislators, policymakers, and the public writ large. It houses everything from fact sheets and environmental reports to agency policy changes and regulatory actions, making it a tool for “democratic oversight,” according to Gehrke, who for 10 years has been tracking changes to vulnerable federal environmental data.

Screenshot of the EPA’s online archive webpage Rachel Santarsiero

This isn’t the first time the environmental agency has tried to shutter the online web archive. In late January 2022, the Biden administration’s EPA announced plans to discontinue the online repository, citing burdensome financial upkeep; through a Freedom of Information Act request, Gehrke was able to determine that the agency spent roughly $2 million a year to maintain it. A coalition of environmentalists, historians, and librarians swiftly condemned the decision, with groups like EDGI and American Society for Environmental History calling the announcement “alarming” and cause for a “tremendous gap” in the historical record. 

After five months of public backlash, the EPA acquiesced, in part by announcing it would delay the web archive’s retirement by one year to July 2023. I reported on it at the time for New Security Beat: 

“News of this welcome reprieve for the EPA digital archive raises a significant question: Why continue with plans to shut it down at all? Postponement does not resolve the eventual damage to government transparency and historical record keeping that the archive’s demise will create. And the concern of organizations opposed to closure will not be satisfied by an additional year of operation.”​

In March 2023, the agency walked back its decision further still by adjusting the banner announcement to say that the online web archive was simply “retiring” — end date not included. Since then, over the last three and a half years, the online resource has soldiered on quietly, no longer being updated but still accessible to the public until a few weeks ago, when the EPA updated the archive’s expiration date to December 31, 2026. 

While the usability of the archive has historically been far from perfect — researchers often encountered dead links and frustratingly limited search capabilities — the archive has held a trove of tens of thousands of EPA documents dating back to the 1990s simply not available elsewhere.

Major political environmental inflection points could be tracked through the archive, such as President George W. Bush’s 2003 Clear Skies Initiative, or President Barack Obama’s 2015 Clean Power Plan — two initiatives that sought to dramatically transform power plant pollution standards. And during President Trump’s first term, when the administration deleted the majority of the EPA’s climate change web resources, the online resource crucially maintained and made accessible these defunct pages for the public. 

The archival repository has also been a tool for environmental enforcement and oversight. In 1989, after an investigation found that military operations had contaminated the soil, sediment, surface water, and groundwater at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune and the Marine Corps Air Station in North Carolina, the EPA listed the base on its National Priorities List. Documents on the EPA’s decades-long investigation were preserved on the archive and helped nearby residents and service members on base overcome doubts about the agency’s effectiveness and better evaluate chemical exposures. Earlier this week, President Trump said he would withhold compensation due to service members and their families exposed at Camp Lejeune if Republicans lose their majority in Congress.

Now, the EPA’s latest move could further undermine public confidence at a time when trust in government is near historic lows. 

“The EPA’s insistence on decommissioning its web archive will only continue to erode public trust — at the exact time the public and lawmakers need agency information the most,” Lauren Harper, the first Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, wrote in an email. “Killing easy access to records forces researchers and lawmakers to flood an already underwater FOIA office just to see once-public records.”

The recently updated webpage states that historical information can still be found in the EPA’s “snapshot collections,” but given the second Trump administration’s crusade against public data and evisceration of funds to federal programs and personnel, it’s hard to know for sure if all, or even a fraction, of the archive’s contents will live on. 

“EPA should expand and systematize the archive, not throw it away and expect that three discrete snapshots will suffice,” said Gehrke. 

The EPA did not respond to a request for comment.