The BLM has removed the phrase “all of the above energy approach.” The image on the left shows BLM’s “Energy and Minerals” webpage on January 20, 2021, and the image on the right shows the same webpage on January 21, 2021. Text highlighted in red was deleted; text highlighted in green was added. Welcome! This … Read more
Between January 20 and February 28, 2021, the Department of the Interior (DOI) overhauled its stated priorities. The DOI’s priorities, as listed on its “Our Priorities” webpage, had been altered dramatically under the Trump administration.
The “EPA Actions to Address PFAS” webpage was changed to reflect EPA career scientists’ conclusions about the latest toxicity assessment for PFBS guidelines and their decision to remove the document. The image on the left represents the webpage on January 20, 2021; the image on the right represents the webpage on February 9, 2021. Words … Read more
A new paper by the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) summarizes how the Trump administration took unprecedented steps to censor climate change-related information—including by limiting access to websites about its causes and actions that mitigate it, as well as by changing the language used to refer to it.
Today, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) releases Access Denied: Federal Web Governance Under the Trump Administration. The report examines the Trump administration’s management of federal websites related to environmental regulation and makes recommendations for the Biden administration moving forward. Currently, there are few policies governing website content.
By Kelsey Breseman EDGI began back in 2016, when a massive data-saving movement launched in response to the realization that critical scientific data would be endangered by an anti-science Trump administration. Since then, EDGI has monitored changes to environmental information on federal websites. It has also explored the potential for community-driven data stewardship—through a decentralized … Read more
Beginning January 25th, 2021, EPA’s top webpage epa.gov includes a clickable black and yellow image to report environmental violations.
Between January 4, 2021 (left) and January 19, 2021 (right), EPA’s Homeland Security Research webpage began redirecting to a new webpage, Emergency Response Research. Welcome! This post is part of the EDGI Website Monitoring Team’s “Change of the Week” blog series. The purpose of this series is to highlight interesting changes we have observed in … Read more
February 10, 2021 — Today, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) publishes searchable records of approximately 1,500 changes to federal agency environmental webpages under the Trump administration. For four years, EDGI’s website monitoring team has identified and catalogued significant changes to federal websites using their open source monitoring software. EDGI’s Federal Environmental Web Tracker makes records of significant changes publicly available.
By Alejandro Paz and Gretchen Gehrke Website monitoring is critical for raising public awareness about federal management of public information. In 2017, EDGI’s website monitoring software development team developed a suite of tools to identify and visualize changes between different versions of a single webpage. In 2019, our partner the Internet Archive integrated EDGI’s open … Read more