Say Goodbye to the Obama Era “All of the Above” Energy Approach

Say Goodbye to the Obama Era “All of the Above” Energy Approach

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

EPA Indicates Bold Support for Scientific Integrity on Its Website

EPA Indicates Bold Support for Scientific Integrity on Its Website

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

Climate Silence and the Trump Administration’s Censorship of Federal Environmental Agency Websites

Climate Silence and the Trump Administration’s Censorship of Federal Environmental Agency Websites

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. 

New Report Shows Pattern Under Trump of Federal Agencies Removing Public Information Prior to Environmental Proceedings

New Report Shows Pattern Under Trump of Federal Agencies Removing Public Information Prior to Environmental Proceedings

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.

EDGI supports Internet Archive’s Decentralized Web Principles

EDGI supports Internet Archive’s Decentralized Web Principles

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

Goodbye Homeland Security, Hello Emergency Response: EPA Renames a Major Research Initiative

Goodbye Homeland Security, Hello Emergency Response: EPA Renames a Major Research Initiative

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

EDGI Releases Dataset of Federal Environmental Website Changes Under Trump

EDGI Releases Dataset of Federal Environmental Website Changes Under Trump

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.

How EDGI’s Website Monitoring Team Uses an Open Source Tool to Identify Website Changes—and How You Can, Too

How EDGI’s Website Monitoring Team Uses an Open Source Tool to Identify Website Changes—and How You Can, Too

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