website-monitoring Archives – Environmental Data and Governance Initiative

Advancing Public Participation and Community Engagement with the Federal Government

February 26, 2026May 17, 2024 by Gretchen Gehrke

This comment stresses that the federal government should strive to increase the tangible impact of public participation in federal decision-making. To do this, EDGI recommends OMB design public participation processes that have the appropriate timing and depth to meaningfully influence government actions, and to develop standards for information management to ensure the public can easily learn about issues and opportunities for input.

EPA Indicates Bold Support for Scientific Integrity on Its Website

October 15, 2025March 9, 2021 by EDGI Comms

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

October 15, 2025March 4, 2021 by Shannan Lenke Stoll

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.

Since Biden’s Inauguration, Environmental Enforcement Has New Place of Prominence on the EPA’s Homepage

October 15, 2025February 18, 2021 by EDGI Comms

Beginning January 25th, 2021, EPA’s top webpage epa.gov includes a clickable black and yellow image to report environmental violations.

EDGI Releases Dataset of Federal Environmental Website Changes Under Trump

October 15, 2025February 10, 2021 by EDGI Comms

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

December 19, 2024February 3, 2021 by EDGI Comms

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

Why a Small Change to an EPA Webpage on Drinking Water Chemical Advisories Matters

October 15, 2025January 11, 2021 by EDGI Comms

This week’s change occurred between May and July 2018 and is about a sentence that was added to an EPA webpage about drinking water health advisories for PFOA and PFOS chemicals.

Making a public dataset: reviewing and reclassifying changes to federal environmental webpages

March 25, 2021October 28, 2020 by Gretchen Gehrke

Blog written by Alejandro Paz Lead image shows the HTML source code comparison for two versions of the same page, on which “greenhouse gas emissions and carbon footprint” was changed to “environmental footprint.” Making a Public Dataset For the past three and a half years, EDGI has been monitoring U.S. federal agency environmental webpages and … Read more

Change of the Week: Stripping information and stripping protections for migratory birds

March 25, 2021October 12, 2020 by Gretchen Gehrke

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 the language used on, or access to, federal websites. We want to share these changes to encourage public engagement with and discussion of their … Read more