National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) | Report written: February 25, 2019 |Different federal agencies managed their web resources differently during the recent 35-day partial government shutdown. Many agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) placed a banner at the top of webpages to inform the public that websites would not be updated, and did not update public datasets. Another agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), blocked access to many web resources by redirecting URLs to a simple government shutdown notice. The lack of maintenance of websites during government shutdowns has historical precedent, such as during the 16-day shutdown in 2013, but we cannot quantify its extent. In the most recent government shutdown, nearly one-third of the NOAA webpages that EDGI monitors (1,045 out of 3,275) redirected to the shutdown notice, including informational pages and data portals for archival climate, atmospheric, oceanic, and environmental data. However, some essential real-time operational data, such as that produced by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), remained available and were regularly updated during the shutdown. Federal agencies have built a web infrastructure in order to deliver data and display important environmental information, but a lack of infrastructural maintenance, such as what transpired during this past government shutdown, has demonstrated how vulnerable that infrastructure can be. In this report we document ways in which different federal agencies managed their web resources during the most recent government shutdown, with particular focus on NOAA. At the end of the report we discuss implications and recommendations for data access and management during future funding lapses.
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