You know the phrase, picks or it didn't happen? It's like that, but with government webpages.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes. 404, age not found.

That error message has become a more common site on government websites.

Lots, reportedly thousands of federal government webpages have been recently taken down,

ranging from Census Bureau research on depression among LGBT adults to FDA guidance for making

clinical trials more diverse. This erasure comes after President Trump signed executive orders,

cracking down on DEI initiatives and what he calls gender ideology. Jack Cushman directs the

Harvard Library Innovation Lab. He's also part of the

end-of-term archive project. It works to document government sites before a new administration takes

over. I asked him how many of those web pages have already been preserved. I think one way to put

it is that a great deal has been archived, and especially the end-of-term archived. Another way to put it is that a great deal has been archived, and especially the end-of-term

archive. Another way to put it is that a great deal has not been captured. We're talking about a

government of two million people who generate data in the course of doing their work, and whatever

their work is, they're going to report out to us as their ultimate employers. Here's what I saw.

Here's what I recorded. Here's how you can get access to a copy of it. So we're talking about an

infrastructure that is much larger than there's any ability for the external community to make a

copy of. So if we, in a serious way, if we shut off access to all of the data that the government has created for us,

that we paid for, then we're going to end up not having a copy of most of it at the end of the day.

This isn't something that we can fix from the outside.

But it is something where we can get the copies of the things that are most important or most often used

and help our patrons that way.

A federal judge recently ordered that at least some of these government websites be restored.

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