Internet Archive, Harvard Library Save At-Risk Federal Data - IEEE Spectrum

"Shortly after the Trump administration took office in the United States in late January, more than 8,000 pages across several government websites and databases were taken down, the New York Times found. Though many of these have now been restored, thousands of pages were purged of references to gender and diversity initiatives, for example, and others including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) website remain down.

By 11 February, a federal judge ruled that the government agencies must restore public access to pages and datasets maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). While many scientists fled to online archives in a panic, ironically, the Justice Department had argued that the physicians who brought the case were not harmed because the removed information was available on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. In response, a federal judge wrote, “The Court is not persuaded,” noting that a user must know the original URL of an archived page in order to view it...."