Trump’s actions raise fears about public access to data

"During his eight years in office, President Barack Obama was hardly a darling of open government advocates. His Justice Department prosecuted nine cases against whistleblowers and leakers, compared to three by all other previous administrations.

But Obama also took some steps to increase transparency, including establishing a web-based log of visitors to the White House. That log allowed journalists and others to track lobbying at the White House, including links between the Obama administration and the pharmaceutical industry.

But easy access to the log disappeared after Trump was sworn in. The National Archives and Records Administration stopped paying a contractor to maintain an embedded web application for the Obama-era visitation records. They are still available at the Obama White House archive, but only on zip files that are difficult to download and analyze.

As of last week, the Trump administration had not built a web page with information about recent visitors to the White House, although it has said it will post such records 'on an ongoing basis, once they become available.'

Other information of interest has also disappeared. The phone book for employees at the U.S. Department of Energy has been removed from the agency’s website. Several federal websites have been altered to eliminate or tone down evidence linking human activities to global climate change.

While all incoming administrations put their ideological stamp on federal websites, librarians and other professionals fear that previously accessible raw data could be put behind walls. They have started networking on how to salvage what they can."