The EPA Just Posted a Mirror Website of the One Trump Plans to Censor

"As the Trump regime has taken power, a lot of valuable information from government agencies has been erased. Useful info is being scrubbed from the USDA, the Department of Education, and there are clear indications that the EPA is next. But we now have a snapshot of what the EPA website looked like the day before Trump took office. And it’s all thanks to FOIA requestors.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has come under unprecedented threat in recent weeks. Republicans have gone so far as to introduce a bill that would eliminate the EPA entirely. But people are pushing back. And after individual efforts to backup the website, along with plenty of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the EPA just posted a snapshot of the site as it existed on January 19, 2017, the day before Trump was sworn in.

It’s unclear how many FOIA requests were filed for the site, but we know that it was at least three. Under federal law, agencies are required to publicly post any documents that get three or more requests. 'Documents' is a catchall term under FOIA that can include anything from videos to websites. If just one person makes a request, those documents are only sent to the person who asked for it and it’s up to that party to make it public.

'The genius of this approach is that, because they were required by federal law to post the mirror site (because it’s a frequently requested record), it’s harder now to force it down,' writer and anthologist Russ Kick told Gizmodo over email. Kick is the founder of The Memory Hole, a one-man operation that posts government documents."