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Accessing Federal Data & Information: Home

This guide can help you find and access missing or suppressed data.

Where has the data gone?

According to a New York Times article published on Feb. 2, 2025, "more than 8,000 web pages across more than a dozen U.S. government websites [were] taken down" between January 31st and February 2nd. Data and information about a variety of topics including "vaccines, veterans’ care, hate crimes and scientific research" were removed across a number of departments. Some datasets are made public again, but with significant alterations. 

While it is common for new administrations to make changes to federal websites, the recent removal of data is more targeted and wide-sweeping than in previous administrations. 

The resources in this guide are intended to help you locate missing data and research that was previously published on government websites. We will continue to update this guide. If you need help locating data, contact libref@beloit.edu.

Library Resources

Recommend Resources

If you need help finding or accessing data or is you have recommendations for resources to add to this guide, contact libref@beloit.edu

Archived Government Data

Search for datasets across various sites using the databases below:

  • Find Lost* Data: a searchable database that includes datasets that have been downloaded from federal, state, and local agencies.
  • Data Rescue Tracker: a collaborative tool built to catalog existing public data rescue efforts.

Archived datasets available for free online:

  • Data Rescue Project 2025 - coordinated effort among a group of data organizations, including IASSIST, RDAP, and members of the Data Curation Network. Serves as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points for public US governmental data that are currently at risk
  • Internet Archive Wayback Machine - a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive. Search for and access past versions of websites through this site.
  • Internet Archive End of Term Crawl - Captures and saves U.S. Government websites at the end of presidential administrations.
  • DataLumos - An ICPSR archive for valuable government data resources. ICPSR has a long commitment to safekeeping and disseminating US government and other social science data.
  • Public Environmental Data Partners - A volunteer coalition of several environmental, justice, and policy organizations, researchers across several universities, archivists, and students. Preserves and provides public access to federal environmental data.
  • The Data Liberation Project - An initiative to identify, obtain, reformat, clean, document, publish, and disseminate government datasets of public interest.
  • Harvard Dataverse - An online data repository where you can share, preserve, cite, explore, and analyze research data. It is open to all researchers, both inside and out of the Harvard community.

GovWayback

GovWayback.com allows users to access historical versions of U.S. government websites from before January 20, 2025 with a simple URL change. Visit the website to see currently supported URLs.

How it works: Take any .gov URL and add wayback.com right after .gov, and you'll be redirected to the Wayback Machine's archived version of the page. If the URL doesn't work, it means that the page has not been archived yet.

If you want to protect your privacy when finding URLs through a search engine, try DuckDuckGo. It doesn't track when you copy a URL (Google, Bing, and other search engines do track when you copy URLs). 

Examples:

Simple domain:
www.epa.gov → www.epa.govwayback.com

Specific page:
www.whitehouse.gov/administration → www.whitehouse.govwayback.com/administration

Complex URL:
www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2 → www.congress.govwayback.com/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2