President Donald Trump has promised Americans “radical transparency”—but his government has taken a number of steps that observers say make it anything but the self-described “most transparent Administration in history!”
In his first term, which the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation described as “allergic to transparency,” the White House stopped releasing visitor logs, censored or rejected a record percentage of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and refused to release his tax returns. So far, the second-term Trump Administration has scrubbed federal websites, limited reporters’ access, and used disappearing-message apps for high-level communications that typically should be retained for posterity. The Associated Press reported last week that “Trump could leave less documentation behind than any previous U.S. President,” and the Freedom of the Press Foundation said the Trump Administration “is eroding the information environment in ways this country has never seen.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Most recently, this week the White House removed official transcripts of the President’s remarks, which are now only available as videos—a departure from a common practice across Democratic and Republican administrations over decades. The only transcript that is now available on the White House website is Trump’s inaugural address.
“You must be truly f-cking stupid if you think we’re not transparent,” White House communications director Steven Cheung told HuffPost when asked about the latest move.
In the void of official archives, a number of independent record-keepers have taken matters into their own hands, offering the public a cache of data and documentation to sift and search through without fear of sudden removal. Still, these mostly collect only previously-made public records, and transparency advocates remain concerned about those that the public may never see.
Here are some of the databases available.
American Presidency Project
What started out in 1999 as a project by then-graduate student Gerhard Peters and professor John Woolley at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for students of political science has since turned into a valuable comprehensive digital repository of presidential public documents dating back to George Washington.
The nonprofit, nonpartisan American Presidency Project hosts copies of Trump’s speeches and executive orders, social media posts, press pool reports, media interviews, and more—from both his terms as well as his campaigns and transition periods.
Data.gov Archive
Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab, which developed the web-archiving tool, Perma.cc, released in February a new archive of more than 300,000 data sets from data.gov, the U.S. government’s repository of open data. “We’ve built this project on our long-standing commitment to preserving government records and making public information available to everyone,” the lab said in announcing the project.
Data Rescue Project
The Data Rescue Project is a collaboration between organizations like IASSIST, RDAP, and members of the Data Curation Network. The project, which started out in February on a Google Doc, aims to “serve as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points” for public U.S. governmental data that it deems “currently at risk.”
Data it harvests, including from government agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Education, is maintained in the searchable archive DataLumos, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research’s crowd-sourced repository hosted by the University of Michigan.
Factba.se
Started in 2017 by Virginia husband and wife Bill Frischling and Jennifer Canty to empower the public to factcheck Trump’s statements for themselves, Factba.se collects videos of Trump’s speeches, as well as press gaggles and other appearances. “How could you argue something is not true if you could see not only what this person said but the entire context around it?” Frischling told BuzzFeed News.
The database was acquired by FiscalNote and is now hosted by FiscalNote’s policy news site Roll Call. It also has a collection of Trump’s tweets and social media posts, going as far back as 2009, as well as the President’s public schedule and emailed press releases from the White House.
Federal Environmental Web Tracker by EDGI
Formed in 2016 to document changes to “vulnerable” federal environmental data, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) is a research collaboration of professionals advocating for environmental awareness. Its website-monitoring team created a tracker for changes to environment-related federal pages. Since returning to office, the Trump Administration has purged information or text related to the climate crisis on many government websites.
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a nonprofit that provides users free access to its expansive digital library. Since beginning in 1996, the archive has a collection of more than 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, 15 million audio recordings, 10.6 million videos, 4.8 million images, and a million software programs. “Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge,” it says on its site.
In 2017, it launched the Trump Archive, which collects “TV news shows containing debates, speeches, interviews, rallies, and other reporting related to Donald Trump, before his first presidency and throughout subsequent years.”
But anybody can contribute. Described by the New Yorker as “a tech-support professional” in Kansas, a man identified only as Andrew—who uses the moniker Grumpy—began downloading videos from federal agencies on February 1 in response to takedowns by the Trump Administration. The videos are available on his Internet Archive account, Grumpy System.
The Internet Archive also operates the Wayback Machine, a tool that preserves timestamped snapshots of websites. Like the Internet Archive’s other databases, individuals can contribute to the Wayback Machine, too. Its director told NPR that six weeks into Trump’s second term, some 73,000 government web pages (and counting) were cataloged before being expunged, including reportedly the only copy of the House Jan. 6 Committee’s interactive timeline of the 2021 Capitol Riot.
The Wayback Machine has also hosted since 2008 the End of Term Web Archive, which “collects, preserves, and makes accessible United States Government websites at the end of presidential administrations.”
Rev
AI-powered speech-to-text company Rev hosts a free Transcript Library that includes searchable transcripts of Trump’s public appearances going back years.
Trump’s Truth
Trump’s Truth, a project by the Never-Trump-Republican founded nonprofit group Defending Democracy Together, archives all of Trump’s posts on his platform TRUTH Social. While Trump’s TRUTH Social posts are publicly available, the Trump’s Truth site warns that the President’s posts on his own platform “may be deleted at any time.” The archive checks for new posts “every few minutes” and includes video transcription and image descriptions to enable greater search ability.
“We believe this is an essential part of the historical record, and that it must be preserved for its educational, journalistic and research value,” the site says.
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