Responding to changes in United States government publications

There have been significant changes to the way the United States government is publishing information and which is a marked departure from past practice. The sources and resources you may have bookmarked or come to rely on may be missing, incomplete or, potentially, altered. Some topics and vocabulary have been scrubbed. Terms such as diversity, equity, inclusion, gender identity or transgender have been removed along with any publications or data referencing these terms. 

There are ongoing efforts by librarians, archivists, researchers and others in the United States and internationally to capture data before it's removed. If you're interested in learning more about these efforts, please see the Data Rescue Project.

The following is a list of US-specific resources the SFU Library has either licensed for your use or which have been made available by various organizations such as the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, IPUMS or others.

Available to SFU researchers

Statistical Abstract of the United States: Available in print (HA 202 A2) or online, the Statistical Abstract is a comprehensive summary of statistics on the social, political, and economic organization of the United States. Online it is 1400+ individually indexed tables with attached spreadsheets. 

U.S. Declassified Documents Online: This online resource contains cabinet meeting minutes, CIA intelligence studies and reports, FBI surveillance and intelligence correspondence and memoranda, Joint Chiefs papers,l National Security Council policy statements, Presidential conferences, State Department political analyses, White House Confidential File materials, and more on the U.S. government and world events in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research: ICPSR is an international consortium of more than 810 academic institutions and research organizations. ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community. ICPSR maintains a data archive of more than 350,000 files of research in the social and behavioral sciences. It hosts 23 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields. 

Statista: While not U.S.- specific, Statista is a simple to use statistics portal that integrates statistics from thousands of sources, on topics related to business, media, public policy, health and others. Statistics can be exported in PPT, XLS, PDF, and PNG formats.

Open data

DataLumos: An ICPSR archive for valuable government data resources DataLumos accepts deposits of public data resources from the community and recommendations of public data resources that ICPSR itself might add to DataLumos.

IPUMS: Provides census and survey data from around the world integrated across time and space. IPUMS integration and documentation makes it easy to study change, conduct comparative research, merge information across data types, and analyze individuals within family and community contexts. Data and services available free of charge.

Census Reporter: Census Reporter is an independent project to make it easier for journalists to write stories using information from the U.S. Census bureau.

Public Environmental Data Partners: A volunteer coalition of several environmental, justice, and policy organizations, researchers across several universities, archivists, and students have compiled a large list of federal databases and tools, and prioritized them based on their relative impact, our confidence that we could archive them, and the relative effort it would take to obtain and archive them. Look here for a collection of EPA data as well as the CDC's Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool.

Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool: Provides an interactive map and underlying datasets that are indicators of burdens in eight categories including climate change, energy, health, housing, legacy pollution, transportation, water and more. 

Harvard Environment and Law Data: The purpose of this collection, put together by members of the Salata Strengthening Communities research cluster, is to store critical climate and law datasets accessible at various locations in one place. The datasets are downloaded and uploaded with minimal modification. The collection should be helpful to any researcher working on policy, compliance, and community issues related to the environment.

publicdata archives of public data: Collection of archived datasets from US government sources including NASA, CDC, NOAA and others.

CDC datasets uploaded before January 28th, 2025: An archive of all CDC datasets uploaded to https://data.cdc.gov/browse before January 28th, 2025. Excludes corrupt datasets and data not publicly accessible. Provenance is unclear but suspected contribution by r/DataHoarder.

Other

Democracy's Library: Democracy's Library brings together more than 700 collections from over 50 government organizations, archived by the Internet Archive since 2006. With more than half a million documents (and counting) from local, regional, and national governments. To identify US publications, use the filter by collection or by creator option on the left side menu.

Data Rescue Project: The Data Rescue Project is a coordinated effort among a group of data organizations, including the International Association for Social Science Information Service Technology (IASSIST), Research Data Access and Preservation (RDAP), and members of the Data Curation Network. Our goal is to serve as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points for public US governmental data that are currently at risk. We want to know what is happening in the community so that we can coordinate focus. Efforts include: data gathering, data curation and cleaning, data cataloging, and providing sustained access and distribution of data assets.

End of Term Archive: The End of Term Web Archive captures and saves U.S. Government websites at the end of presidential administrations. The EOT has thus far preserved websites from administration changes in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. They are currently accepting URL nominations for the End of Term 2024 Web Archive.

Find Lost Data: Powered by Boston University's School of Public Health, Find Lost Data facilitates searching across a variety of websites including many listed in this guide. 

Government Information: Eliminated, Suspended: Curated by Sacramento State Library, this guide tracks the current US government administration's efforts to suppress and eliminate information. 

The Journalist's Resource: A compilation of additional non-government data alternatives and archives primarily focusing on health data.

Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership: The manifesto drafted by the Heritage Foundation to affect government change and adopted by President Trump.

Project 2025 Executive Action Tracker: Produced by the Center for Progressive Reform and Governing for Impact, the tracker monitors the Trump administration’s implementation of Project 2025 across 20 federal agencies.

Project 2025 Tracker: Maintained by u/RusticGorilla, curator of Keep_Track, a subreddit "dedicated to keeping track of the current U.S. administration and lawmakers in Congress. By working together, we hope to curate and summarize the actions taken by officials in order to hold those in power accountable." I include this resource here because much of the effort going toward preserving US government information is being undertaken by people who can't be identified for their own safety.