EDGI Releases Dataset of Federal Environmental Website Changes Under Trump

From an Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) Announcement:

Today, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) publishes searchable records of approximately 1,500 changes to federal agency environmental webpages under the Trump administration. For four years, EDGI’s website monitoring team has identified and catalogued significant changes to federal websites using their open source monitoring software. EDGI’s Federal Environmental Web Tracker makes records of significant changes publicly available.

The information that’s available on federal websites can have important policy implications. As EDGI has often reported over the past four years, changes to the information that’s available on federal websites are almost always precursors or responses to policy changes. Federal websites provide information that the public is likely to access before commenting on a proposed rule to learn about current regulatory efforts, the science underlying a new policy decision, or likely impacts of a proposed rule. The information found (or not found) on a federal website can impact public participation in regulatory processes.

In the weeks after Trump’s election in November 2016, newly-formed EDGI compiled a list of 25,000 federal web pages related to climate, energy, and the environment, including pages for 20 federal agencies such as EPA, NOAA, and NASA. First using proprietary software and then building and using novel open source software, EDGI has compared versions of these web pages weekly since January 2017. This new dataset represents the documented changes that EDGI’s website monitoring team flagged as significant in some way over the past four years.

EDGI’s Federal Environmental Web Tracker gives journalists, academic researchers, and the public data that can be used to provide insight, documentation, and analysis of the information policies and priorities of the Trump administration.

The Federal Environmental Web Tracker will be updated quarterly as EDGI continues to monitor federal environmental websites.

URL to the Federal Environmental Web Tracker: https://envirodatagov.org/enviro-fed-web-tracker/ 

URL to the Tracker’s explanatory page: https://envirodatagov.org/federal-environmental-web-tracker-about-page/

Filed under: Data Files, News