The EPA is quietly killing its web archive

This story was originally published  and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.​ In a little-noticed webpage update, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced a plan to decommission its online web archive at the end of the year, a move that would wipe tens of thousands of publicly available environmental resources from the web. It houses everything from fact sheets and environmental reports to agency policy changes and regulatory actions, making it a tool for “democratic oversight,” according to Gehrke, who for 10 years has been tracking changes to vulnerable federal environmental data. Screenshot of the EPA’s online archive webpage Rachel Santarsiero This isn’t the first time the environmental agency has tried to shutter the online web archive. In late January 2022, the Biden administration’s EPA announced plans to discontinue the online repository, citing burdensome financial upkeep; through a Freedom of Information Act request, Gehrke was able to determine that the agency spent roughly $2 million a year to maintain it. A coalition of environmentalists, historians, and librarians swiftly condemned the decision, with groups like EDGI and American Society for Environmental History calling the announcement “alarming” and cause for a “tremendous gap” in the historical record.  Grist thanks its sponsors. To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. Here's How After five months of public backlash, the EPA acquiesced, in part ’s retirement 2023. I reported on it at the time for New Security Beat:  “News of this welcome reprieve for the EPA digital archive raises a significant question: Why continue with plans to shut it down at all? Postponement does not resolve the eventual damage to government transparency and historical record keeping that the archive’s demise will create. And the concern of organizations opposed to closure will not be satisfied .”​ In March 2023, the agency walked back its decision further still “retiring” — end date not included. Since then, over the last three and a half years, the online resource has soldiered on quietly, no longer being updated but still accessible to the public until a few weeks ago, when the EPA updated the archive’s expiration date to December 31, 2026.  While the usability of the archive has historically been far from perfect — researchers often encountered dead links and frustratingly limited search capabilities — the archive has held a trove of tens of thousands of EPA documents dating back to the 1990s simply not available elsewhere.