2 weeks Ago By Tiffany Hsu
Soon after the new administration arrived, things began to go missing from the . They weren’t just the partisan policy platforms that typically disappear during a presidential transition. Informational pages about the Constitution and past presidents, up in various forms since President George W.
Bush was in office, all vanished. had also been taken down or modified, including content about vaccines, hate crimes, low-income children, opioid addiction and veterans, before temporarily blocked part of the sweeping erasure. A tracking criminal charges and convictions linked to the Jan.
6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was removed. are , some of the were dismissed, and many like “Black,” “women” and “discrimination” have evaporated. President Trump’s team is selectively stripping away the public record, reconstructing in the negative space of purged history, archivists and historians said.
As data and resources are deleted or altered, something foundational is also at risk: Americans’ ability to access and evaluate their past, and with it, their already shaky trust in facts. “This is not a cost-cutting mechanism,” said Kenny Evans, who studies science and technology policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and runs the White House Scientists Archive at the school. “This slide toward secrecy and lack of transparency is an erosion of democratic norms.
” The casualties are not just digital. The head of the National Archives, which has been described as “ ,” was in February. A key source of federal funding for public records depositories nationwide, the , was named in an calling for its “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law” (its acting director said he planned to “ ”).
As the U.S. Agency for International Development was , a senior official told employees to classified documents and personnel files.
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