‘What Data?’ Records and Data Policy Coordination During Presidential Transitions

Abstract

The presidential transition in the United States takes place over the course of several years and involves the efforts of many different agencies and organizations. While it is standard practice for an incoming administration to change the content on government agencies’ websites, the Trump administration pushed this practice beyond convention, even to alter the official narrative on climate change. Almost immediately after the inauguration, the official White House website deleted nearly all references to the phrase ‘climate change,’ and all online mentions of climate change on federal and government websites had been excised in the following months. Even if government data cannot be deleted completely, the manner in which they are preserved and made accessible, or hidden and obscured, is vitally important to the researchers and public that rely on this information. This project argues for the coordination of controls on this information: the policies, standards, and directives that regulate both the content accessed (e.g. the datasets) and the access points themselves, including the government agencies’ websites that act as information sources and portals to the databases and repositories of publically funded research.