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Michael Dunne: I'm Michael Dunne. The Trump administration has removed a lot of things from the federal government since the inauguration. It has removed thousands of federal workers, removed the name Mexico from the Gulf of Mexico, and removed scores of historical facts from places like national parks. But perhaps the most impactful deletion the administration has made is the terabytes of critical data removed from public access under the guise of not meeting the administration's priorities. In response to this unprecedented scrubbing of public data, a plucky band of librarians and academics has stepped into the breach to save this critical information. Today on the show, you'll hear from the Data Rescue Project, a grassroots group of volunteers who have scoured the internet and other sources to save vital data that was in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. Lynda Kellam is the director of the Data Rescue Project. Lynda, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us.
Lynda Kellam: Thank you for having me.
Dunne: Let's just start with this. What is the Data Rescue Project?
Kellam: So, we are a volunteer network that started in February 2025 in response to some of the attacks against federal public data, and federal public data that we considered at risk. Most of us are librarians, or we've been working as data librarians at universities, and our group has expanded well beyond that over the past 19, going on 20, months. But we are originally librarians who were very concerned about the loss of public data and wanted to make sure we could back it up and make it available to the public. And we've been working to do that for a while now.
Dunne: What was the impetus to start this organization? Was there a singular event, or was it just a lot of things you were seeing? How did you form? It sounds like a lot of librarians and academics getting together to form this group. How did that happen?
Kellam: Yeah. So, some of us had actually been involved in the 2017 efforts to protect climate and environmental data, or had connections to that 2017 effort, and we knew what had happened then and were concerned about what might happen in 2025. At the time, though, it wasn't clear. In 2017, not a lot of data was brought down. It was kind of anticipatory work at that time, and we just didn't see the takedowns that we've seen this year. The big galvanizing event was the removal of a lot of data on the CDC's website, especially the BRFSS, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which is a major resource for researchers as well as many other people. Our community started receiving emails from our patrons, our researchers and our students, asking what they were going to do for alternative sources for this data, and that was the real initial galvanizing event. The second was USAID's website going down and the loss of a massive amount of data that the agency had collected. We knew then that we couldn't wait around, that we couldn't wait to see what happened next, that we needed to take some action. Part of that was initially a Google Doc. We wanted to make sure people were aware of things that already existed, so we started gathering information from other groups doing data rescues and preexisting organizations like the End of Term Web Archive, which works with the Internet Archive, to make sure people were aware of these efforts. The response we saw to that Google Doc made us realize we needed to do something more, and that created this organization. A lot of the original members came from different data libraries and professional organizations. I always talk about three: IASSIST, RDAP and Data Curation Network, but there were others as well, so we knew each other professionally, and we wanted to come together and work on trying to back up what we could before it went down. Our first effort was on Department of Education data because we knew that could be a possible target.
Dunne: I'm going to ask two really simple questions, but I think they're probably instructive for our listeners. Why, in your view, was the federal government removing all this data?
Kellam: Yeah, and the initial efforts, I mean, there are different reasons, and it's very complex in terms of the reasoning. It's not one thing. When it comes to the CDC data, part of that is the desire to pull down data that didn't match the gender ideology of the current administration, so there's been some removal of variables within those data sets to match that ideology. With USAID, it was the desire to get rid of the agency that brought down that website. There are different things happening elsewhere: loss of contracts. We've seen a lot of data staff who worked on data being cut in different ways, so there's a lot of data that's still accessible but not maintained by as many staff as it used to be, and that's concerning to us because it puts the data at risk without someone actively maintaining it. So it's a complicated situation. It's not just one thing, but there have definitely been direct takedowns, agency dismantling, reductions in force, contract cuts and DOGE efforts. It's a complicated web of things that have impacted the data available on the web.
Dunne: Okay, here's kind of a silly question, or maybe a dumb question number two: How do you preserve data? Where do you put it?
Kellam: Well, this is a great question, actually. It's not silly at all, because one of the challenges in 2017 was where to put the data. In 2017, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, the largest data archive in the country, based at the University of Michigan, created a data repository for government data, and really for this kind of rescue data. They saw a need for a place to put it, and they created something called Data Lumos. It's been around since 2017. I knew about it because I've been a data librarian for almost 20 years, and I was aware of its existence. I got in touch with the director and asked if she would mind if we put the data into that repository, because the thing with public data is it's public, for the public. It's meant to be available and accessible. If we were just taking that data and storing it on our own servers or personal storage devices, it would be of use to no one. So for us, backing up the data meant it also had to be made available as quickly as possible. In our workflow for backing up data, since all of this data is available to the public, people can download any of it. It's accessible, and we created workflows for downloading it, creating packages and uploading it into Data Lumos. You can go to that site now and see all the data we've rescued. To give you a sense of scale, from 2017, when it was created, until January 2025, there were only 100 data sets in Data Lumos. There are now over 4,000. We've done a lot of work. It's not just us; other groups have used this repository too, but for us, that was the workflow. Other groups have different workflows, but that's the one we decided on to truly make that data accessible to people again.
Dunne: Okay, when I think of mavericks and revolutionaries, librarians aren't usually the first thing that comes to mind. But in a way, you kind of are. Talk about that, about why you're doing this, but maybe go even deeper into how a librarian like yourself looks at information, especially publicly available information.
Kellam: Yeah, I think for a democracy, an informed electorate is fundamental, and a fundamental part of that is being able to access information. What we do as librarians is provide access to information, and that includes all kinds and forms of information. People traditionally think of librarians as stewards of books, but we're stewards of information. So for me, it's a very important role we play in trying to ensure this data continues to be made public. I have a real connection to this because I used to work at a state university that was under resourced, and this kind of federally available public data from the government was the only real resource we could use. We had some other resources we could pay for, but when you pay for data that's already publicly available, it's a waste of resources. So from my perspective, librarians play a role in making sure our patrons have access to information, no matter who they are and no matter how much money they have. The Data Rescue Project, for me, plays an important role in ensuring equitable access to information across the country.
Dunne: Okay, obviously the administration took down, removed and discarded this data for reasons of their choosing. Are you concerned they might try, through legal action or something else, to get to the data you're preserving?
Kellam: The data we preserve is available in the public domain, so all of the data we have, anybody can access. All of the data we're rescuing can be downloaded, used and remixed in any way you want. That's the nature of public data. There are limited circumstances where that's not true, but the data we rescued and backed up is publicly available and in the public domain. So no. If they were to try, there's no reason they should be able to, and we can make the case that they can't.
Dunne: If things change, is the hope that the data will go back to the same places it used to be before it was taken down by the federal government?
Kellam: I think a lot of the data is still, except for maybe USAID's, available somewhere. It's just not publicly accessible in some cases. What I'm concerned about at this particular moment is making sure people have access to things now. That's really what we're trying to do: not just preserve it for the long term, but preserve it for people to be able to access at this point. And keep in mind, we're using the word “data” broadly in our group. We're not just backing up raw data sets. In a lot of cases, we're backing up visualizations or more accessible aggregate statistics that come from data sets, and those are just as important to me, because they're the things that can be used in a classroom, or in a class assignment, or by an average person wanting to ask a question. In some ways, they're actually more important to back up right now for the public to access than the major data sets, which we know are somewhere and will probably be fine. The other concern we have, beyond just backing up data, is the loss of ongoing data collection. There have been a lot of surveys that have either been changed, altered or stopped altogether, and that disruption means we're going to have a hole in our understanding of certain sectors of our country because we're not continuing those data collections.
Dunne: So talk about some of the projects you've been working on. And I guess the question within that question is: Did you say, ‘OK, you're the expert on agricultural data sets, go save that. You're the expert on USAID, go save that’? Is that kind of how it worked?
Kellam: Yeah, there was a lot of triaging involved. My background is in social sciences, so I tend to know the demographic data better than others. We certainly had to draw on the science community for a lot of the environmental science data, and there's a different group called Public Environmental Data Partners that works primarily in environmental justice and climate data, so we worked in partnership with them to use that expertise. One example is a project called HIFLD Next. It's not our project; it's PEDP's project. But we backed up the data from a tool called HIFLD that was removed from public access, and that effort was led by a GIS librarian at Brown. He organized his students and a whole group of volunteers to go through and back up the data in a systematic process to make it available, and then PEDP came along and used that data to recreate the tool that had been taken away. So yes, it's very much a community effort. The steering committee of the Data Rescue Project tries to give some direction, but we really depend on volunteers taking on that effort depending on their areas of expertise and what they care about most.
Dunne: Okay, and I imagine some of those volunteers are students at some of the universities you all work at.
Kellam: Yeah, there have definitely been students, a lot of librarians, professors, and technologists from different sectors, not just universities. Definitely students, though.
Dunne: I know it's all important, but if there's one data set you're especially glad you were able to preserve, something that helps you sleep better at night knowing your organization saved it, what would that be?
Kellam: Definitely HIFLD is the one I'm most proud of, just because it took so many people to work on it. There are others where people have told me they slept easier at night knowing the data was backed up somewhere, even if it hadn't been completely removed from the web, because they knew there was a backup they could look at. The heartbreak was definitely USAID. That was really hard for us, to lose so much access there. But we did get the data we could from the Demographic and Health Surveys API, so we were able to gather some of it in anticipation of what might happen. I'm really proud of that too. The one I've always been sad about, though, is the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, which is a restricted-access data source. That system is no longer available to researchers the way it used to be, and there's no way for us to get that data because it's not public. It's restricted to protect individual identities, and there's nothing we can do about that. That's the one I regret most, but HIFLD is the one I'm most proud of.
Dunne: Two last questions. First: This was obviously a shock to the system with what the administration has been doing, but this administration will end. I'm wondering, because your work has been so impactful, do you think an organization like yours should continue regardless? Because who knows what the future brings, and having this kind of failsafe, for lack of a better phrase, seems important to preserve.
Kellam: Yes, I agree. I think there's definitely a place for the kind of work we do. We're a volunteer organization, though, so transitioning to a permanent organization would require money and commitment from people that we just don't have right now, for the long term. What we're trying to do right now is create a toolkit that documents all the work we've been doing, one we can pass on to someone to steward for the long term. That's the best we can do at the moment. If somebody wanted to take this on as a passion project and spur it forward, that would be great, because it's not just about the United States and what's happening here. There are concerns this same thing could happen in Germany and other countries, so having a plan available for people in any situation where they think data is under threat, whether for political or technological reasons, can hopefully serve as a foundation.
Dunne: My last question, Lynda: Can an average citizen participate? Can they help?
Kellam: Yeah, sure. We're relaunching our volunteer sign-up in September. On our website, there's information about office hours we're holding where people can learn more about what we're doing and get reactivated with the Data Rescue Project. We took a bit of a summer break, so we're relaunching that. Beyond working directly with us, though, what I'd really love is for people to think about public data as a public good and to advocate for it. We need this data. It's important for our country to have access to it, for our people to have access to it. So write to your representatives and talk to them about this topic. There's also another group called Data Index that has a lot of information about public comments on changes to data sets. Getting connected to that work would be a great way to get involved. It's not just about data rescue; it's also about the future and what we do going forward. There are lots of ways to get involved.
Dunne: All right, and we'll link to your website. She is Lynda Kellam, director of the Data Rescue Project. Lynda, thank you so much for talking with us.
Kellam: Thank you for having me.
Dunne: That's the show for today. All episodes of Oregon on the Record are available as a podcast at klcc.org. Tomorrow on the show, you'll hear about changes that could happen to Oregon's historic repackaging law that might impact recycling on a statewide level. I'm Michael Dunne, host of Oregon on the Record. Thanks for listening.
