No one is expecting that President-elect Donald Trump’s administration will champion the cause of transparency, but as the clock to Jan. 20, 2017, ticks down, fears have risen that data normally available to the public on government websites will disappear.
As my colleague Mark Sumner wrote on Tuesday, the climate community is already rushing to protect data it fears could be suppressed, altered or destroyed. Those efforts have been joined by general proponents of government transparency.
Fueled in part by distress over the outcome of last month's election, small bands of activists with computer skills have sponsored hackathons to download government data or flag it for collection by others. Even some outside the U.S. are getting in on the act. On Saturday, climate researchers at the University of Toronto are promoting what they've dubbed a daylong "guerilla archiving" to protect climate data from any tampering by Trump appointees.
Some individual researchers said in interviews that they're also taking it on themselves to hoard data. They believe that many agencies posted their data online under pressure from President Barack Obama and will retreat under Trump.
The effort has been helped by the Obama administration, which made transparency of government documents the norm.
Some of Obama's policies have also been a boon to the archiving project, including a 2013 executive order to make government data more readily accessible and a drive to collect many federal government data sets on a single site: data.gov.
"This is a huge undertaking," said Hudson Hollister of the Data Coalition, an industry group that lobbies for government data to be posted online in standardized, accessible formats. "The easy stuff has been transformed. ...The hard stuff requires extra policymaking."
Hollister said it's unclear whether Trump will maintain Obama's order. "It was an executive order and we know Trump has said he's going to review all executive orders and cancel some out. Honestly, I don't know where he'll come down on this one," Hollister said.