Even amid Donald Trump’s failures – the Iran war, soaring prices and a sharp rebuke in the midterm elections last week – there’s still at least one area his administration continues to carry out adeptly: its mass public information censorship campaign.
In less than two years, the Trump administration has done staggering damage to US data and information infrastructure. Hundreds of federal datasets have been terminated or altered, and thousands of government webpages that address diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), the climate crisis and other issues have been quietly revised or completely wiped.
This under-the-radar censorship isn’t random – it’s been squarely aimed at any information that contradicts the administration’s ideology.
As a new Guardian analysis shows, much of what has been targeted so far comes directly from Project 2025 , the 900-page Heritage Foundation policy blueprint for a rightwing overhaul of the federal government.
The Guardian reviewed all of Project 2025, and found nearly 100 proposals to distort government data, research and guidance. The Trump administration has already implemented most of them, a clear indication, critics say, of how necessary narrative control is for the broader conservative political project.
“This administration is using information control as a means of achieving their agenda,” said Gretchen Gehrke, co-founder of the non-profit Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, which has closely followed the suppression of scientific information under the Trump administration.
Experts who reviewed the Guardian’s findings say they are alarmed at how effectively the Trump administration has carried out Project 2025’s proposals.
“You can see so clearly the specificity with which a policy was recommended in Project 2025 and the specificity with which it was carried out,” said Amy Friedrich-Karnik, who has tracked Project 2025 as federal policy director at the Guttmacher Institute.
But Friedrich-Karnik and other experts say they aren’t surprised at how quickly the Trump administration has followed through.
“If you are an administration that is focused on taking away people’s rights and on limiting people’s access to healthcare, then it follows you don’t want scientific evidence and data to be available to people. Because if you start chipping away at people’s faith in institutions, then you can fill the void with disinformation that’s really detrimental to people’s health and wellbeing.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. The Guardian also reached out to the Heritage Foundation for comment but did not receive a response.
Another reason the Trump administration has targeted data and information is because it’s an easy lever for the executive branch to pull, said James Goodwin, policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform who has closely followed the implementation of Project 2025.
“One of the horrifying realizations of the second Trump term is just how much unfettered control presidents have over the data resources and data infrastructure that are spread throughout the federal government,” Goodwin said.
Following last week’s midterm elections, when Democrats overwhelmingly regained control of the House and Senate, experts say there’s now an opportunity to critically examine Project 2025 as a blueprint for upcoming investigative and legislative priorities: how exactly did the Trump administration take down information? What gaps in data protection were exploited?
“Project 2025 will be a useful diagnostic tool for leading congressional oversight because it allows them to reverse engineer everything that’s transpired over the past two years,” Goodwin said.
The Guardian used a natural language processing program to scrape Project 2025 for paragraphs that were likely about the deletion or alteration of government data and information. Reporters then manually reviewed more than 500 entries and also identified dozens additional relevant passages from our reporting. We determined whether the recommendations had been implemented, were in progress, or had not yet been implemented based on news reports, executive orders and regulatory and agency documents. We classified the recommendation as one of three types: recommended removal or change, recommended dismantling of an office or department that collected data, or recommended policy or regulatory change that corresponded with a content deletion. We consulted topic experts to review our findings and confirm the status of recommendations that we could not verify in our research.
The Guardian’s Deleted data series explores how critical US government information is being deleted and what the consequences will be, and will preserve or recreate lost datasets. If you know about any datasets, webpages or government materials that have been deleted or altered in the past year, or are willing to share how those changes affect you, we’d love to hear from you. Please reach out at [email protected] .
