EPA Sets Year-End Date to Shut Its Online Archive
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to decommission its online web archive at the end of the year. A banner on the archive now gives the expiration date as December 31, 2026, according to Grist. The notice appeared in a little-noticed webpage update, and Grist describes it as discreet.
The shutdown would remove tens of thousands of public environmental resources, among them fact sheets, environmental reports, policy changes and regulatory actions. Researchers, legislators, policymakers and the public have relied on the archive for decades, Grist reports. It holds material from at least 20 years back, some of it from the 1990s and not available elsewhere.
"This information is irreplaceable, and if the archive is decommissioned, that information will be lost forever," said Gretchen Gehrke, co-founder of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, known as EDGI. She called the archive a tool for "democratic oversight." Gehrke has tracked changes to vulnerable federal environmental data for 10 years.
A plan that keeps coming back
This is not the first attempt. In late January 2022, the Biden administration's EPA announced it would discontinue the archive, citing the cost of upkeep. A Freedom of Information Act request let Gehrke determine that the agency spent roughly $2 million a year to maintain it.
EDGI and the American Society for Environmental History were among the groups that objected. They called the announcement "alarming" and said it would leave a "tremendous gap" in the historical record. After five months of backlash, the EPA delayed retirement by a year, to July 2023. In March 2023 it changed the banner to say the archive was simply "retiring," with no end date.
The EPA has not updated the archive in three and a half years, though the public could still use it.
Grist notes that the archive has been imperfect, with dead links and limited search. It has also let users follow past policy turning points, such as the 2003 Clear Skies Initiative and the 2015 Clean Power Plan. When the first Trump administration deleted most of the EPA's climate change web resources, the archive kept those pages available.
The banner contrasts with the public announcements of EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, who recently took down the agency's power plant pollution standards and its federal methane regulatory system.
Source: Grist