The White House’s open.whitehouse.gov which has hosted a publicly accessible database since 2013, now contains nothing.

The website served as a centralised source for researchers who could use the data to better understand the US but late on Tuesday evening Maxwell Ogden, a computer programmer working with Dat Data Project noticed the database had been cleared out.

https://twitter.com/denormalize/status/831581871230193664

When landing on the database’s homepage, users are met with the promise of new data coming soon but what happened to all the data that was there?

A quick check with Wayback Machine reveals that on 18th January there was indeed data hosted on that domain so it has clearly been removed.

Snapshot of open.whitehouse.gov before the purge. The archive as it appears at time of writing.

Ogden has downloaded all of the data that he could, which was hosted on the database, which is no mean feat considering that totals 9GB of data. He has said that he will distribute this data as soon as possible.

The programmer published the code he used to grab the files as well as the meta data from the site as it was before the wipe.

Thankfully the data is not completely lost for those that need it right now and Ogden has pointed folks in the direction of two mirrors which house the data which we’ve linked to below.

We will update this story to include Ogden’s database when said archive is uploaded to the web. The Trump administration appears to have a penchant for removing data it doesn’t agree with.

In January it was alleged that the new administration ordered the Enviromental Protection Agency to remove a page about climate change. That page is still available at time of writing.

[Via – Inverse ] [Image – CC BY 2.0 Ervins Strauhmanis