As federal datasets disappear, websites go dark, and public records systems come under increasing strain, archivists, researchers, journalists, and librarians are scrambling to preserve endangered knowledge. Rachel Santarsiero, director of the Climate Change Transparency Project at the National Security Archive, has been documenting those losses through an evolving chronology of disappearing public data and archival resources under the Trump administration. In this conversation with Newsjunkie’s Gordon Whiting (GW) and Morgan Kriesel (MK), Santarsiero discusses climate transparency, public records, the fragility of institutional memory, and why preserving public knowledge requires broad community involvement—not just government agencies or elite institutions.

“I wanted to create an entry point for… anyone concerned with their Public Right to Know.”

MK: Rachel Santarsiero, you are the director of the Climate Change Transparency Project at the National Security Archive?

Yep.

MK: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work?

I am an engineer by training. I got my undergraduate in civil engineering, and worked as an engineer for a couple years. Then I wanted to pivot more into policy work and writing. I had always studied international affairs and writing, also as an undergrad, but it was something I wanted to move more fully into. So I went to grad school for international development work, and then got involved with the National Security Archive through a fellowship in 2022. And then after I finished grad school in 2023, I started working with the National Security Archive full time when I was a fellow there.

I first started off on working on our Iraq War Documentation Project, and then also split my time with climate work. Previously, the Climate Change Transparency Project was actually called Environmental Diplomacy Project, and my predecessor, Dr. Bob Wampler, had been looking at the historical record of US involvement in international environmental negotiations—so COP meetings, involvement in the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change)—and then when I came on the project, we sort of shifted it to have a more inclusive, holistic look at climate change transparency. So we wanted to include things like how intelligence and defense agencies were responding to climate change (what we could get shaken loose there), oil and gas industry influence in government policy and conversations. We also wanted to look at humanitarian response to international and domestic disasters. We really wanted to open up the project beyond just negotiations. So that's a little bit background about the project.

But since I've been with the archive full time for the last two and a half years, essentially, my day-to-day is sending Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, doing a ton of archival research at the National Archives in DC and presidential libraries around the country—so most recently, I've been to the Clinton Library to do some research on Kyoto Protocol era of records—and I do a lot of open-source research, and interviews with either current government officials, former government officials, or just scholars on climate change policy.

But then, with this disappearing data work that I've been doing over the last year—that is definitely something new that I didn't start off doing. When the new Trump administration came into office, and there was reporting going on about datasets that were missing and websites that were going dark, I just thought it was really important to start tracking climate-related resources. So that's how I started off. It was about February 2025, where we published our first briefing book on disappearing climate resources, climate data. And then I published a follow up to that in September of 2025.

So what I wanted to show with these first two pieces was—where are the main, most important climate resources disappearing from? What am I interacting with on my day-to-day basis? Are they saved elsewhere? Are there things that maybe haven't been reported on yet? And also, what do these [data preservation] coalitions look like? What are the efforts going on? Where are they targeting? So that was sort of how this disappearing data initiative started.

Those definitely got some attention, which was great because it helped connected us to other folks in this data preservation space. So, since then, I got connected with folks at EDGI (which is the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative) and the Data Rescue Project. They're excellent. They're the organizations that are really doing the like, deep, meticulous scraping, and preservation, and tracking of data. We're not really doing that so much. There are some things that we've scraped from websites, just things that we stumbled upon, that we found interesting and thought would be important. But it's way less intensive than these organizations.

And then over the summer of 2025—late summer, early fall—[Tom S. Blanton, NSArchive’s director] had approached me about a conversation he had with SHAFR (which is the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations). They were working on a new issue [of their journal, Passport], covering the first year of the Trump administration. They approached me about potentially doing a chronology or timeline of some kind, documenting the major blows to data losses, archival collections. And I think they approached me because they were really interested in what was happening with disappearing archival collections, disappearing information in Smithsonians, what was happening with different data lawsuits going on. So this work that I've been doing went beyond just a climate focus from there, because then I started looking at the wider scope—the most interesting disappearing datasets and resources, or threats to archival collections, stuff like that. That's how this timeline came together.

So this [Disappearing Data Chronology] is going to publish in their April 2026 issue. And then we also wanted to update it on our website and keep a living, breathing, growing timeline. The SHAFR one only tracks January [2025] to January [2026], but we're going to continue to update it as we see other other losses, or in some cases, restorations. And there are [disappearances] off the top of my head that I have been meaning to update it with anyways, like the CIA World Fact Book.

MK: Yeah your Data Chronology has been a really great resource for me. I've been poring over it for the past couple days.

So you had a really good idea of the climate data, but then how did you expand out into the rest of disappearing data?

I definitely had a good basis for the climate data, but I think what I first really wanted to wrap my head around was the status of these lawsuits. Because I knew there were a lot of challenges to climate data already happening. I knew there were also challenges to health data. I feel like I was constantly seeing competing information, but I could never find one thing to sort of keep all these lawsuits straight.

I started off just looking at the AP’s lawsuit tracker for the whole Trump administration, particularly focused on data-related lawsuits that were happening. So that was a super helpful resource for me. I was using CourtListener a lot for tracking the lawsuits and, specifically, seeing what stages some were in, because some of the lawsuits haven't been resolved. Then also, Data Rescue Project (DRP) was super, super helpful in my efforts. They had been tracking beyond just climate related work. Like the End of Term archive, they [DRP] take a more holistic approach to the types of materials they're crawling and preserving. Freedom of the Press Foundation has a Classified Catalog, a running Excel sheet of threats to transparency. So they're focused a lot on like, FOIA and public records requests. That was super helpful for me as well. And then [I was] just constantly monitoring the news for things I had seen in the past, particularly with the Wilson Center, and with the US Institute of Peace. I was also really curious to keep track of when DOGE intervening in different spaces.

MK: I've been collecting trackers for this as well. Do you know of America's Essential Data from the Federation of American Scientists?

Oh, that's a good one. I have definitely heard of them, but I actually don't think I [referenced] it in my work. It definitely is familiar. Yeah, I feel like this would also be a really excellent resource.

MK: They're one of my go-tos because it's just so easy to check and know at a glance what data has been removed.

Exactly, yeah.

I will say, our website is a little outdated in some ways. But I really wanted to create a visual timeline, to make it accessible. My main goal was making it accessible for people, because it's such an overwhelming topic. It's something I've been really overwhelmed with over the last year.

I wanted to create an entry point for someone who is maybe not as familiar—so they can see, from a high level, what the status has been like for the last year—but also a helpful tool for researchers, litigators, and anyone concerned with their Public Right to Know.

MK: Totally, yeah. Another source that I've been using a lot is the American Statistical Association’s timeline of changes to statistical agencies. It’s really good, and they have a tracker specifically for education data now, which has been hit pretty hard. Do you use that too?

Yeah, I definitely came across the American Statistical Association.

I would say, as much as I wanted this to be a holistic, cross-discipline [resource]. I definitely think there are gaps, and I am open to feedback or crowdsourcing for other ideas that we may have missed. This is by no means intended to be like an exhaustive chronology. So I absolutely think there are gaps, specifically to that point of like, the education sector.

Gordon Whiting: Nobody can [make an exhaustive resource], and so we started to use the term “representative sample.” So you get a pretty good idea of it, but it's not 100%.

Exactly, “representative sample” is a great way of putting it.

“…no one organization can do this. It's really up to everyone to pitch in...”

MK: It's so hard trying to find one source for all of this.

And that's part of the issue. And why I wanted to start it in the first place.

I keep reiterating that no one person or organization can do all of this. Even organizations like EDGI, like End of Term archive, like Data Rescue Project—these organizations are the experts in scraping and preservation, and even they can't do it all. No one has any idea how many URLs have disappeared, how many pages have been shut down or changed locations. And I think that’s something that can be really overwhelming and scary. But on the other hand, I've tried to [frame that as] empowering others to be their own data experts.

I helped out with a public comment period with the Climate Reality Group, the New York State chapter. We were meeting with members of the public who wanted to get more involved with public comments, and we talked a lot about disappearing data. What we came away with is that everyone is the expert in what data they use, and with what might be happening in their own backyard. Even if you're not a data expert, or a computer scientist, or an expert in coding or software, everybody is the expert in the data they are engaging with on a daily basis. So I think that's why it's such a great opportunity to have this communal-wide push. That's why it's so important to stress that no one organization can do this. It's really up to everyone to pitch in if they're able to.

MK: That’s been our main philosophy with Prairie Fire. People know what’s happening in their own sectors, but we all have to come together in order to protect public knowledge—to make sure we all have what we need.

Exactly.

The other big piece is that everybody’s speculating about how much of this is permanent and what the ripple effects will be, five or ten years from now. What’s permanently lost? What’s been saved? What goes back online under another administration?

Part of why I wanted to publish this was to help put the pieces back together down the line and have a record of what’s been lost and restored.

Again, our focus is obviously FOIA and transparency, but also archival and institutional knowledge. If this can help in some small way, I think that’s a win.

MK: You talked about data that you guys have been scraping. What can you tell me about that?

It’s been here and there. I believe there were January 6 testimonies that we did a ton of scraping on. I wasn’t involved in that effort specifically, but there were things disappearing from the DOJ's library that got removed.

I also noticed one day that on ODNI’s website—the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—they only had reports available from 2020 onward, whereas previously they had reports from the 1990s and early 2000s. The reports were still accessible through the Wayback Machine, but they were no longer publicly available on the live site. So I did a quick scrape of those reports.

The Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine are such a godsend to this work. It’s such a miracle that they exist. But it also underscores the need for multiple groups and multiple backups. If the Internet Archive goes down or faces lawsuits, you can’t have everything in one place.

MK: It highlights the danger of relying on one institution.

Exactly. I do volunteer work with EDGI helping with page monitoring and scraping. They are really leading the charge in environmental justice, climate, and health-related preservation efforts.

It’s harder from the outside to know exactly what stage they’re at in the scraping process, but they’re doing incredible work.

GW: I would like to insert something here. We’ve been building a Guide to Public Archives at Newsjunkie. We thought there would maybe be 500 or 1,000 important archives worldwide, but there are thousands and thousands. But what we found is that some datasets now originate at the archive itself.

That’s fascinating. Do you have an example?

GW: There’s a legal archive project in India called Servants of Knowledge. The laws of India never existed in digital form before they started publishing them.

They're now having regional lawyers, essentially law groups, posting their work initially, primarily, to the Servants of Knowledge website. Instead of it being a digitization of an existing record, it appears there first and lives there. But we're trying to figure out how to make that searchable [on Newsjunkie], so you can search for the primary digital archives where the datasets emerged.

Oh, I'm so fascinated by that. I think that will be an incredible resource for people

MK: And that energy of the emerging independent movement that’s stepping up as primary sources, because traditional institutions are becoming less trustworthy—that’s something we’re interested in for Prairie Fire.

I think that’s really important.

And I don’t want to make it sound like everyone needs to become a web scraper, but I do think it’s important for people to think about the resources they interact with every day and understand how much they already rely on public data.

I wrote an article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists about disappearing EPA pages, and talked a lot with editors about why the public should care. Scientists and historians obviously care about these resources, but why should the average person care? It's a valid question, especially when there are other issues at top of mind—you know, ICE coming into communities, people feeling unsafe—I totally get that data is not top of mind to everyone.

But we all interact with this data every day. You’re looking it at for: What is the weather going to look like next week? Am I in a flood zone? Where do you want to live? Where do you want your house to be? It's all of these things, and I think it's important to educate people on how they engage with it.

“We can be that bridge without having that ivory tower…”

MK: A lot of people see data and academia as elite or disconnected. How do you break down those barriers?

I went to Sunshine Fest a few weeks ago, which is a big open-government transparency conference.

One idea I’d love to see (though I don't know how realistic it is): It would be amazing if every high school senior filed a public records request with their town or municipality before they graduated—just to engage with the process and understand that these records are available to them. FOIA isn’t just for journalists, everybody can file a request. And that’s how you find out about issues happening in your own community.

That's just like, a pie in the sky example, but like things like that—to have community members feel empowered, feel like they have access—it’s a daunting [task].

MK: I like that a lot. My fanciful idea is to bring knowledge [production] into communities more, instead of these big institutions that are pretty much all centralized in DC—having data collection be a part of local governments, so it's more available and relevant to the people in that community.

Absolutely. Something that comes to mind is some volunteer work I did with EDGI.

In 2024, we were doing a community-led FOIA project with indigenous groups in Alaska who were living on a former military industrial site. They were trying to request records at the state level, for environmental impact assessments. So we [helped run] a couple community-led workshops of filing FOIA requests at the state level.

I think that was just an incredible example of like—people are intimately familiar with what's happening in their own backyards. And we can help provide tools to help answer their questions, or for anyone interested in exercising their right to know. We can be that bridge without having that ivory tower, like you said, where things are just concentrated in DC.

MK: Like, “This is how this data tool applies to your life, and then to your community.”

Exactly.

GW: One thing that hits us at least a couple times a week is how the world of research, data science, pure science, applied science, social sciences, census data—it's so much bigger than we thought we knew.

Your average person, in high school or at the supermarket, they're going to see it like, “Well, there was probably a lot of bloat.” It's easy to spin it that way, if you really don't have a visceral grasp of the benefit this apparatus gives you.

Sure, there's bloat. I can point anywhere and there will be something excessive. However, what's the net benefit? We constantly get demands (spawned by political voices) to simplify things that cannot be reduced down that way.

Yeah. And that goes to the earlier point of being a good community member. I think we would feel a lot better if we knew how we were engaging with these things more, or empathized with how other groups engage with different data and resources. Like native groups, groups of color, marginalized groups, stuff like that. I think we would have a better appreciation for this [with more] communal involvement.

MK: The administration has weaponized anger, hatred, and disgust as a way to justify all of this. And maybe we need to turn to the opposite things, like empathy and community building, in order to unite a resistance. I think community involvement is the solution to a lot of problems that we have.

I couldn't agree more.

MK: I think academics and scientists might have a resistance to including more emotional elements. But that is a big part of involving the public—the emotional or context and really personalized appeals.

Right. Because it's more qualitative. It's even beyond that: It's less tangible. But I think it's no less important.

I did a mixed methods thesis, so I'm all for qualitative work.

GW: Are you going to hold any conferences on this? Or are there some thought leaders that are galvanizing on this topic, to surface all the issues and examine them?

I don’t know that the National Security Archive has plans for conferences or forums specifically around this, but I think it’s an excellent idea.

We're a non partisan organization. Our only political policy leaning is promoting government transparency and combating government secrecy. In the past, we haven't really had these online, active forums to engage with folks. It's really been like, publishing historical briefing books and stuff like that. But that is something I want to see us do more in the future, move a little bit beyond what we're doing and engage more with transparency policy.

One person I’d definitely recommend reaching out to is Lauren Harper at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. She’s doing a lot around FOIA and access to information, across all disciplines. She's very active in doing online YouTube forums and stuff like that with Freedom of the Press Foundation, and she is one of our alums. She was at the National Security Archive for like, 13 years.

I think that's great, because I think [this conversation] is still happening in these silos of specific disciplines, specific circles. So that is a gap we're seeing right now, or at least that I'm not explicitly aware [is being filled], and that's probably a good next step for organizations like us, and for other other organizations. Obviously it's great to publish these resources, but I think it's most important to create spaces where people can ask questions, and you can further this conversation.

There's good and bad, with stuff being so decentralized. It's great in the sense that so many people are involved in this issue, and people are doing little bits here and there. But then it's hard to know—where do I start on this issue? How do I get involved? And I think that's a piece that I still struggle with.

“We can't expect that we're going to get through it, and be on the other side of this in three years. It is something we have to continually keep working at.”

MK: I think one barrier to breaking down the silos is the belief that we just have to survive until the next election and everything will go back to the way it was.

Totally, which is just not true at all.

So many things have been saved and restored, which is amazing, but I don’t think we can rely on that. Just as I said with the Internet Archive, I don't think we can rely fully on—in the beginning of the Trump second administration, people put a lot of faith in the courts and in lawsuits. And some of them are working out, but some of them aren't. I don't think there's any one thing that's going to be a silver bullet.

And even if there’s a different administration later, these pressures aren’t going away. I think there are forces working to erase things, manipulate data, cherry pick data, beyond just who's in office.

And there have been losses under Democratic presidents too. For example, the EPA’s online archive. They chose to shutter it [under Biden], and now it's not maintained. There was a big backlash from environmental groups for not keeping up this online archive, so it's still available, but it's not getting updated anymore.

It is incredibly unprecedented and extreme, what this administration is doing right now. I don't want to shy away from that. But these are things we should care about year round, whoever is in office.

I am saying this maybe a little bit biased, as I’m coming off of two days at the Heartland Institute's climate realism conference in DC. I was doing some reporting there for Desmog this week. And I mean, Heartland Institute—I don't know if you guys are familiar, but it's like, the most fringe right wing climate denial group.

GW: No, it’s not fringe. They've got the EPA chief there!

Exactly, that's exactly my point. It's not fringe anymore. Republicans aren't distancing themselves. Zeldin was there doing the opening remarks and giving legitimacy to it.

So maybe what I'm saying is a little bit biased from that. But from what I saw, even though it is a fringe group, these are people that have been working on these issues for decades to try to chip away at the foundation. And I think that's my larger point here: We can't expect that we're going to get through it, and be on the other side of this in just three years. It is something we have to continually keep working at. Because, and I hate to talk in that binary of us-versus-them, but there are forces that are doing the exact same for the opposite ends, if that makes sense.

MK: Yeah, I totally agree. What we're seeing now is the result of decades of concentrated, deliberate work.

But it seems like there's been a lot of shock around the level of suppression that we're seeing. I was talking about this with one of my buddies recently, and he said, “When you're surprised, it's because you were wrong.” Like you had a belief or an assumption that proved not to be true. And so, I feel like we all need to get over our shock and start realizing that our assumption was wrong.

I think that's a great way of putting it.

And I will say, one heartening thing is that librarians, archivists, and preservation groups absolutely understand the stakes. They're not standing

in their bubbles or their silos. And I really commend the work that these coalitions like the Data Rescue Project has done to lead the charge.

And I think the End of Term Archive laid the foundation for that by preserving the last several administrations’ data. They have really paved the way, so that data coalitions and librarians now can can jump into action.

MK: Totally. They were really ahead of the curve on that. I think we need to commend them, absolutely, but also carry on in that spirit.

So, something I wanted to check in on from earlier—you said that, day-to-day, you're sending a lot of FOIAs. You're doing interviews. I asked Tom too, but I wanted to see what you thought of how day-to-day operations [and institutional access] has changed under Trump.

I would say, FOIA has been in trouble for a long time. Even before Trump, it became exhausting.

It's gotten worse under Trump with cuts to funding. So we've seen, in particular, cuts to FOIA offices, increased wait times, lack of institutional knowledge with FOIA officers who are conducting searches (like less familiarity in how their own search processes work and how to find documents).

I don't want to make it seem like it's always this adversarial relationship between us and FOIA offices. A lot of the times, FOIA officers really want to help you find what you might be looking for. There are exceptions to that, of course, but I think more what we're seeing is a lack of resources, lack of training. So that's making FOIA more difficult right now.

MK: So you're seeing the consequences of institutional knowledge being interrupted.

Exactly. Whether it's through the RIFs or people taking deferred resignation.

There's an increased reliance on contractors too, in FOIA offices. So not specific government employees, outside contractors, who, again, are less intimately familiar with their search capabilities, with agency records, stuff like that.

NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) is experiencing incredible cuts. You can still go there and look at research, but there's less staff there—again, loss of institutional knowledge.

It's interesting doing interviews, because some folks out of government are more willing to share now. I don't want to say that's a good [effect] of institutional knowledge loss. But we are getting a more well-rounded perspective. For example, I interviewed people that were at the State Department's Office of Global Change, trying to get a sense of what things were looking like before they got let go.

Another piece of this is funding. I think in the first Trump administration, I got a sense that a lot of nonprofits that were more liberal leaning saw an influx of funding to combat this administration. I think we're not seeing that influx of funding now. A lot of foundations are maybe more reticent to fund things like climate work, DEI work (obviously), environmental justice. I think nonprofits as a whole are struggling because they've had to change how they write grants, maybe, or how they go about their work. That’s an overall loss of funding. I mean, you're seeing that in universities, it's not just nonprofits.

“We’re always pulling these threads, always having this document state-of-mind.”

MK: One thing I noticed in your chronology is that many of these cuts align with administration narratives around climate, race, immigration, and historical oppression. I was wondering what narrative threads you have been noticing, and your take on data erasure as a narrative control tactic.

I'm so glad you're hitting on this, because I could not agree more with you.

There was a Grist article I was reading about environmental and climate data [that said] data erasure is another form of climate denialism. And I think that can be applied beyond climate.

If you're removing these resources, then these facts and figures don't exist, these problems then don't exist. So how are you supposed to enact policy to target issues that deal with race, labor, socio-economic status? You don't have any basis for it. So I absolutely think that’s such an important piece.

MK: You also mentioned surveillance as the other side of this conversation.

Someone in one of these open government coalitions once asked me: “How do authoritarian regimes keep track things? What is their record keeping like?” And I think that's through surveillance, through data mining.

I feel like you've seen there are so many ways that citizens are being tracked. And I don't want that to sound like, kooky or conspiratorial, but I think there are legitimate ways they are employing surveillance tactics to keep track.

I don't know that we'll focus on it so much, but I hope someone does. I think that's such an interesting facet of authoritarian governments. Because we always think about them as burning books, burning all the documents, but there also is record keeping going on at the same time. So what is that looking like for this administration?

GW: We have a little feature in our social media called archive of the week. This week, it’s the Stasi Records Archive of the secret police in East Germany who kept unbelievably extensive records.

Oh my God. I've been reading a lot of the author Erik Larson, and he wrote the book In the Garden of Beasts. It's such a meticulous archival account that gets into that, the intense record keeping that was in place. I think it's really important that we look at those things, not to revere them at all, but to see what could be happening now.

MK: So it seems like the other side of this—like, you have a right to know the things that affect our society, but you also have a right to privacy. And yes, your data can be used against you, just as easily as you can use the data tools that we have [made public]. To me, those conversations need to happen at the same time.

I think that's a great point. I feel like those conversations are happening separately, but I completely agree they need to be brought together.

And then meanwhile, you have the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, who said that the PRA (the Presidential Records Act) is unconstitutional. The president and Office of the Vice President have to turn over their records 12 years after a president's term is over. So George W. Bush, for example, that PRA expired in 2021. So in 2021, his records needed to be delivered over. The Trump administration is trying to argue that that's unconstitutional. Specifically so Trump can keep his records at Mar-a-Lago, and not have to deliver them to NARA's office.

This was a Nixon-era transparency law, established after Watergate to preserve the tapes. Before that, presidents could keep their materials, but now they're property of NARA. They have to be delivered there. So again, there’s just so many interesting pieces of this conversation: What the public has access to, what rights the public has to privacy, what rights the current president thinks he has (to not comply with transparency laws).

GW: What’s next for you?

I’m working on a couple briefing books right now. One looks at the history of U.S.-China cooperation on environmental policy, particularly around the Kyoto Protocol era. Another project looks at early border wall construction and how environmental policy became intertwined with surveillance and policing.

I’m also still really interested in how intelligence agencies analyze climate change and what they choose to release publicly versus keep classified.

I sent a FOIA request right after [the Climate Realism conference] for all engagements between Heartland Institute and Zeldin for the last year. Maybe something interesting will come from those. Maybe it'll be nothing, But we’re always pulling these threads, always having this document state of mind.

If there's something being decided, or something in the news, there's most likely a paper trail of that happening. Obviously, things are happening on Signal, and messages are disappearing, and people are having conversations off the margins. That's something we're seeing a little bit more of in this administration as well. But were always trying to approach our work from a primary-source evidence base.

GW: Who is the audience for the National Security Archive’s briefing books?

Historically, it’s been a lot of historians, scholars, students, journalists, and researchers.

But with the climate work and disappearing data work, we’re trying to broaden that audience and make these issues more accessible to the public.

FOIA and transparency shouldn’t just be tools for journalists. They’re public tools.