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Data Access With Federal Administration’s Transition

Posted: 2/21/2025 ()

The challenges of data access during federal administrative transitions can happen every four years. What follows are some resources that might be useful. We will continue to update this blog post with new information. If you have any links that could be helpful, please send csde@uw.edu your updated and helpful information. We know that what follows may not provide you with the exact data you need, so let us know what you need and what’s missing and we can try to find where it is located. If you have data that needs hosting, we can also provide you with suggestions for where to do so at UW.

Every four years an endeavor takes place to refresh the End of Term Web Archive. It’s a coordinated project to archive parts of the federal web before the end of a presidential term. See this website. It is currently processing 300 TB of the last administration’s public administration files.  Another place to look is the Way Back Machine.  The Data Rescue 2025 Github site is one place to learn about what has been rescued and how to rescue data.

The UW libraries is maintaining a Library Guide about Federal Data Access. You can find that page here. They also have freely available government datasets ingested into UW Libraries-licensed databases like Sage Data, Simply Analytics, and others with lock icons next to them here. The libraries team of federal data librarians can be contacted at that site, if you have questions about what is available.

One place to check for some available demographic data are the resources at the University of Minnesota.  Additionally, the Inter-University Consortium of Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan provides DataLumos (https://www.datalumos.org/datalumos/) which is a crowd-sourced and open-source resource for government data archiving.  There is also the Public Environmental Data project that will soon have about 52 massive datasets coming online. You might also check data repositories like the UW Dryad collection for environmental science data and publications.

There are third party sites, as well, such as

  1. the Registry of Research Data Repositories https://www.re3data.org,
  2. Data Commons (owned by Google),
  3. Proton
  4. Policy Map (https://www.policymap.com/) (they also have provided a recent link to rescued data on their site: https://policymap.wpengine.com/blog/purged-federal-agency-data-available),
  5. the St. Louis Fed (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/),
  6. Census Reporter (https://censusreporter.org/),
  7. ESRI (https://www.esri.com/en-us/home) which, e.g., provides mapped ACS data (https://doc.arcgis.com/en/esri-demographics/latest/regional-data/acs.htm).
  8. Flourish and Thrive Labs has archived CDC data here. For now, they are providing these data free of charge to state and local public health agencies, contact: cdcdatarequest@fandtlabs.com and provide the following information in your email: name, 1️⃣ Your Name, 2️⃣ The name of the health department where you work, 3️⃣ What dataset you need and for what date ranges. If you don’t know the name of the dataset, describe what you are trying to do.
  9. BryanGeoDemo offers access to many recent public health and demographic data.

There are also tools for archiving data.  Here are some links for you: