Data Tools
Datasets are the foundational collections of information that contain raw observations or measurements in structured or unstructured formats. These resources usually exist as static files in formats such as XLS, shapefiles, CSV, or JSON or are stored in relational databases such as SQL and often require external software or specific technical skills to be useful. Raw data often remain difficult to use for individuals who do not possess specialized training in data science or statistics. For example, a federal agency might maintain a dataset containing millions of individual records of disease reports that serves as the base evidence for long-term research.
Data tools, on the other hand, provide accessible platforms for users to interact with and understand those underlying datasets. Data tools help translate complex data into formats that are more readily accessible to a wider audience. Examples of data tools include dashboards and mapping portals that provide a way to search or visualize information without the need for manual coding. Their value to the public is significant because they provide a way for general data users, including small business owners, students, and local officials to access federal evidence without needing to perform their own technical analysis. This accessibility empowers the public to make informed decisions and supports transparency in government operations.
Disruptions to Data Tools
Unsurprisingly, some of the most impactful disruptions to the federal data ecosystem occur when public access to a valued data tool is removed or their underlying data changes unexpectedly. In the last year, a coordinated shift in administrative priorities led to the removal or manipulation of several high-profile interactive data tools that previously served as cornerstones for research, public health, and national security analysis. Unlike the periodic archiving of individual datasets that occur on transparent and predictable timelines (either internally at an agency or with the National Archives), actions removing functional interfaces and analytical dashboards that improved public access to data were abrupt and disarming to many data users.
Climate and Environmental Justice Data Tools
One of the earliest and most significant removals occurred in January 2025 with the decommissioning of Council on Environmental Quality’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST) and the Environmental Protection Agency’s EJScreen (CEQ, 2025; Archive, 2025). These tools provided geospatial visualizations of environmental burdens and socioeconomic indicators contributing to inequality. While the raw data behind these projects remained technically accessible via federal servers, the integrated mapping interfaces that allowed local governments and community organizers to identify disadvantaged areas were taken offline.
Similarly, the National Climate Assessment (NCA) hub was temporarily removed from federal servers on June 30, 2025, when the GlobalChange.gov domain was deactivated following the elimination of funding for the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). The NCA Atlas tool allowed users to explore temperature and precipitation variables across different global warming levels using an interactive mapping interface provided through a contract with ESRI. The site was later restored after a reorganization of websites by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and is currently publicly accessible, although the data are likely to have been changed given the stated intent to do so by the Administration (Frazin, 2025). The original 5th NCA hub along with the NCA Atlas are also currently available through independent mirrors such as nca5.climate.us and a partial continuation of the original site provided by ESRI through ArcGIS.
Because of the high-value of the information that CEJST, EJScreen, and the NCA Hub provided to the public, their removal prompted a rapid-response in the data rescue community. Independent organizations and civil society groups launched private restoration projects to maintain public access to these tools (Willson, 2025). Organizations and projects such as the Public Environmental Data Project (PEDP) have successfully restored versions of tools like the EJScreen and the data underlying the NCA hubs. PEPD has restored a number of related tools, which can be found on https://screening-tools.com/. These efforts rely on rapid preservation and archiving of the original federal code and data.
Geospatial Planning Data Tools
In late August 2025, the Department of Homeland Security discontinued the public-facing Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data (HIFLD) Open portal. This tool was a primary resource for emergency managers and urban planners, offering an interactive environment to visualize critical infrastructure layers like energy grids and medical facilities. The removal restricted this high-fidelity mapping capability to vetted government users through a secure portal, effectively ending public access to a centralized geospatial utility.
Leadership at the contractor company that hosted the data tool, ESRI, was alerted by concerned federal staff familiar with the plans to shutter HIFLD Open through contract cancellation prior to the takedown. Initially, ESRI agreed to provide continued free public access to the resource and vowed to backup the data. However, since December 2025 the ESRI site via an ArcGIS endpoint was no longer available. Connected endpoints to shared resources at other agencies, such as the geospatial layers provided by NASA to the tool, have also been discontinued. Thanks to efforts of the Data Rescue Project, in partnership with ICPSR, all of the underlying data and metadata have been archived via datalumos.org.
HHS’ Large-scale Data Tool Takedown
Data tools were also wrapped up in the wholesale erasure of critical health information at HHS that led to the removal of approximately 8,000 web pages. Targeted tools provided insights on topics such as health equity, reproductive health, and LGBTQ+ health.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) dashboard was one of the most prominent tools eliminated during this period. This geospatial application allowed emergency managers to identify communities at risk during natural disasters by analyzing fifteen different census variables. Its removal in early 2025 forced local jurisdictions to rely on dated archives or alternative private indices to plan for disaster response. Similarly, the AtlasPlus and Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance System dashboards and interactive tools were briefly taken offline.
These actions were challenged in federal court by a coalition of medical organizations, including the Washington State Medical Association (Alder, 2025). A legal settlement reached in September 2025 required the department to restore more than 100 of these removed tools and pages to their state as of January 29, 2025. While this mandated the return of the SVI and AtlasPlus, the restored versions often carry prominent headers indicating they are under review for future modification:
Per a court order, HHS is required to restore this website to its version as of 12:00 AM on January 29, 2025. Information on this page may be modified and/or removed in the future subject to the terms of the court’s order and implemented consistent with applicable law. Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from truth. The Trump Administration rejects gender ideology due to the harms and divisiveness it causes. This page does not reflect reality and therefore the Administration and this Department reject it.
Despite the court-ordered restoration of the HHS resources, especially to CDC data tools, the disclaimers clearly indicate an intent to remove the tools once the order is lifted. To ensure long term access to the original analytical functions, civil society groups established independent mirrors at RestoredCDC.org.
International Data Tools
The landscape for global data tools shifted significantly between early 2025 and 2026 as well. Primary federal resources for international comparative data were eliminated. These tools, which provided interactive interfaces for analyzing global health, geography, and political structures, served as essential utilities for researchers, diplomatic missions, and the general public.
The United States officially rejected the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on March 4th, 2025 in remarks by Edward Heartney, US Minister Counselor to the United Nation’s Economic and Social Council. It’s unclear whether Heartney had the authority to revoke US involvement in the SDGs as the responsibility for coordinating participation in international statistical activities is statutorily prescribed by the Paperwork Reduction Act to one of the roles of the US Chief Statistician in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The SDG website, a collaboration between OMB, the Department of State, and the General Services Administration (GSA), remained online until at least May 1st, 2025, albeit with a disclaimer from GSA:
! This site is under review and content may change
The SDG reporting data had not been previously updated by OMB since October 11th, 2024. The eventual removal website in late Spring of 2025 marked a significant shift in how the United States reports its progress on international benchmarks. Previously, https://sdg.data.gov served as a centralized system tracked domestic indicators across the 17 global goals, including climate action, gender equality, and poverty reduction. While the raw data is available via the Internet Archive’s [Wayback Machine] (https://web.archive.org/web/20250501022335/https://gsa.github.io/sdg-data-usa/en/zip/all_indicators.zip) the interactive data can still be found on the UN Statistics Division website. Thankfully, in accordance with OMB policy, GSA retained public access to the open-source github repository where the source code and data are stored.
Ironically, one international data tool that was at significant risk but was not necessary to be recovered was the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) supported Demographic and Health (DHS) STATCompiler. The DHS Program STATcompiler allowed users to make custom tables based on hundreds of demographic and health indicators across more than 70 countries collected through USAID’s long-standing Demographic and Health Survey program. This DHS dashboard was a primary tool for monitoring global population health by both federal agencies and the public. In early 2025, the interactive portal for these surveys was taken offline as part of a review of foreign assistance data. Throughout this period, the underlying survey data and documentation remained available to registered researchers through the program’s primary contractor, ICF International. The entire DHS program was preserved via interim funding secured by the contractor.
Most recently, The Central Intelligence Agency officially sunset the interactive version of the World Factbook on February 6, 2026. For decades, this tool was the global standard for comprehensive, country-level profiles, providing searchable data on everything from population health to geopolitical conflicts to telecommunications infrastructure. The takedown of the World Factbook was sudden and absolute (Marcum, 2026) - all traffic to the original website domain is currently forwarded to an anonymous blog post and all official backups were removed from the website. The removal of the interactive portal initiated community-led restoration projects. These non-governmental initiatives, listed on worldfactbook.us, collectively aim to preserve the static content, the searchable functionality, and historical continuity of the World Factbook. To date, there has not been a full restoration of the World Factbook similar to the restored functionality of some of the other data tools described in this chapter.
Data Tool Status Summary Table
The following table provides a summary of the status of these major tools as of February 2026. This is not a comprehensive list of all data tools removed, but rather focuses on major resources discussed in the news media as high-value. A more comprehensive, albeit mixed, list is available on Wikipedia.
| Data Tool | Original Agency | Current Functional Status | URL |
|---|---|---|---|
| AtlasPlus | CDC | Active; restored per court order | available at: https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/nchhstpatlas/main.html |
| CEJST / EJScreen | White House / CEQ / EPA | Eliminated; available via non-gov mirrors | mirror at: https://pedp-ejscreen.azurewebsites.net/ |
| DHS STATCompiler | USAID | Eliminated; available via non-gov mirrors | mirror at: https://www.statcompiler.com |
| Climate Risk Viewer | USDA | Active; restored per court order | available at: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/collections/87744e6b06c74e82916b9b11da218d28 |
| NCA Hub | USGCRP | Active; modified per executive directive | partial mirror at: https://nca-atlas-nationalclimate.hub.arcgis.com/ |
| Open HIFLD | DHS | Eliminated; available via non-gov mirror | mirror at: https://hifld.publicenvirodata.org/ |
| sdg.data.gov | OMB | Eliminated; no functional replacement | data archived at: https://github.com/GSA/sdg-data-usa/tree/develop/data |
| SVI Interactive Map | CDC | Active; restored per court order | available at: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/place-health/php/svi/svi-interactive-map.html |
| World Factbook | CIA | Eliminated; no functional replacement | various restoration efforts listed at: https://worldfactbook.us |
Conclusion
Users of federal data tools found many of their favorite dashboards and analytics platforms disrupted during 2025. Highly valued data tools have been largely restored by preservation initiatives. In part, this was possible because much of the underlying data were still publicly accessible (either at federal agencies or through non-governmental archives) and because the code supplying the tools was available open-source and deposited in the public domain (often, on GitHub). In some cases, government contractors who had originally been the stewards of the data tools on behalf of a government agency were able to maintain access to those tools.
Data tool restoration projects are also approachable from a external funding perspective because they have a tangible, time-bound, and discrete deliverable. Recreating specific canceled, deleted, or discontinued federal data collections that fuel these data tools, however, is more costly, more time consuming, and less easily executed due to a transparency issues with underlying methodology.
References
- Alder, S. (2025). HHS Settlement Requires Restoration of 100+ Health Datasets and Tools. https://www.hipaajournal.com/hhs-settlement-lawsuit-restore-critical-health-information-federal-websites/
- Archive, N. S. (2025). Disappearing Data: Trump Administration Removing Climate Information. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/climate-change-transparency-project-foia/2025-02-06/disappearing-data-trump
- CEQ. (2025). Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST). Harvard Dataverse. 10.7910/DVN/B6ULET https://dataverse.harvard.edu/citation?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/B6ULET
- Frazin, R. (2025). Energy Secretary Chris Wright says admin ’reviewing’ past climate reports. The Hill. https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5441347-energy-department-chris-wright-national-climate-assessment-review/
- Marcum, C. S. (2026). The World Factbook was a Valuable Data Resource. In Open Evidence. https://www.doi.org/10.59350/npaqv-r3682 https://www.chrismarcum.com/marcum-blog/2026/02/06/The-World-Factbook-Was-A-Valuable-Data-Resource.html
- Willson, M. (2025). Groups archive environmental justice data scrapped by Trump. E&E News. https://www.eenews.net/articles/groups-archive-environmental-justice-data-scrapped-by-trump/