United States Agency for International Development

The shuttering of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a process that began on January 20th, 2025 with the issuance of Executive Order 14169, resulted in a significant disruption to the public accessibility of a large corpus of federal data. While practically unreported in the news media relative to other data disruptions, the shuttering of USAID likely had an out-sized effect on overall data-loss during 2025. USAID housed significant data assets in its Development Data Library (DDL). The DDL primarily hosted structured, machine-readable datasets generated through USAID-funded programs, ranging from longitudinal health and education surveys, to local economic conditions in developing countries, to geospatial maps and images. The DDL also served as USAID’s Research and Development (RAD) grant program’s public access repository for research data funded by the agency.

Director of the Duke Center for International Development, Dr. Edmund Malesky, wrote about the value of the DDL and the RAD data it held in a letter attached to the center’s annual report that he penned:

“Moreover, we were obligated to post all of our analysis and data on a publicly available website, so anyone could check our work. I know very few organizations that insist on this level of transparency. In fact, one tragic feature of the Trump administration’s closure was the destruction of this very repository, sending thousands of USAID employees and contractors scrambling to recover and preserve their hard work.” (Malesky, 2025).

The DDL housed 2,027 data assets and remained online until at least January 28th, 2025 and according to an analysis of data supporting this project, around 81% of those were publicly accessible. While public access to the DDL site went dark on or about January 31st, 2025 USAID’s comprehensive data inventory (previously available at https://data.usaid.gov/api/views and https://data.usaid.gov/data.json) remained listed as a harvest source for Data.gov until at least August 19th, 2025. Despite this, no data could be downloaded from hyperlinks to the source, leading to a significant number of ghost datasets in the Federal Data Catalog up until that time. The DDL was among the data resources memorialized by essentialdata.us and the Federation of American Scientists for their Halloween 2025 “Dearly Departed Datasets” initiative.

Because the DDL’s Socrata API did not provide direct download links for many of its resources to the Data.gov harvester, data rescue efforts that relied on the Federal Data Catalog had mixed success. For instance, the Harvard Law Library’s archive of Data.gov contains only metadata for the formerly publicly accessible Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). The last Wayback Machine snapshot of the Federal Data Catalog entry for the DHS was on August 19th, 2025. All of the underlying data can still be accessed through the website of the contractor that has run the program for more than 40 years, thanks to funding they secured to shore-up the project for at least the next three years. A small number of other USAID data assets were preserved and archived by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) via datalumos.org. Fortunately, much of the remaining publicly accessible data held by USAID was preserved by the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School’s efforts to archive all of the assets linked from Data.gov between late 2024 and mid-2025 (Satter, 2025).

The future of USAID data

Conversations with individuals familiar with the data infrastructure at the Department of State, USAID, and the General Services Administration revealed that uncertainty remains around the future of access to the agency’s datasets. For instance, while the Administration garnered considerable attention for the mishandling of classified documents during its haphazard dismantling of USAID (Fischer, 2025), the status of non-classified records and data is not currently known to the public. One person familiar with the matter suggested that the process of formal archiving of USAID data with the National Archives was underway at State. As of the date of publication of this report, neither State nor USAID has made a request for a change in the records schedule with the National Archives and the last records schedule request for the agency occurred in 2023.

However, data restoration is very likely to involve an assessment of whether the release of specific USAID data assets is consistent with Administration priorities. For instance, the USAID-administered President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) website had previously listed twenty program evaluation datasets in five programs available for download; the Administration removed 13 of these datasets as inconsistent with Administration priorities. Among those datasets removed (and still available via the Internet Archive’s WaybackMachine) were data on voluntary circumcisions (an HIV prophylactic procedure) and on cervical cancer surveillance. Currently, only two evaluation program summaries remain accessible with a disclosure posted to the website indicating further data and program review is possible:

“A subset of historic Spotlight datasets through Fiscal Year 2024, compliant with Executive Orders, are available below. Additional datasets and FY25 results will be made available with the next Spotlight update. Note: Fiscal Year 2025 targets and budgets as approved through congressional notification procedures for FY25 are included in these datasets, however program interruptions, reporting challenges, and programmatic shifts have occurred since January 2025. Fiscal Year 2025 target and budget data should be analyzed and interpreted accordingly.”

Conclusion

The sudden dismantling of USAID in early 2025 precipitated a massive, albeit underreported, disruption to global development and public health data access. While swift interventions by civic society groups and at least one USAID contractor managed to rescue critical assets like the Demographic and Health Surveys and portions of the Development Data Library, the broader data infrastructure remains severely compromised. The ongoing uncertainty surrounding records preservation (including final disposition in the National Archives), compounded by the politicized purging of specific datasets to align with new administration priorities, highlights the profound vulnerability of federally funded research to abrupt administrative shifts, policy reprioritization, and ideological censorship.

References

1. Fischer, W. (2025). Letter to Mr. Christopher Colbrow, Agency Records Officer, US Agency for International Development. https://www.archives.gov/files/records-mgmt/resources/ud-2025-0047-usaid-open.pdf
2. Malesky, E. (2025). 2025 Letter from the Director - Duke Center for International Development. https://dcid.sanford.duke.edu/2025-letter-director/
3. Satter, R. (2025). Harvard Law Library acts to preserve government data amid sweeping purges. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/harvard-law-library-acts-preserve-government-data-amid-sweeping-purges-2025-02-06/