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Advice & Opinion

The EPA is quietly pulling the plug on its own history

Destroying federal records takes legal approval. The EPA hasn't said whether it has any.

On December 31, while most of us are deciding whether we can still stay up until midnight, the Environmental Protection Agency plans to switch off its online web archive. No press conference. No public comment period. Just a small banner on archive.epa.gov announcing the retirement date and pointing visitors to a handful of website "snapshots."

Mother Jones flagged the change on October 23, reporting that the agency set the shutdown date a few weeks earlier. The archive holds tens of thousands of EPA documents dating back to the 1990s, and researchers say many of them aren't available anywhere else.

Lawyers live and die by evidence. From where we sit, the federal government is wheeling a filing cabinet full of receipts toward the dumpster and calling it housekeeping.

What's in the cabinet

The archive stores agency fact sheets, reports, policy changes, and regulatory actions. You can trace George W. Bush's 2003 Clear Skies Initiative and Barack Obama's 2015 Clean Power Plan through it. A 2022 open letter from 20 environmental and archivist groups noted it also holds records of chemical authorizations and monitoring data from natural disasters.

It holds Camp Lejeune, too. The EPA added the Marine Corps base to its Superfund priority list in 1989 after investigators found military operations had contaminated its soil, surface water, and groundwater. Documents from that decades-long investigation lived on the archive, and Mother Jones reports they helped Marines, their families, and nearby residents evaluate what they'd been exposed to.

And when the first Trump administration deleted most of the EPA's climate change web pages, the archive is where those pages survived.

Why this makes you less safe

If you live next to a Superfund site, that site's paper trail is how you learn what got into your water and who knew about it. If a chemical gets approved, the authorization record is how a doctor, a reporter, or a lawyer figures out what regulators knew and when they knew it. Disaster monitoring data becomes the baseline for the next disaster.

Pull it offline and the next family starts from zero. Lauren Harper, who studies government secrecy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, warned that cutting off easy access will push researchers and lawmakers into an already overwhelmed FOIA office for records that used to be one click away. That's the real replacement plan: wait months, maybe years, for something you could once read over coffee.

The law says show your work

The Federal Records Act doesn't stop at paper. The National Archives says the Act applies to agency web records, and that web content can meet the legal definition of a federal record. Federal records can't be tossed on a whim. An agency can only dispose of them under a schedule approved by the National Archives.

That leaves the EPA with two options, and neither one looks good. If these records are preserved somewhere, as the agency claimed in 2022 when it said official records would stay available through FOIA, then the EPA is spending effort to make public information harder to reach. If any of them are being destroyed, the EPA owes the public the National Archives authority that permits it. Destroying federal records without that authority breaks the law. So far, the agency hasn't publicly shown which option it's choosing, and it didn't respond to Mother Jones' request for comment.

To be fair, this didn't start with Trump

Biden's EPA first tried to retire the archive in January 2022. The agency said the site was never meant to be permanent, cost too much to maintain, and that not every web page counts as an official record. Gretchen Gehrke of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative used a FOIA request to learn the upkeep ran about $2 million a year. After months of backlash, the EPA pushed the date to July 2023, then dropped the deadline entirely in March 2023. The archive sat untouched until Lee Zeldin's EPA put a hard date back on it.

The EPA has a point that the archive was clunky. Dead links and a weak search tool frustrated researchers for years. A broken search bar is a reason to fix the search bar. Gehrke put it plainly: the EPA should expand and organize the archive instead of expecting a few snapshots to cover 30 years.

You can't un-delete institutional memory

Once these pages go dark, every link to them breaks: in court filings, scientific studies, textbooks, and news stories. Volunteer groups like EDGI and the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine have saved some of it, but a volunteer copy isn't an official record, and nobody can promise it's complete. Rebuilding means FOIA requests, lawyers, and staff time paid for by the same taxpayers who already paid for it once.

Gehrke called the information irreplaceable. We'd add that it's ours. Taxpayers funded every page.

Who wins, who loses

The winners are any company with an ugly history buried in those files, and any administration that would rather not have its record compared to the last one. The losers are Camp Lejeune families, fenceline communities, researchers, journalists, and every worker who was ever exposed to something on the job and needs to prove it.

What's next

The clock runs out December 31. If you rely on a document in the archive, save a copy now. If you're a researcher, a journalist, or a lawyer, send your member of Congress one question: has the National Archives approved what the EPA is doing with these records? Make them answer it before New Year's Eve.

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