EPA sets Dec. 31 end date for its archive of past agency records

The Environmental Protection Agency has set Dec. 31, 2026, as the date it will decommission its online archive of older agency documents, according to a banner notice reported by Mother Jones and Grist on Oct. 31.

The archive holds tens of thousands of publicly available environmental documents dating to the 1990s, including fact sheets, environmental reports, policy changes and regulatory actions, according to the report by Rachel Santarsiero of Mother Jones, published through the Climate Desk collaboration. The report gave no exact count. The EPA’s updated page says historical information remains available in what it calls “snapshot collections.”

The EPA did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.

Gretchen Gehrke, a co-founder of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), which has tracked changes to federal environmental data for 10 years, told Mother Jones: “This information is irreplaceable, and if the archive is decommissioned, that information will be lost forever.” Gehrke said of the snapshots: “EPA should expand and systematize the archive, not throw it away and expect that three discrete snapshots will suffice.”

Lauren Harper is the first holder of the Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. She said: “The EPA’s insistence on decommissioning its web archive will only continue to erode public trust.”

According to the report, the archive preserves records of major policy shifts, including the 2003 Clear Skies Initiative and the 2015 Clean Power Plan. It also documents the agency’s investigation of Camp Lejeune, the North Carolina Marine Corps base listed on the National Priorities List in 1989. The report said those records helped residents and service members assess their chemical exposures. During President Donald Trump’s first term, his administration deleted most of the EPA’s climate change web resources, and the archive kept those pages accessible, Mother Jones reported.

Estimates of the archive’s size vary. Santarsiero wrote in a 2022 piece for New Security Beat, then as a fellow at the National Security Archive, that it held about 100,000 documents dating to the 1990s. She wrote that the Internet Archive had captured more than 430,000 unique URLs from it, and that the Policy Commons database had saved upwards of 40,000 of its documents, available only by paid subscription. Two historians writing in Perspectives on History, the American Historical Association’s magazine, put the total at an estimated 420,000 unique documents. They wrote that the archive is the only source for some public-facing EPA climate change resources from the Clinton and Obama administrations.

This is not the first time the agency has moved to close the archive. In early 2022, the EPA under President Joe Biden announced plans to discontinue it. The historians wrote that the agency cited the maintenance costs of its aging digital platform. A Freedom of Information Act request later showed it cost roughly $2 million a year to maintain, according to Mother Jones.

The American Historical Association, the American Society for Environmental History and other groups sent a June 13, 2022, letter to EPA Administrator Michael Regan opposing the closure. A separate letter was co-signed by 21 organizations, including EDGI, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Sierra Club, the historians wrote. The joint letter said closing the archive “reduces the public’s ability to access important information about critical environmental issues,” according to New Security Beat.

After about five months of criticism, the EPA delayed retirement by one year, to July 2023. Its banner said the extra year would be used to “assess the use of archive content and… continue to analyze, inventory, and transition key content” to the main EPA website, New Security Beat reported. Under the original plan, news stories and press releases would stay on the main website, and most documents would be reviewed case by case for transfer to the National Archives and Records Administration.

In March 2023, the banner was changed to say the archive was “retiring,” with no end date. The archive was then left online but not updated for about three and a half years, Mother Jones reported. A page from the archive’s speeches section, last updated June 2, 2017, carries the banner “We’ve made some changes to EPA.gov” and no decommissioning date.

The reports reviewed for this article do not say what the snapshot collections contain, when they were taken, or how many of the archive’s documents they hold.