In a little-noticed webpage update, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced a plan to decommission its online web archive at the end of the year, a move that would wipe tens of thousands of publicly available environmental resources from the web. The discreet banner notice comes in stark contrast to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s recent public takedowns of the agency’s power plant pollution standards and federal methane regulatory system.

“The EPA’s online archive makes information about a wide variety of environmental issues and past policies available to the public, dating back at least 20 years,” said Gretchen Gehrke, co-founder of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI). “This information is irreplaceable, and if the archive is decommissioned, that information will be lost forever.”

For decades, the web archive has been an unparalleled resource for researchers, legislators, policymakers, and the public writ large. It houses everything from fact sheets and environmental reports to agency policy changes and regulatory actions, making it a tool for “democratic oversight,” according to Gehrke, who for ten years has been tracking changes to vulnerable federal environmental data.

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