Research in an Age of Uncertainty

With the Trump administration’s cuts to government services, I can’t help but worry about the state of research in the United States and the future of research, especially that which uses government data.

As of March 2025, the executive branch of the Federal Government has ordered funding cuts to initiatives like medical research, and worked to purge data sets (Mueller, 2025; Will Stone & Pien Huang, 2025). It has laid off many of the critical staff who collect, preserve, and share the information that comes from federally funded research and collections, and important archives are closing due to lack of staff (Swenson & Fields, 2025; Truitt & Riley, 2025). Researchers, citizens, and even other branches of government can no longer find materials they need and government websites have posted strange disclaimers about the diligently prepared and vetted information found on their websites (Sun et al., 2025; Wilson, 2025), and they worry about the future of vital resources like PubMed and ERIC (Gaudino, 2025; Suleta, 2025).

At the same time, vital services and organizations are at risk due to the “chainsaw” approach to budget cuts led by Trump vizier Elon Musk (Tomasky, 2025). Those of us who work in libraries are closely following the Executive Order aiming to eliminate the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and the censorious approach the Trump administration is taking as it tries to proscribe messaging at the Smithsonian and at other cultural organizations like the Kennedy Center (Swenson & Fields, 2025; The Associated Press, 2025; Trump, 2025).

The near- and long-term effects of this governance are hard to parse. For instance, the Naval Academy is facing a collection development crisis spurred on by the Secretary of Defense ordering a federal book ban – calling for the removal of at least 900 books whose content is now verboten due to themes related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (Ismay & Selig, 2025). What will happen to these books – will they just be removed from circulation, or will they be permanently deleted from the collection?

This is just one of the examples of how Federally funded data is being made unavailable to the public whose tax dollars underwrote it. Assuming Trump does not provoke a constitutional crisis related to the 22^nd Amendment (Green, 2025) and steps aside at the end of his current term, will any of the purged material return in 2029, or will it all have been permanently deleted?

Unfortunately, this situation is more familiar to librarians than we would like it to be. In our line of work, we have seen several instances of databases and research tools going defunct. Sometimes a community or company will step up to take on these materials (like in the case of Statistical Abstract of the United States), but other times a resource is lost forever (Brador, 2025; Clark, 2011; ProQuest and Bernan Pick up Where the Census Bureau Left Off: The Statistical Abstract of the United States Is Back, 2016). Librarians are also familiar with the phenomenon of linkrot, which has resulted in the loss of almost 40% of the websites available just twelve years ago (Chapekis et al., 2024).

At the same time, large corporations are using their stranglehold on America’s intellectual property laws to push everything from films and TV shows, eBooks, and software from purchase models to subscriptions, and actively fighting off attempts to make these resources available for lending at libraries (Bailey, 2024).

Despite these challenges, I remain optimistic. Recently, I’ve been impressed by the efforts at institutions like Harvard and the Internet Archive to preserve government documents (Kaufman, 2025; Satter, 2025).

Libraries have also popularized the idea of Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS) to create redundancy for materials like academic journals and born-digital web tools (LOCKSS, 2025). Amateur “data hoarders” have also participated in efforts to preserve government data sets, and community-based efforts to find and document “lost media” have shown that the internet can still produce collaborations and collective action, while serving as inspiration for individuals who want to share and preserve media they find important (Bumas, 2024; Morales, 2025).

Of course, history demonstrates that these efforts are vulnerable to a multitude of factors including collectors who take knowledge out of the marketplace, and copyright strikes which remove materials that may be otherwise inaccessible popular sharing platforms like YouTube.

How do we as librarians address this? One way is to push for reforms that allow increased exceptions to U.S. copyright laws, which enable more users and institutions to store and share materials they find useful or important. In addition to allowing exceptions for library uses, American librarians should consider working to reform U.S. copyright law in general, as that has extended copyright terms of 14-28 years to a minimum of 75 to potentially 300 or more years (Hirtle, 2010a, 2010b), causing some items to be unavailable for sharing for many lifetimes.

Another way is to acknowledge that librarianship is an endeavor of constant maintenance – of data, records, buildings, and machines that store them. In today’s climate of uncertainty, we can embrace our role as maintainers by working to obtain access to relevant data sources quickly. We can join collaborative preservation initiatives like CLOCKSS, and we can promote and support library-related organizations that work to store and share data and collections like Haathi Trust and DPLA. When we preserve copies and work together to make materials more accessible, librarians can fulfill our collective mission of providing access to information and help our patrons during these times of uncertainty.

John DeLooper

References

Bailey, D. (2024, April 23). The ESA says its members won’t support the one form of game preservation that might actually work. Gamesradar. https://www.gamesradar.com/games/the-esa-says-its-members-wont-support-the-one-form-of-game-preservation-that-might-actually-work/

Brador, I. (2025, March 27). Help us say farewell to Newspaper Navigator! The Signal. https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2025/03/help-us-say-farewell-to-newspaper-navigator/

Bumas, A. (2024, November 6). They searched through hundreds of bands to solve an online mystery. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/the-most-mysterious-song-on-the-internet-mystery-solved/

Chapekis, A., Bestvater, S., & Rivero, G. (2024, May 17). When online content disappears. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/

Clark, C. S. (2011, September 2). Grumblings persist over demise of Statistical Abstract. Government Executive. https://www.govexec.com/oversight/2011/09/grumblings-persist-over-demise-of-statistical-abstract/34832/

Gaudino, A. C. (2025, February 17). Statement on proposed actions to the US Department of Education [Substack newsletter]. Thrive 2025. https://thriveedu.substack.com/p/statement-on-proposed-actions-to?utm_medium=web

Green, E. L. (2025, March 30). Trump says he’s ‘not joking’ about seeking a third term in defiance of Constitution. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/30/us/politics/trump-third-term.html

Hirtle, P. (2010a, March). Factoids: What is the oldest work protected by copyright in the U.S.? What work will have the longest protection? LibraryLaw Blog. https://blog.librarylaw.com/librarylaw/2010/03/factoids-what-is-the-oldest-work-protected-by-copyright-in-the-us-what-work-will-have-the-longest-protection.html

Hirtle, P. (2010b, April). The search for the oldest copyrighted work in the U.S. goes on. LibraryLaw Blog. https://blog.librarylaw.com/librarylaw/2010/04/the-search-for-the-oldest-copyrighted-work-in-the-us-goes-on.html

Ismay, J., & Selig, K. (2025, March 29). Naval Academy takes steps to end diversity policies in books and admissions. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/us/politics/naval-academy-diversity-affirmative-action.html

Italie, H. (2025, February 19). What’s going on with the Kennedy Center under Trump? AP News. https://apnews.com/article/kennedy-center-trump-what-to-know-4305e2c3d5611c4bfb1686d597727369

Kaufman, M. (2025, February 18). The ‘Wayback Machine’ is preserving the websites Trump’s White House took down. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/18/tech/internet-archives-deleted-websites-wayback-machine/index.html

LOCKSS. (2025). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LOCKSS&oldid=1272773265

Morales, J. (2025, February 13). Data hoarders race to preserve data from rapidly disappearing U.S. federal websites. Tom’s Hardware. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/data-hoarders-race-to-preserve-data-from-rapidly-disappearing-u-s-federal-websites

Mueller, B. (2025, February 25). President Trump’s cuts to medical research. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/briefing/president-trump-vs-medical-research.html

ProQuest and Bernan pick up where the Census Bureau left off: The Statistical Abstract of the United States is back! (2016, March 10). Bernan. https://web.archive.org/web/20160310165110/http:/bernan.com/General/Full_Press.aspx?ID=84

Satter, R. (2025, February 6). 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/

Stone, W., & Huang, P. (2025, February 6). Some Federal health websites restored, others still down, after data purge. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5288113/cdc-website-health-data-trump

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Swenson, A., & Fields, G. (2025, February 26). The National Archives is nonpartisan but has found itself targeted by Trump. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/trump-national-archives-firings-layoffs-historical-recordkeeping-559027fdd2f634263bea7774a78d66fe

The Associated Press. (2025, March 30). Historians see Trump attacks on the ‘Black Smithsonian’ as an effort to sanitize racism. Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/30/historians-see-trump-attacks-on-the-black-smithsonian-as-an-effort-to-sanitize-racism-00259310

Tomasky, M. (2025, February 21). Elon Musk’s Cringey Chainsaw Act Exposes a Deep Ignorance Fueling DOGE. The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/post/191811/musk-chainsaw-cpac-trump-right-wing-ignorance

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Trump, D. J. (2025, March 14). Executive order: Continuing the reduction of the federal bureaucracy. The White House. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/continuing-the-reduction-of-the-federal-bureaucracy/

Wilson, K. (2025, February 24). “Complete streets” webpage falls prey to Trump purge. Streetsblog USA. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2025/02/24/complete-streets-webpage-falls-prey-to-trump-purge