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When a U.S. president left office 40 years ago, archival teams swept in to gather almost every piece of paper, picture, audio or video tape that the president and his staff had generated.Â
They carried boxes of these official documents from the White House to the National Archives and Records Administration, which stores and makes them accessible to the public in perpetuity.
By the late 2000s, as more of those records came in electronic form, workers swapped out boxes for giant servers, loaded them onto trucks and drove them to their new quarters when the presidency turned over. The records were transferred onto servers in a NARA data center.
After hearing the news that then President-elect Donald Trump had appointed a notorious climate change denier to lead the Environmental Protection Agency transition team in 2016, Nicholas Shapiro, an environmental anthropologist, penned an urgent email to a dozen or so fellow scientists.
He was worried that the EPA was about to be torn apart from the inside under Trump’s leadership. Others on the email thread were concerned that vital environmental data would be taken down from federal websites and destroyed. They’d just seen brutal attacks on science in Canada irreplaceable scientific records were dumped in the trash under conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper and they feared that something similar could happen in the US. So Shapiro took a cue from his sister, an organizer for the Women’s March, and tried to bring researchers together to mount an offensive.