Building the community to protect and preserve the US national data infrastructure

The panel presents the work of three organizations (the Data Rescue Project (DRP), ICPSR, and the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) that have been leading efforts to preserve critical social and environmental data. DRP, ICPSR, and EDGI have been collaborating together and with statistical, data, research, and environmental organizations and thousands of librarians, scientists, and concerned data geeks to respond to an unprecedented challenge to US data resources. The panel will discuss the impact of changes in policy and government employment on the national data infrastructure, efforts to preserve and provide access to individual data resources, and plans for increasing the resilience of data infrastructures in the United States. US data infrastructure relies heavily on data produced and disseminated by US statistical, administrative, and programmatic agencies. Since early 2025, much of this data has been put at risk. As agencies attempt to comply with executive orders or experience Reductions in Force, data has been altered, data collection discontinued, and access to data, especially restricted data, curtailed or censored. Websites have been shut down, and even when recreated (sometimes under court order) data access is often severely curtailed. Over this period, a number of organizations, some new and some long-existing, have come together to marshal the efforts of thousands of people around the world to preserve US data resources. The Data Rescue Project (https://www.datarescueproject.org/) was formed in February 2025 to coordinate these efforts. The DRP Portal tracks at-risk data, allows individuals to volunteer to preserve an identified dataset, and improves discovery of "rescued data." Their efforts have preserved over a 1200 datasets from 86 different government offices. Most of these rescued data resources are preserved and made accessible in ICPSR's DataLumos, an archive for at risk government data. ICPSR (http://icpsr.org), a 63-year old data archive with the largest collection of curated social science data in the world, created DataLumos (http://datalumos.org/) in 2017. Between February 2017 and February 2021, 101 deposits were made to DataLumos. These include data such as OSHA compliance data and the CDC's Abortion Surveillance System, 2009-2013. The original 101 DataLumos datasets have been downloaded nearly 5000 times. Since February 2025, another 800 datasets have been deposited to DataLumos, and entire data collections have been transferred from disappearing federal agencies directly to ICPSR for inclusion in DataLumos. New datasets continue to be deposited every day. EDGI was formed in November 2016 to document and analyze changes to vulnerable federal environmental data and governance practices. EDGI has grown into the preeminent watchdog tracking and assessing modifications to federal environmental information resources and their accessibility; a national leader in highlighting impacts on environmental, data, and information policies and practices; and the forerunner in developing a new field of inquiry and critique: environmental data justice. Bringing together these three organizations will provide a comprehensive and up-to-date report on efforts to protect and preserve key data resources along with concrete ways that members of the broader statistical community can contribute to the resilience of the US data infrastructure.