{"id":25395,"date":"2025-04-05T09:01:15","date_gmt":"2025-04-05T09:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=25395"},"modified":"2025-04-05T09:25:34","modified_gmt":"2025-04-05T09:25:34","slug":"the-white-house-frames-the-past-by-erasing-parts-of-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=25395","title":{"rendered":"The White House Frames the Past by Erasing Parts of It"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Soon after the new administration arrived, things began to go missing from the White House website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

They weren\u2019t just the partisan policy platforms that typically disappear during a presidential transition. Informational pages about the Constitution and past presidents, up in various forms since President George W. Bush was in office, all vanished.<\/p>\n

Thousands of other government web pages<\/a> had also been taken down or modified, including content about vaccines, hate crimes, low-income children, opioid addiction and veterans, before a court order<\/a> temporarily blocked part of the sweeping erasure. A Justice Department database<\/a> tracking criminal charges and convictions linked to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was removed. Segments of data sets<\/a> are gone<\/a>, some of the experts who produced them<\/a> were dismissed, and many mentions of words<\/a> like \u201cBlack,\u201d \u201cwomen\u201d and \u201cdiscrimination\u201d have evaporated.<\/p>\n

President Trump\u2019s team is selectively stripping away the public record, reconstructing his preferred vision of America<\/a> in the negative space of purged history, archivists and historians said. As data and resources are deleted or altered, something foundational is also at risk: Americans\u2019 ability to access and evaluate their past, and with it, their already shaky trust in facts.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not a cost-cutting mechanism,\u201d said Kenny Evans, who studies science and technology policy at Rice University\u2019s Baker Institute for Public Policy and runs the White House Scientists Archive at the school. \u201cThis slide toward secrecy and lack of transparency is an erosion of democratic norms.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The casualties are not just digital. The head of the National Archives, which has been described as \u201cthe custodian of America\u2019s collective memory<\/a>,\u201d was fired by Mr. Trump<\/a> in February. A key source of federal funding for public records depositories nationwide, the Institute of Museum and Library Services<\/a>, was named in an executive order<\/a> calling for its elimination<\/a> \u201cto the maximum extent consistent with applicable law\u201d (its acting director said he planned to \u201crestore focus on patriotism<\/a>\u201d). As the U.S. Agency for International Development was being gutted<\/a>, a senior official told employees to shred or burn<\/a> classified documents and personnel files.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The National Archives in College Park, Md.<\/span>Jared Soares for The New York Times<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Soon after the new administration arrived, things began to go missing from the White House website.They weren\u2019t just the partisan policy platforms that typically disappear during a presidential transition. Informational pages about the Constitution and past presidents, up in various forms since President George W. Bush was in office, all vanished.Thousands of other government web pages had also been taken down or modified, including content about vaccines, hate crimes, low-income children, opioid addiction and veterans, before a court order temporarily blocked part of the sweeping erasure. A Justice Department database tracking criminal charges and convictions linked to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was removed. Segments of data sets are gone, some of the experts who produced them were dismissed, and many mentions of words like \u201cBlack,\u201d \u201cwomen\u201d and \u201cdiscrimination\u201d have evaporated.President Trump\u2019s team is selectively stripping away the public record, reconstructing his preferred vision of America in the negative space of purged history, archivists and historians said. As data and resources are deleted or altered, something foundational is also at risk: Americans\u2019 ability to access and evaluate their past, and with it, their already shaky trust in facts.\u201cThis is not a cost-cutting mechanism,\u201d said Kenny Evans, who studies science and technology policy at Rice University\u2019s Baker Institute for Public Policy and runs the White House Scientists Archive at the school. \u201cThis slide toward secrecy and lack of transparency is an erosion of democratic norms.\u201dThe casualties are not just digital. The head of the National Archives, which has been described as \u201cthe custodian of America\u2019s collective memory,\u201d was fired by Mr. Trump in February. A key source of federal funding for public records depositories nationwide, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, was named in an executive order calling for its elimination \u201cto the maximum extent consistent with applicable law\u201d (its acting director said he planned to \u201crestore focus on patriotism\u201d). As the U.S. Agency for International Development was being gutted, a senior official told employees to shred or burn classified documents and personnel files.The National Archives in College Park, Md.Jared Soares for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25397,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25395"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25398,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25395\/revisions\/25398"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}