podcast
CNN One Thing
You’ve been overwhelmed with headlines all week – what's worth a closer look? One Thing takes you beyond the headlines and helps make sense of what everyone is talking about. Host David Rind talks to experts, reporters on the front lines and the real people impacted by the news about what they've learned – and why it matters. New episodes every Wednesday and Sunday.
Trump’s DEI Data Purge
CNN One Thing
Mar 26, 2025
As datasets and web pages across the federal government disappear to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive orders, a coalition of concerned citizens is rushing to preserve information and access. We talk to one of the researchers behind the Data Rescue Project about how they're doing that work and how federal data purges could impact trust in government.
Guest: Lynda Kellam
Have a tip or question about the new Trump administration? Call us at 202-240-2895.
Episode Transcript
David Rind
00:00:00
Major League Baseball's opening day is Thursday. Let's go Mets. And one of the sport's most iconic figures has been in the news lately. I'm talking about Jackie Robinson. You probably know him as the man who broke baseball's color barrier, who bravely stood up to bigotry and hatred to push the game and the country forward. But you may not know that Robinson also had a military career. He served in a segregated Army unit during World War two. Well, for several hours last week, that piece of history was scrubbed from the Pentagon's own website.
Jake Tapper
00:00:37
As recently as this morning. If you had visited the defense.gov website, you would find a series of articles about sports heroes who served no article actually, on Jackie Robinson. The only mention of Jackie Robinson we could find was in an article about Pee Wee Reese, a white teammate of his on the Brooklyn Dodgers who famously accepted Robinson when Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color barrier.
David Rind
00:01:01
Remember, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued an order to remove all diversity, equity and inclusion related content from Pentagon platforms. But multiple defense officials told CNN that because the edict was so broad and vague, reviewers were given keywords like first racism, ethnicity, and history to search for, content to remove. And because the purge was expected to be done within two weeks, some of that work was turned over to automated algorithms. The lack of guidance and a rushed timeline resulted in flagged topics that have nothing to do with DEI, like Holocaust remembrance and suicide prevention. After a huge outcry and some conflicting statements, the Pentagon eventually restored the page about Jackie Robinson and officials tried to set the record straight.
Sean Parnell
00:01:48
We want to be very, very clear. History is not die when content is either mistakenly removed or if it's maliciously removed. We continue to work quickly to restore it.
David Rind
00:02:04
'But that article was just one of thousands of articles and photos marked for deletion on Defense Department websites. And this is happening all across the federal government. Data related to climate change, gun violence and LGBTQ public health has all been impacted, in some cases removed. But it might not be gone forever. Today, we meet the ragtag group of academics and so-called data hoarders, taking it upon themselves to save the data and information just as quick as the new administration is trying to remove it from CNN. This is One Thing I'm David Rind.
David Rind
00:02:50
Lynda Kellam loves numbers.
Lynda Kellam
00:02:53
A data librarian at a university. I have been a data librarian for about 20 years now.
David Rind
00:02:59
I got into journalism so I didn't have to do math. That's what a lot of us do in this business. So I like talking to people who, you know, embrace the numbers.
Lynda Kellam
00:03:07
Yes.
David Rind
00:03:12
She says during the first Trump administration in 2017, there was a small grassroots effort to preserve federal data that was being deleted. For example, the Environmental Data Governance Initiative for energy helped track down climate data. And more broadly, this kind of thing happens no matter who's president. Since 2008. A site called the End of Term Web Archive captures and saves agency websites as administrations change over. But she says once Trump took office again in January, things felt different.
Victor Blackwell
00:03:44
'A page entitled facts about LGBT Youth suicide. Another page about creating safer schools for LGBTQ+ youth. Both of those are gone.
Lynda Kellam
00:03:56
When we started hearing about the CDC data being taken down, we had patrons getting in touch with us, asking as what alternate sources that were out there where they could get the data. What we should be doing.
Victor Blackwell
00:04:09
'Are the changes are to comply with President Trump's executive order to eliminate federal D-I programs, and federal staffers have been warned of severe consequences if they do not comply with the order.
Lynda Kellam
00:04:21
So we wanted to focus. Our group wanted to focus on the social data. We were concerned about that, and there was really a group out there to do that.
David Rind
00:04:29
It was out of that concern for social data that the data rescue project was born.
Lynda Kellam
00:04:38
We saw a lot of people on blue Sky and their slack channels. There's a lot of listens. Librarians are all in all touch channels. And we saw people, you know, grabbing the same data or asking the same kind of questions over and over and over again. And so we really wanted to make sure that people remembered that the infrastructure was there. So LG exists. End of term web archive exists. You know people, some people knew, but a lot of people had forgotten that those things existed. And we can use those to help us gather data. So our group was really an effort to kind of corral the grassroots efforts, the grassroots interest in data rescue. And originally all I did was create a all we did with our group was create a Google doc, and it had a lot of resources on it, and it kind of went viral. And so that's where the data rescue project emerged with from this Google doc. And I will say it's not just me like there's there's a whole group of us. Well, there's about 700 volunteers, but there's a core group of us who've been working on this since the first. Yeah, we have about a thousand people subscribe to our newsletter and 3000 on blue Sky.
David Rind
00:05:44
Why did they see this as such an acute emergency? Because you mentioned like this happened in administrations past. When they change over, stuff goes away, stuff comes back. So why is this moment so uniquely different for you and all those other people?
Lynda Kellam
00:05:57
It's the pace. I mean, when it happened in 2017, there wasn't. First off, the pace wasn't as quick. And then also we didn't see as much data come down as we thought with that would be all right.
John Berman
00:06:07
Breaking overnight. Workers at the U.S. agency for International Development, USAID in Washington, were told to stay home.
Lynda Kellam
00:06:14
When the USAID was dismantled. And the data, you know, in the website was taken down, that was that would that was a real start for a lot of people. It was something that was like, true, a lot of attention because we didn't expect that to happen. We didn't expect the CDC data to suddenly disappear.
Expert
00:06:30
There's a reason why these data were collected. They're critically important for health agencies, particularly in our communities, to know how to protect us.
Lynda Kellam
00:06:39
And so I think those initial actions were some of the impetus for people becoming really involved. So one of the things that we've created is a tracker to track the cataloging of where different Data sets have gone. But just knowing where they go, and that was one of the problems we had in 2017, is that there wasn't something like the tracker to track where things were going, and so there was might have been some data loss, especially in data rescues that were not, you know, that were just popping up in different places. And so this group, the point is to try and coordinate that after a little bit more and make sure that we know where data is going. And we also have been very careful about making sure that the data is going to a good home. So our data we've been putting into ICSPR as a data lumos, which was created in 2018. It's a crowdsourced repository for federal data.
David Rind
00:07:32
'So how does it actually work? Like on a day to day basis, are people getting alerts that, oh, so-and-so website has been pulled off the air and I have to go grab the stuff right away? Or like, how did how does that actually happen?
Lynda Kellam
00:07:44
Yeah. So some of it has been preemptive go, you know, we went for MLS because it's the most important agency for librarians, and we were worried it would be at risk. And you were right.
David Rind
00:07:56
What is IMLS?
Lynda Kellam
00:07:58
'Sorry?= The Institute for Museum and Library Services. So it's it's it's one of the agencies that was targeted in last week, couple weeks. So there's a lot of data there that's important for understanding our libraries and library services. And so we went in and got that immediately. There have been times where there are alerts. We were not quick enough to help with the USAID data, but we were able to get a little bit. So we have some people who are telling us that they know that this data source is coming down because the contract is being ended. And so we can go get the data.
David Rind
00:08:35
Like there are clues, breadcrumbs out in the news and elsewhere that you guys can follow.
Lynda Kellam
00:08:39
Yeah. And we were hearing a little bit from inside of some federal workers or letting us know that they think something might be targeted, and then we'll we'll go get the data. There's also some things like. Yeah, last night I worked on one. Somebody asked me about the community resilience estimates, equity supplements that had been pulled down from the Census Bureau. And it's an Wayback machine. I imagine it was taken down simply because of the word equity. Equity. But it's yeah, but skew data and making it available. Wayback machine is great and it's a wonderful place to go get archived materials. But for data sets it's for long term preservation. They really need to be preserved.
David Rind
00:09:19
And the Wayback Machine is this place that archives old websites like across the board, not just government data, but you guys are leveraging that and then taking it putting it somewhere presumably a little more secure.
Lynda Kellam
00:09:31
Yeah. Somewhere where that has a long term preservation mandate. We don't focus on websites, and there are definitely websites that have come down that people have let us know about, that we can't really do much about that except point them to and determine Web Archive and Wayback Machine, which is only have so much capacity and our expertise is our data sets. So the ones that we're really worried about, the things that we can't do anything about that are very concerning are the restricted access data and things that are behind dashboards where there's no downloadable access to the data. We we've made some efforts on the dashboards, and we've gone in for some of them and just downloaded to as many tables as we can get, but for restricted access data. And that's a very laborious process. It required, you know, you can't do that for everything. And then the restricted access data, unfortunately, it's not so much that there's not access. There's no application access.
David Rind
00:10:31
Kellam says this restricted access data is the most difficult to protect because it requires more than just downloading information. It requires an actual specific application to access it, something the average data hoarder doesn't have access to.
Lynda Kellam
00:10:46
If the NCES the National Center for Education Statistics doesn't exist. You can't put in an application for the restricted access data. USAID is the same way if they have the demographic and household surveys, which are amazing surveys that are of developing countries, and they have been going on for decades, and nobody can access them because there's no application process in place. There's nobody to take those applications.
David Rind
00:11:12
And so the strip mining of those agencies have made it just so that that stuff is kind of black box.
Lynda Kellam
00:11:20
Yeah. And it's that's the thing is a lot of cases, it's not that they're taking down the data, it's just that that there's no body behind their data is something you have to actively preserve. There has to be, you know, some kind of mechanism to either make it available or continue. Make sure that it's preserved long term. And, you know, these agencies are targeted in more and more different professional communities are coming together. And, you know, because they see their data, the data they depend on being taken down.
David Rind
00:11:49
Do you see the targeting as purely ideological, just stuff that the administration doesn't want to have up there, whether it be DTI related, climate related?
Lynda Kellam
00:11:59
No, I don't I actually I mean, there's some of that, but I think some of it's targeted, you know, in the drive for efficiency in cost savings. It's not so much that it's just an ideological effort there. Definitely. I think the CDC data, that was a different thing. But with a a lot of this, it's more in the innocent bystanders of these efforts are the the data sets, the fact that they're not taking down necessarily, but they're not being maintained in the way that they need to be, or the people are not there any longer to maintain them.
David Rind
00:12:32
We got to take a break, but I'll have more with Lynda Kellam in just a bit.
David Rind
00:12:44
Who are the people working on this effort and your group and other folks that are just kind of doing this work like they're all statisticians, librarians, or are they people just kind of motivated by the moment?
Lynda Kellam
00:12:57
There are a lot of librarians who started out, and most of the core group, the core leadership of the group, the theories of leadership is, is, are librarians. So there are researchers who've joined us. There are people who are students. We have an undergrad who's helped out a lot. One person who said he just got involved because he has friends who are federal employees, and he felt bad for what was happening to them. And so he wanted to do something to give back. We have the data hoarder community. There's a few of those who are involved.
David Rind
00:13:29
What's a data hoarder?
Lynda Kellam
00:13:32
Yeah, I didn't know this existed in.
David Rind
00:13:34
Hoarder has a bad connotation.
Lynda Kellam
00:13:35
'I know. So these so it's a Reddit community that's called data hoarders. And it's people who are interested in saving data in any kind of format. A lot of them are. You know, interested in saving their VHS tapes and figuring out ways to to store those and all kinds of things. I mean, it's a really cool community, and they've been very supportive of us, but it's it's a it's a wide variety and definitely non-profits we have people are definitely academics. And then people who are just in the community and who are really concerned.
David Rind
00:14:11
So you've been doing this work a long time. Did you ever think you'd find yourself in a position organizing a group like this, trying to catch all this stuff that it's going away?
Lynda Kellam
00:14:22
No, we you know, I actually told someone that I, I hoped we didn't have to do this, which we might have been optimistic thinking back in December, I was hoping maybe we wouldn't have to. But that level of interest and the level of concern was really what made me and others want to do something.
David Rind
00:14:45
Are you worried that being part of this project could open you up to retaliation in some way, whether from the Trump administration itself or even just supporters of the president online?
Lynda Kellam
00:14:56
I mean, there's I, I, we have gotten a lot of support and goodwill from people, and so far we have not had any kind of retaliation, I think. This isn't a political question. It's just a matter of we are librarians and we provide access to information, and this is data that our people are using, and we need to make sure that they can continue to use it.
David Rind
00:15:23
But we have seen administrations use data for their purposes, right, to kind of make it for political ends. And, you know, there's been concerns about economic data and how Trump administration might want to use that to his advantage. So these numbers are kind of political, right?
Lynda Kellam
00:15:39
Potentially, yes. And I but again, it's it's our mission to preserve access. So I have a library I worked with, a library full of books and full of articles that counter things that the administration might be saying. And I'm going to continue to or support things with administration moves in some cases. And so I'm going to continue to, to, to preserve those. If people decide that this is that they need to retaliate, I mean, I there's nothing I can do about that. There's nothing I have no answer to that. I would hope that they see that this is important for us as a country to continue under, stay at being able to understand the nature of our nation and the characteristics of our nation.
David Rind
00:16:21
You mentioned that you don't deal so much with websites, but we have seen a lot of those removed. And this the I purge. You know, I'm thinking about the Pentagon and articles about the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan just because I had the word gay in it, Jackie Robinson, you know, I could go on. Do you think at all about what story is going to be told about the country, and what story the Trump administration wants to tell about the country through these web pages, through the data that it wants up there and doesn't want up there? Like, how do you think about all that as someone who's whole job is preservation?
Lynda Kellam
00:17:01
Yeah, I mean, I think that's it's a interesting question. It's I am worried in the long term because I think that, you know, people I grew up with a level of trust in public information and federal information being I also come from a family that were federal employees and military. So I, you know, had a public information was something that you could rely on as a source. And I think the politicization of that is a very unfortunate thing. And it's making it so that it becomes harder to. See a balanced picture there. And that's that's what I find worrisome in the long run using, you know, I worry about the erosion of trust in federal information over a long term.
David Rind
00:17:52
Yeah. Do you worry that the discourse has become so poisoned that even the data that is still up there, the average person might look at it and say, I don't trust that that's, you know, that's deep state information.
Lynda Kellam
00:18:04
Yeah, I think there's an element of that. And I think we as academics in the universities, we have to figure out ways to, to try and regain that trust. I'm not 100% sure on how to fix it, but certainly librarians, if I was.
David Rind
00:18:16
Going to ask, do you have any theories?
Lynda Kellam
00:18:18
I mean, we were doing a lot in in universities and in schools to help with what we call information literacy, news literacy, use multiple sources to understand the truth. So I think that's all we can do, is just encourage those skills in people to not just take things for face value, but to try and think through the information they're getting now if information is being crafted. There's always been propaganda. I mean, that's the thing is there's always been some level of propaganda. But in that, how do you counter that propaganda, I think is is the challenge we're going to be facing or counter. The one sided story is going to be something that we're facing, that we've been facing, and we're going to be facing going forward.
David Rind
00:19:00
So you don't think this data purge is part of some larger strategy to rewrite American history, to tell the story of the country, how they want to tell it?
Lynda Kellam
00:19:10
Yeah. I don't think it's that target. I don't think it's that intentional. I really don't. I think to some extent there might be for some other data sets and an attempt to kind of remove certain populations, but I don't know that most of the things that we've done preemptively, it's not about necessarily changing history as it is about not understanding what the government does or how the government functions.
David Rind
00:19:36
Well, for the data rescue project. How will you know or when will you know if this has been a success?
Lynda Kellam
00:19:42
I think it's been a success in the sense that we've been able to bring attention to it. We've been able to get people talking to each other when it comes to capturing the data. There's a lot of questions that hard questions that we need to deal with going into the future, and more about the restricted access data. And if I have any point of success that something from that's successful that I can point to, it's going to be that I want to leave behind a toolkit that somebody could use if this is to happen again. We've talked a lot in our group about having a playbook or something that people can use in this country or other countries. If this were to happen, and I think that would be a nice thing to give to others. But at this point, we've been we've been successful. I don't know what the endpoint is going to be. Right. We don't know what's going to happen next. Every day it feels like there's something different coming down or something happening. So it's really hard to predict the next week, much less the next couple of months in the next year. But there's conversations about all of the infrastructure, and all of that is an important part of what we need to do.
David Rind
00:20:51
Well, Lynda, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Lynda Kellam
00:20:54
Yeah. No worries.
David Rind
00:21:04
One Thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Leying Tang and me, David Rind. Our senior producers are Felicia Patinkin and Faiz Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager, Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Licktieg is the executive producer of CNN audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Jon Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Osman Noor and Wendy Brundidge. We'll be back on Sunday. I'll talk to you then.
