A team of volunteer archivists has recreated the Centers for Disease Control website exactly as it was the day Donald Trump was inaugurated. The site, called RestoredCDC.org, went live Tuesday and is currently being hosted in Europe.
As we have been following since the beginning of Trump’s second term, websites across the entire federal government have been altered and taken offline under this administration’s war on science, health, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Critical information promoting vaccines, HIV care, reproductive health options including abortion, and trans and gender confirmation healthcare have been purged from the CDC’s live website under Trump. Disease surveillance data about bird flu and other concerns have either been delayed or have stopped being updated entirely. Some deleted pages across the government have at least temporarily been restored thanks to a court order, but the Trump administration has added a note rejecting “gender ideology” to some of them.
Restored CDC isn’t going to have continuous updates on this type of healthcare and disease guidance, but it has brought back all of the critical data that was purged in an easy to use, easy to navigate, and fast website. Other critical archiving projects, including the End of Term Archive, have saved government websites more broadly, but many website archives are slow to use and difficult to navigate because things like interactive elements and internal linking can sometimes be wonky. Some archives require users to download files to navigate them on their own computers, for example. Archives on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine are a great public service, but depending on the snapshot, they can be slow to load and some elements may be broken. Using RestoredCDC.org, meanwhile, is like using any other website, and the team hopes that the pages will be indexed by Google so they will be easily discoverable on search engines.
On other archives, “The individual pages are archived, but links between them are broken and the pages are not easy to locate through web searches,” the team behind RestoredCDC wrote.
“Therefore, we will re-build the links between the pages, to create a site that can be navigated the same way as the pre-January 21, 2025 CDC site,” they wrote. “The only changes we will make on these pages is to add a header that indicates that this site is not a CDC website. Because of the complex navigation between pages, we will also include a button to report problems in this header. Our goal is to provide a mirror site that provides the same information and user experience as the previous CDC website.”
In a Reddit post on the DataHoarders subreddit, one of the developers of RestoredCDC said that the website was made using archived pages created by that community, and that the website is hosted in Europe.
“Our goal is to provide a resource that includes the information and data previously available,” the team wrote. “We are committed to providing the previously available webpages and data, from before the potential tampering occurred. Our approach is to be as transparent as possible about our process. We plan to gather archival data and then remove CDC logos and branding, using GitHub to host our code to create the site.”
