The EPA Is Quietly Killing Its Web Archive | Hacker News Reader

The EPA Is Quietly Killing Its Web Archive

motherjones.com

310 pointsrobtherobber60 comments

Take note Republicans (which I'm doubting many even care anymore), your party thinks short term profits for a few are more important than science and the environment for all.

EPA planned to do the same thing in 2022...

https://web.archive.org/web/20220124192618/https://archive.e...

Relevant text from TFA:

> This isn’t the first time the environmental agency has tried to shutter the online web archive. In late January 2022, the Biden administration EPA announced plans to discontinue the online repository, citing burdensome financial upkeep; through a Freedom of Information Act request, Gehrke was able to determine that the agency spent roughly $2 million a year to maintain it. A coalition of environmentalists, historians, and librarians swiftly condemned the decision, with groups like the EDGI and American Society for Environmental History calling the announcement “alarming” and cause for a “tremendous gap” in the historical record.

> After five months of public backlash, the EPA acquiesced, in part by announcing it would delay the web archive’s retirement by one year to July 2023.

$2 million a year is wildly insignificant for the federal government.

Less than one cent per year per person in federal taxes.

Ok, but I could replicate this process and archive for under $20,000k per year(probably way under) and set it up in less than 1 day with claude...

You've obviously never worked in government before. The technology is likely not the issue; the bureaucracy is.

Would have been nice if DOGE had worked on stuff like this instead of performative cruelty.

I’ll come back in 3 days and you can share the link with your web archive. I’ll Venmo you $20 for your Claude pro subscription.

Looking at the 2024 to 2025 archive, it's around 1TB/year:

https://app.browsertrix.com/explore/usgov-archive/collection...

If that's true, something has clearly gone wildly wrong with the, most likely several, departments involved/created with maintaining this. I suspect if you look at the breakdown, it's 90% administrative costs, with the rest being inflated Cisco contracts, or whatever other parasite latched on.

As others have said, it's been archived already.

Will you pay me 20k a year? I will absolutely do it for 20k a year.

With or without claude, this is a trivial job.

Did you set up a working backup with Claude? It is still extremely difficult to do right.

If you did please, please share your setup. And how you audited it.

You're acting like it is super hard to setup basically a large file repository.

That it is reasonable for it to cost 2 million/year. It isn't. It obviously isn't.

Using claude or not, this is not a large job. With claude it is a hilariously small job though. I could do this in addition to my real job and it would be trivial to do so.

And yet the number of projects with similarly insignificant costs is large, and they do add up.

The argument cannot be "this money doesn't matter", it has to be "this represents good value for money" (imo)

They literally don’t add up. Just look at a pie chart of the US government budget. The administrative state is a bargain.

Departments like the EPA are so small that they have to be put in the “other” umbrella that makes up 1% of federal spending (go to the Agency tab):

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

sad, the spending chart doesn't load in my version of firefox, and both links in the caption also have page-load issues. very sad.

Works for me on 158.0.1

Just a note that pie charts are not well regarded in this application.

Stephen Few, “Save the Pies for Dessert” (https://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_inte...)

Edward Tufte, “The only worse design than a pie chart is several of them.”

The “1% other” is more compelling.

The link I shared wasn't even a pie chart, so when I said "pie chart" I was speaking in a colloquial sense.

> "this represents good value for money" (imo)

Wouldn't you say this archive represents good value for the money?

A nation that forgets its past is a nation that repeats its mistakes.

> Wouldn't you say this archive represents good value for the money?

Yes, that's the point. Not "this is so cheap it's irrelevant" but "this is an important resource worth funding".

This is so disingenuous. We all know where the money goes.

The checks that add up are the social security checks cashed by the quarter or so of baby boomers who don’t need them.

Is the suggestion that social security (a (progressive) program where people largely pay in) should be replaced with a welfare type program? Or if we're just talking about biggest expenditures, things like the 1) Medicare, 2) other gov health spending, and 3) interest paid on the debt are far larger than the item your comment mentioned.

A program that is only used by poor people will immediately be scrapped. Never underestimate the seething hatred that the middle class has for the underclass. Besides all that social security money goes straight into the economy.

The epa doesn't have access to the federal budget

That’s not really the point, the point is that $2 million isn’t a lot of money for a service that is for the benefit of over 300 million people.

It serves a lot more than just the citizens of the US, for what it's worth.

Its tiny, setting up traffic lights on some road junction might cost similar.

Wouldn't want any of that pesky true climate-change-proving data available, now would we?

We have alternative facts now.

"There'd be fewer cases if you stopped testing..."

Climate change was such a downer. Good riddance!

https://web.archive.org/*/https://archive.epa.gov/

The EPA plans to sunset its online archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30795719 - March 2022

A “proper” mirror alongside archive.org would be good too

Maybe not what you're looking for, but check out https://wayback-labs.sf.archive.org/epa/

I'm presuming this is all preserved in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_Term_Web_Archive (though making that more easily available would be great -- another project for https://wayback-labs.sf.archive.org/ )

Has anyone scraped this already for offline use?

I think Archive Team might have scraped it, but their site is down due to PHP-related reasons at the moment.

Thank you. I'm going to scrape for now but I hope there's a bulk download available somewhere eventually.

Next thing the moon landing hoax will become part of Americas curriculum ala Interstellar

Why are companies allowed to remove themselves from the web archive?

They shouldn't be.

They're not. Someone on HN said that they just mark it as unavailable but they still keep it, I don't know what the expiry is on that though, or if they could be forced to actually delete something 'for real'. Nor do I know how you'd verify that beyond doubt.

Where are r/archiveteam when you need them?

If they weren't afraid of the data being public they wouldn't be removing it.

The only saving grace of this administration is that their incompetence helps to slow down their evilness.

Everything bad is good for this administration.

This isn’t really a Trump thing. It says they’ve been trying to shut the thing down since 2022

I mean, if they want to kill everyone in the extreme heat belt, so be it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I hate to say this because it's so overused, but this move is certainly veering into 1984 territory

Or Rollerball

Wiping and rewriting history is straight from 1984 (novel). It's insane US let this happen.

The adverb “quietly” has become such an AI smell to me, even if it’s probably not one in this instance.

I hate the click-bait smell of "quietly". For me it's in the same category as "eviscerated." The hyperbole factory rolls ever onward...

There's this whiff of snooty superiority all over the word "quietly" that I just don't like. I can't quite put my finger on it but it's like I'm being talked down to.

Pangram v4 shows 100% human written: https://www.pangram.com/history/aa7e5cb1-0070-4bcc-8694-6180...

Don't let AI tells ruin professional writing for you.

well, they certainly aren't advertising it, are they?

Well, they didn't call the archive load-bearing

That must be why the kids are always saying "lowkey".

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