Government Executive reports that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to retire its online archive which will remain live until at least July 2023. The agency announced this decision in February 2022 and asserts that transparency will not be compromised in this transition. EPA will be using a snapshot feature that captures the agency’s entire website every four years.
20 environmental and activist groups voiced their concern that the archive constitutes a “critical public resource” and serves as a record of the EPA’s activities over the past two decades in an open letter sent on June 13, 2022. EPA provided a statement to Government Executive, expressing that the archive is outdated and costly to maintain. The statement emphasized that content owners are committed to providing the public with “relevant, meaningful, and timely information.” Some information, such as news stories and press releases, will remain on EPA’s main website while content that is not required to be maintained by law will be deleted or officially recorded as records on a case by case basis.