"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute." -- George Orwell, 1984
A number of posts have discussed presidential documents, official data, and government websites. The Trump administration has killed off or limited access to many such resources, including the CIA World Factbook, State Department X posts, and DOJ press releases about the January 6 insurrection.
Treasury's own 2026 National Money Laundering Risk Assessment documented active cases of drug traffickers, cybercriminals, and fraudsters laundering proceeds through anonymous U.S. shell companies — and then, three months later, the agency permanently eliminated the only federal database designed to expose who owns them.
FinCEN issued a final rule on August 11, 2026, permanently removing the requirement for U.S. companies and U.S. persons to disclose beneficial ownership information — the identities of the individuals who actually control a business — to its national database under the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA). The rule took effect upon publication in the Federal Register on August 12. FinCEN simultaneously pledged to delete every record previously submitted by U.S. persons — names, addresses, and identity documents collected throughout 2024 when the law was briefly operative.
JP Alegre at The Deep Dive:
A machine-learning project a Canadian university student built in high school has become the basis for the most complete public archive of a quarter-century of USAID program evaluations, after the Trump administration took the original database offline last year.
USAID’s Development Experience Clearinghouse dates back to 1975 and has grown to include more than 168,000 documents on the agency’s foreign aid work. Its website went dark in early 2025 without warning as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency moved through the agency, and workers reportedly hauled its servers entirely away.
Musk wrote on X at the time that he had “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
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Ketevan Gallagher had no connection to that fight when she downloaded more than 4,000 evaluation PDFs from the DEC in 2024, for a senior research project using machine learning to analyze the reports. She’s now studying computer engineering at the University of Toronto. She reached out to AidData, a development research lab at William & Mary, when the DEC went offline the following year, to see if it could preserve her collection.
AidData published the archive this month at usaid-archive.aiddata.org, describing Gallagher’s organized dataset as “a unique solution for those searching for lessons learned” from decades of US foreign aid work. It now holds roughly 4,500 evaluations spanning 2000 to 2023, a subset of the original collection. Gallagher said she was “very grateful that AidData was able to preserve this data.”