Photo by Jon Tyson

Since day one of his second term, Donald Trump has been waging a war against information, government data collection and the public’s right to know. And yet over a year later, the White House is still finding new ways to delete inconvenient facts.

Most recently, CBS News reported that the Justice Department has deleted press releases having to do with the January 6, 2021, riots at the Capitol. As CBS framed it, “The purge of news releases documenting criminal charges, convictions and sentencings is the latest step by the Trump administration to revise the history of the assault on the Capitol.”

Given Trump’s commitment to pardoning or commuting the sentences of those who sought to overturn the 2020 presidential elections, these latest actions may come as no surprise. Nonetheless, the actions would appear to be tied to the administration’s drive to create a $1.7 billion slush fund to compensate its political allies who were supposedly “targeted” by the Biden Justice Department. While this plan has run into some legal and political headwinds of late, the Trump administration’s delete-the-evidence strategy serves a purpose. As CBS noted, the Justice Department removed releases detailing convictions against far-right groups like the Proud Boys – several of which were recently vacated by request of the administration.

The Justice Department, it should be noted, is proud of its work to memory hole the January 6 crimes: “We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes…. This includes stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.”

Destroying CFPB

There are other ways they are purging inconvenient information from the previous administration. From the start, the Trump administration made no secret of its intention to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the independent agency established under the Dodd-Frank Act that enforces consumer protection laws. The Trump administration’s actions to undermine and essentially eliminate the CFPB – Elon Musk famously vowed to ‘delete’ it – have resulted in a protracted legal battle over its very existence.

For the White House, destroying the CFPB means disappearing the work that the agency has done. As reported by the news site NOTUS, “The CFPB removed around 1,700 website pages spanning press releases, consumer advisories, speeches, testimony and op-eds dating before February 2025.”

The administration has removed archives of material that are a core part of what the CFPB does – protecting consumers. As NOTUS reported, this includes consumer advisories and resources to help consumers navigate financial matters like medical debt collection and hidden fees. And it’s not as if the agency has replaced the existing material – there have been no new advisories since the Trump strategy was put into effect.

Deleting inconvenient information obviously does a disservice to the public; in these cases, it increases the chances that Americans will be scammed and erases  information about crimes that were committed in support of Trump’s campaign to overturn an election he lost. The wider story of this administration’s destruction of government data – which has ranged from cancelling research on food insecurity to deleting a government report on right-wing domestic terrorism to cutting funding for climate tracking satellites – is about fulfilling a more fundamental goal: Making it harder for all of us to know what is happening in the world.

This first appeared on CEPR.