Over the past year, federal websites have changed drastically. The content on thousands of sites has been edited to reflect administration policies, removing information about inequality, reproductive health, vaccine safety, climate change, and more. Datasets have been deleted, longstanding surveys canceled, and historical accounts rewritten.
This disappearing data and history is an ongoing record of the administration’s priorities. But the changes run deeper than widespread deletions and rewrites. The web architecture of federal websites is also changing, transforming what is usually considered mundane administrivia into a weapon of policy. The architecture of a site–its structure, the way information is organized, and the links between sections–can be used to amplify some aspects while hiding others, to make data less accessible even if technically available, and to shape users’ navigation.
At The Workers Lab, we are interested in how these changes can impact workers’ access to information about their rights and the laws that impact them. We examined Department of Labor websites and found that since January 2025, sites have evolved in ways that promote President Trump’s executive orders, showing how something seemingly neutral can advance policy without public notice or legislative direction. The Workers Lab team developed an AI-assisted comparison tool, called LabReport, to identify and document changes across Department of Labor websites.
This tool compares current sites with pre-President Trump versions available on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and extracts and summarizes meaningful changes. We looked not only at what was deleted from sites, as many have done, but also edits to both content and structure–where navigation bars change, how content has been prioritized or buried, how titles have shifted. We examined these changes alongside a content analysis of executive orders dealing directly or indirectly with workers, and found that more than 70 percent of edits occurred within 30 days of a related executive order. The webpages–or rather, the unelected unknown people editing them–are carrying out executive orders.
For example, several executive orders framed worker performance as a matter of individual excellence. Following their issuance, websites were restructured to eliminate and make less available any information on workplace mental health, which implicitly or explicitly held employers accountable for workers’ well-being. References to workplace stress and harassment as employer-level hazards were removed, while mental health and stress toolkits were buried behind additional layers of navigation, making them harder to find.
In another example, executive orders pushed meritocracy in workplaces and attacked any identity-aware safeguards against discrimination as unlawful. Afterwards, Department of Labor sites on gender and racial inequality were removed, and a section for weekly announcements on pay equity was eliminated. Information about the rights of domestic workers were both trimmed down and nested deeper as a subtopic, rather than appearing on the homepage’s main navigation bar. These edits make it more difficult to find evidence that structural inequalities exist, making it harder to refute the meritocratic narrative of workplace promotions.
Following executive orders focused on government efficiency, navigation menus were thinned across sites, aligning their appearance with a narrative of streamlining. However, the elimination and burial of data and information actually prevents people from holding the government and its employees accountable–for efficiency or anything else. The search function for OSHA workplace fatalities was removed. EEOC statistics that were once downloadable for analysis are now included as uneditable files two levels deep. The page summarizing data sources was removed, making finding evidence much harder.
Though each of these changes seems small, together they show a clear pattern of silently reinforcing executive orders, creating a new reality aligned with the administration’s narrative and making sure no one has the information they need to refute it. An edited navigation bar may initially look like a leaner, cleaner design, but also is an obstacle to visitors exploring their rights or holding the government accountable. These changes sidestep any legislative process, happening quickly and quietly, hidden behind a facade of technical neutrality.
Since their creation, government websites have been one of the primary ways Americans can learn about their rights–rights that have long defined what it means to be an American. When those sites are revised to reflect a narrow and politicized narrative, those rights are at risk. In the face of these changes, in the context of eroding civil rights, archiving is an essential tool of democracy. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is a vital resource, as is the work of the Data Rescue Project and others working tirelessly to document disappearing data and archive existing resources before it is too late.
Technology has been leveraged to enact policies without oversight through website architecture, but it also provides us the tools to understand and resist these changes. The analysis shared here was made possible by the same technologies that allow silent overhaul of our public information. Transparency and public oversight can and must transform this weapon of policy enforcement into a tool of democracy.
The LabReport tool was developed by Derin Arat, Kalu Obasi, Oren Goldberg, and Catherine Huang.