Looking for U.S. Federal Data?

The United States Government has a long history of creating and making publicly available data which promote the public good.  Many of these data are discoverable through data.gov; however, many more datasets and data portals are hosted on government websites and discoverable through government partner databases, such as USDA's Economics, Statistics and Market Information System hosted through Cornell University or ICSPR.

ICPSR has thematic collections, which includes federal statistical agency datasets on topics such as health, population health, education, and more.

Existing Alternative Data Sources

See also the subpages of this section of the guide for resources divided by field/topic.

Federal government websites are often changed reflecting the priorities of the current administration.  But, sometimes you want some information or data on a previous website.  The general websites can usually be found through the End of Term Crawl.  However, discoverability and searching is more challenging. 

If you know the URL of a government website that is now down (usually giving a 404 error or similar), check for an archived copy at the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

You can find past captures and suggest pages to be saved. If you are logged into an Internet Archive account, you'll have additional options when you save pages.

If you want to find URLs through a search engine (instead of the google/bing tracking URLs), a good search engine to use is DuckDuckGo, which doesn't track you when you copy a URL.

For a known .gov URL, like www.epa.gov, you can substitute .govwayback.com for .gov and it will redirect you to an archived version of the site through Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. 

Examples

Simple Domain:

• www.epa.gov  www.epa.govwayback.com

Specific Page:

• www.whitehouse.gov/administration  www.whitehouse.govwayback.com/administration

Complex URL:

• www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2   www.congress.govwayback.com/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2