When Donald Trump took office in January, volunteer archivists got to work, ensuring that government websites were backed up before the incoming administration had a chance to purge more than 110,000 government pages.As part of the administration's extremist anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda, agencies were forced to take down any material related to anything from supporting transgender youth to mentions of women in leadership at NASA — a "digital book burning," according to Harvard University social epidemiologist Nancy Krieger.And now, the Trump administration is exacting revenge. The San Francisco Standard reports that Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which has spearheaded a highly destructive and ill-conceived gutting of government agency budgets, is now targeting federal grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Among them? One funding the Internet Archive, a nonprofit founded in 1996 with the aim of providing free access to digitized media, including websites, software, music, and print materials.The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has proven invaluable to researchers, journalists, and archivists, allowing users to go back in time and see how websites looked in the past.According to the Standard, the nonprofit was halfway through an NEH grant of $345,000 when its funding was abruptly cut.It's an especially important initiative, considering the organization was busy archiving websites targeted by the Trump administration."This is really going to impact institutions that we take for granted," Internet Archive director of archiving and data services Jefferson Bailey told the Standard, "like our museums, our historical societies, our public libraries, our academic libraries — just a lot of people that keep information free and accessible and online."Fortunately, according to Bailey, the Internet Archive has other independent streams of funding that will keep it afloat for now.However, smaller nonprofits could suffer greatly as a result of DOGE's NEH cuts. Bay Area-based producer Marc Shaffer called it a "catastrophic development, if not a death blow" for filmmakers."NEH documentaries contribute significantly to American culture," he told the Standard. "They are national treasures deserving of far more support than they receive."While other sources of funding are keeping the Internet Archive afloat, the nonprofit has plenty of other fires to put out as well.Earlier this week, the Internet Archive launched a petition in light of a $700 million lawsuit from major record labels.However, since then, hundreds of musicians have come to speak out in support of the nonprofit.And it's not just musicians — the Internet Archive has grown to be an extremely important tool to ensure that the Trump administration is unable to simply erase the historical record."There's a groundswell of support for the Internet Archive because of the dramatic shift that's going on in parts of the government web infrastructure that you wouldn't imagine would change," Internet Archive founder and director Brewster Kahle told NPR last month. "People are coming and rallying behind us — by using it, by pointing at things, helping organize things, by submitting content to be archived — data sets that are under threat or have been taken down."Share This Article