Read this article by Gary Price of InfoDocket on why the internet needs to be archived.
Use the INTERNET ARCHIVE WAYBACK MACHINE to find historical web pages.
What happens to the White House website info after a President leaves office?
You can see their sites from the past:
James Jones of Free Government Info: http://freegovinfo.info
responded to a question of mine on a government documents librarians listserv: "is there really a list of forbidden words on government websites?"
Here's some background and some sites to investigate relating to the ways that government information changes:
Executive agency web presence changes over time and with each presidential administration. This is the raison d’etre of the End of Term web archiving project (http://eotarchive.cdlib.org <http://eotarchive.cdlib.org/>).
But the current administration has been markedly different in 2 aspects: their view of what government should (or shouldn’t) do and how they think governments should (or shouldn’t) communicate with its citizens in a truthful manner. Because of their tenuous hold on truth and communication, many people and organizations were alarmed that government information — especially environmental information and data — would be erased. And you can find lots of news reports that have covered this as this is indeed what has happened. Here are just 3 examples, but a simple google search will find others:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-web-pages-erased-and-obscured-under-trump/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/14/donald-trump-climate-change-mentions-government-websites
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/climate/climate-change-trump.html>
There are 2 interlocking projects, run by EDGI and the Sunlight Foundation (kudos to both of them!!), in which you may be interested that have attempted to more systematically track the politically motivated changes and deletions on government Websites.
Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI) web site monitoring project:
https://envirodatagov.org/website-monitoring/ <https://envirodatagov.org/website-monitoring/>
Sunlight Foundation Web integrity project (Sunlight unfortunately had to shut down the project suddenly in January :-( ):
https://sunlightfoundation.com/web-integrity-project/ <https://sunlightfoundation.com/web-integrity-project/>