[bpaddock]

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been archiving the FDA.gov site at archive-it.org .

Leaving a lot of dead links on the FDA site. Sometimes they tell you to look in the archives for the old information, without giving you a link to it, and sometimes they don't, they just expect you to know.

Now why can't the FDA afford the space to keep their pages forever on their own site? Fill in your favorite conspiracy theory...

Some of the information that has been removed, such as the 2015 hearings on Fluoroquinolone antibiotics, are important health research as just one example.

https://archive-it.org/organizations/1137

[Analemma_]

> Now why can't the FDA afford the space to keep their pages forever on their own site? Fill in your favorite conspiracy theory...

This seems like a prime example of Hanlon's razor. Tight government budgets and lowest-bidder contractors not bothering with page permanence strike me as the most likely explanation.

[ghaff]

It may also be worth observing that it's how pretty much any private company website operates. Arguably the FDA should be different and archive old, even outdated, content. But, while private companies may explicitly archive some materials like press releases and earnings reports, 99.9% of their focus is on the current content and they'll mostly just delete anything that's not in service of today.

[kevingadd]

It's not limited to the FDA, in the last 3-4 years many US agencies have purged data from their websites, and in some cases the employees themselves have protested this in public and begged people to make archives. It's great to have multiple archive sources for that stuff because you never know when it's going to disappear if politics are involved.