What Happened to the OMB Data? Mystery Solved (Partially)

Yesterday I wanted to retrieve some data from the OMB archives, so I went to the usual spot, https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb. There was almost nothing there. All I found were links to “budgetary analysis” of the new administration’s executive orders. The “analysis” pages themselves contain nothing but short paragraphs signed by Acting Budget Director Mark Sandy, which say that the executive orders will not have any significant budgetary impacts. 

I had read of the efforts of paranoid climate scientists to download data from NASA, NOAA, and other sites, fearing that the Trump administration would scrub them all clean, so I got a little paranoid myself. Could it be that the new gang doesn’t want us to have any background data that might be used to put their budget efforts in a bad light?

It turns out that the situation is a little less sinister than it first looked. Turns out that the Obama administration had a “digital transition plan” that archived all the old data. The OMB archives are here, for example. There are no permalinks, though. Any old links you have saved to Obama-era materials take you to a broken link page on the Trump White House site that has a link to the Obama digital transition page. Down at the bottom of that page there is a long list of agency archives, including the one for the OMB. Eventually you can find what you are looking for.

On Thursday, the Senate finally got around to confirming Mick Mulvaney as the new budget director. We can hope he will assign someone to get to work on the amateurish OMB web page that is still there as of today. We can hope that Mulvaney’s people will give us links to the Obama archives. When a new, professional-looking, user-friendly, OMB website appears, we will know that the chaos has settled down in at least one branch of the Trump White House.