The Destroyer Of Knowledge

Trump vult ignorantiam per Civitates Foederatas regnare .... 

CIA World Factbook - Website Cancelled

Which is a fancy way of saying that Trump apparently wants ignorance to reign across the United States ....

How else can we interpret some of his actions. For instance, in an unannounced move the CIA terminated its World Factbook on the 4th of February 2026. No advance discussion, no warning and no reprieve for this very popular reference website, that was only updated annually and has now simply gone. Even the existing pages have been removed.

The last available data was downloaded by private researchers but was from 2020 and Web.archive.org have them in a usable format. Originally launched in 1962 as a printed, classified reference manual for intelligence officers, the Factbook offered a detailed, numbers only description of foreign nations, their economies, militaries, resources and societies but without any political slant. It proved so useful to other government agencies, that within a decade an unclassified version was released to the general public.

It went online in 1997. which was in fact when those at PC Towers started using it, the Factbook quickly became a very popular reference site for journalists, fact seekers and the curious worldwide, with millions of visits per year.

Now the fact that this dramatic change has occurred under Donald Trump, can't be, and isn't, a coincidence. His demands that every aspect of US government be directed to serving his agenda, has ripped a hole into many US information services ... for instance he ordered the National Parks Service to remove references to slavery, among a slew of other directives.

Similarly, he previously directed that all US government health websites were to be taken down or seriously modified. Many of these, such as those for US Centers for Disease Control, and Prevention website pages with datasets related to HIV, LGBTQ people, youth health behaviours etc have now been removed, or replaced with new content that's in-line with Trump's and Robert Kennedy Jrs views on these subjects, as well as new treatment guidelines for certain infections. Many of the pages have included a note that said “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”

Elsewhere the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights, and National Institutes of Health Office of Research on Women’s Health, have also been removed or emptied of content. Similarly, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting also announced in January 2026 that it was dissolving, following a $1.1 billion federal funding cut. PBS and a few others, are attempting to continue independently, but with more fund raising issues than in the past, when some federal funds where available. |However much of the federal funds were being allocated to local state public broadcasting services, that often served local and rural communities across the USA, and many of  these stations have closed across the U.S. or have faced forced staff layoffs, and programming cancellations.

So, the removal of the CIA World Factbook is not so surprising in the context of US government information website removals and public broadcasting closures under Trumps regime. But even so, the question has to be why the CIA World Factbook website? This can't be an expensive website to maintain, only being updated once a year, so cost can't be a real excuse. The only earlier comment that might pertain to its closure was a stated aim from Trumps appointed CIA Director John Ratcliffe, to end all programs that didn’t advance the agency’s core missions.

However perhaps more pertinently, early in Trump's second term, the White House imposed staffing cuts at the CIA and the National Security Agency, forcing the agency to do more with less. Money could be so tight, that further updates couldn't be guaranteed, but even so, why remove the existing pages?

Trump will be gone in 3 years (we assume), and unless Vance wins, a more financially sympathetic regime will be in place, and updates could be resumed. So one has to assume that an ideological reason also exists. Alternatives to the CIA World Factbook, such as Britannica’s World Data also used CIA World Factbook as one of its sources, and so that too is going to be affected.

So this is yet another sad event in the disunited states, and just a part of a legacy of public ignorance that's being created with each public utterance, diktat and executive order. Its actually embarrassing watching all this unfold, and the apparent inability of anyone to stop this intellectual vandalism taking place (Shame on all the Republican politicians who do nothing) .... Rome was sacked by Barbarians, not by the Romans themselves.