Government documents are just what they sound like: documents published by a local, state, or federal government. Examples of government documents include Senate bills, reports published by government agencies like the FDA or EPA, and so on.
There are many government documents. Government documents are a good source of statistics and research.
Historically, recent government publications have been freely available online. That has changed since 2025. If you suspect the data you're looking for has been censored from government websites, take a look at the University of Minnesota's "Finding Government Information during the 2025 Administration Transition" guide.
With that out of the way, there are a two easy ways to find government data that hasn't been purged.
Use USA.gov
The usa.gov website is a search engine for US government websites. When you search with it, you search only government websites.
Use Google with advance searched techniques
You can use Google to find government documents if you use a few advanced features. Google allows you to limit your search to certain websites and to certain files.
To begin with, you can limit your searches to .gov sites (government sites) by adding site:.gov to your search. If you wanted to search for government websites about water quality you could type water quality site:.gov. If you want to search just a single website, you can do that too, e.g., water quality site:epa.gov
You can also use Google's advanced features to find PDFs on these sites, rather than just plain webpages. It can be good to limit your searches to PDFs because PDFs are how finished reports are often stored. You can use filetype:pdf to limit your search to PDFs.
So, to find PDFs on the epa.gov site, your search might look like this: water quality site:epa.gov filetype:pdf. (Screenshot below.)
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