Back in 2011, the White House issued a freeze on the registration of new .gov Internet domain names by federal agencies and ordered that unneeded domains be identified for culling by the end of the fiscal year. Since then, hundreds of previously registered .gov domains have vanished, along with their contents——many of them sites that the general public was never aware even existed. Now a Freedom of Information Act request by the news site Muckrock has yielded a list of all the domains the US government has let expire over the past decade, and the list stands as a testimony to how convoluted the government's early rush to the Web really was.

About 1,000 .gov domains (PDF) have been terminated as of December 18, 2014. They range from sites that clearly were time-limited (such as 2010census.gov) to local government domains that went unused (like Yuma-AZ.gov). But many were vanity domains or very specific programs within government agencies such as:

Lifeandliberty.gov, a site dedicated to promoting the Protect America Act and the FISA Amendments Act.

Recall.gov, a clearinghouse site created by the George W. Bush administration for multiple agencies of consumer recall notices for cars, boats, food, medicine, cosmetics, consumer products, and pesticides.

FiddlinForesters.gov, a site for the US Forestry Service's official Old Time string band, part of the agency's conservation education program. The Fiddlin' Foresters' last known performance was in 2009 at Arizona's Sabino Canyon Recreation Area.

Safesleep.gov, a domain that apparently (according to the Internet Archive) never had a website associated with it.

Whitenosesyndrome.gov, a site set up by the US Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center and the US Fish and Wildlife Service that dealt with a fatal fungal disease attacking America's hibernating bat colonies.

Other notable sites that were dropped include: Privacy.gov, Technology.gov, Space.gov, Govworks.gov, Results.gov, and ExpectMore.gov.