Shortly after President Donald Trump took office last January, employees at the U.S. Department of Agriculture were reportedly instructed to flag and delete any webpages that mentioned climate change — including resources used by farmers to prepare for extreme weather. In response, a group of environmental and agricultural nonprofits sued the agency over the loss of critical information. In May, just days before a scheduled hearing, the USDA announced it would restore its climate webpages. At that point, “we had essentially won,” said Peter Lehner, managing attorney at Earthjustice, the nonprofit law firm representing the plaintiffs. But the negotiations over a legal settlement continued on.
Last week, the ag department finally settled the lawsuit, agreeing to share the datasets used to power its climate risk viewer and other tools. Even though most of the webpages in question had already been restored, Lehner added, the plaintiffs wanted to ensure access remains public — a priority that prolonged the negotiations.
As part of the settlement, the department of agriculture agreed to keep its climate risk viewer — which contains over 140 layers and includes maps on wildfire risk — online at least until the plaintiffs receive the underlying raw data. That way, Lehner told Grist, if these webpages are taken down at some point in the future, the plaintiffs — such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental nonprofit — would be able to recreate the climate risk maps.
That’s important because the settlement does not guarantee that the USDA will maintain these digital resources indefinitely. “The government should be able to change their website,” Lehner said. “But they have to do it in certain ways. And if it’s important information, they have to give the public notice and they have to do it carefully.” (The Department of Justice, which represented the USDA in the lawsuit, declined to comment on the settlement.)
In the initial complaint, Earthjustice alleged that the USDA’s purge of webpages that mentioned climate change violated multiple federal laws — including the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, which requires federal agencies to give adequate notice before changing the public’s access to informational tools, and the Freedom of Information Act.
Of particular interest to one of the plaintiffs — the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, or NOFA — were webpages related to loans for climate-smart conservation practices. Wes Gillingham, head of the NOFA board, told Grist that the organization directs many growers to these resources to help with the financial cost of implementing more sustainable growing practices.
However, the settlement doesn’t mean that farmers are getting all that they need from the USDA. Gillingham, a farmer himself, added that he is still unsure which loan programs for farmers are available under the second Trump administration. “What loan programs are live and not is a huge question,” he said.
This predicament highlights the financial precarity for many agricultural producers in the U.S., at a time when the federal government has slashed funding programs for farmers. And it illustrates the work that farming groups have left to do to protect their livelihoods. Gillingham noted that he’s currently worried about a future farm bill that could gut funding for conservation practices, like those that can help farmers protect soil health.
Lehner agreed that farmers are struggling under the Trump administration, and that, in a way, gave their lawsuit leverage.
“To be frank, I think the fact that we were representing farmers and others who were saying, ‘Look, this is hurting us. We’re trying to deal with climate change. We’re trying to deal with extreme weather and you’re cutting the legs out from under us,’ that didn’t make them look very good,” he said. “It just made them, in my view, look stupid and mean.”
Editor’s note: Earthjustice and the Natural Resources Defense Council are advertisers with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.