Saving U.S. Climate and Environmental Data Before It Goes Away

Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, thousands of government data sets have been altered or removed, including key tools that researchers and policymakers use to track which communities are most at risk from climate change and toxic hazards.

Eric Nost is a geographer and policy scholar at the University of Guelph in Canada who has been working with the U.S.-based Environmental Data and Governance Initiative to help track and back up these resources before they are lost. He says while every administration change comes with website alterations and shifts to how data is presented or organized, this time things are very different.

“When you start taking down this information, changing how issues are described and doing so in misleading ways,” he says, “really, what it is, is censorship and propaganda.” He spoke to Yale Environment 360 about his efforts.

Yale Environment 360: What did you and your colleagues at the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative start doing when it became clear in 2024 that Trump might be returning to the White House?

Eric Nost.
University of Guelph

Eric Nost: Given the possibility of Trump being elected again, there was planning in the works as the Biden administration came to a close. The Wayback Machine, which takes snapshots of pages over time, is great at capturing static web pages, not so great at archiving the data sets you need to click on and download. So, we began reaching out and working with partners, eventually coming to call ourselves the Public Environmental Data Partners. We developed a list of several hundred data sets across U.S. federal agencies that we used frequently and also did a public solicitation. That list turned out to be several hundred data sets, which is a lot. From this we whittled down to a list of 60 data sets we felt were really at risk, which we divvied up and archived in a variety of ways, downloading it and making it available one way or another.

e360: What has happened since Trump returned to office in January?

Nost: Data.gov is a central repository of government data sets that indexes things and makes them easier to find: As of the end of January, around 2,000 records had gone missing on Data.gov, out of a grand total of about 308,000. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the data are gone from the record forever. But it’s certainly not good, because it’s making it all less available.

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Trump’s first actions from day one were really targeted at DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], in addition to basic rescinding of involvement in climate action, such as the Paris Agreement. That has really directed what agencies have done. The 25-year-old climate change center at the Department of Transportation, for example, was very quick to go. The EPA removed “climate change” from its website navigation, making it harder to find those pages.

The biggest set of changes we have seen is the removal of language on environmental justice and DEI — the language and data and tools. What we haven’t seen so far is pure biophysical climate data removal. It’s not like entire NASA climate data sets have gone missing. We tend to be very wary of saying the data are gone or completely missing. Every agency has its internal data systems, and surely it’s on someone’s laptop somewhere. Whether it’s actually publicly available is a whole separate question. There are data sets — like, for instance, a set of records related to grants that the EPA makes or has made for environmental justice purposes — that I can’t find anymore, as hard as I’ve tried. I don’t think it exists anywhere on the internet.

“It does seem quite tough for my colleagues in the States. There may be more leeway for someone not in the U.S. to be doing this kind of work.”.

e360: What important things have been removed?

Nost: It’s not just data that matters, but also code for websites that people interact with. There are a lot of important tools out there. Even if data is there somewhere, it’s not much use if it’s all zipped up in a file.

The Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool was developed under Biden’s Justice40 initiative, which was an early executive order under his administration that sought to allocate 40 percent of climate investments to so-called disadvantaged communities. This tool helped to identify those communities. Trump rescinded Biden’s executive order, and the tool came down within 72 hours of Trump’s inauguration.

But the thing had been developed as an open source tool from day one, and so the code was already available. So we had already made a copy. We were able to fairly readily rebuild the tool and host it on our own website.

Similarly, EJScreen was the EPA’s tool for similarly trying to understand communities that are on the front lines of toxic pollutants. There are a lot of problems with EJScreen, certainly there’s a lot of limitations. But that tool was well used by community organizations, by state and local governments, for grant-writing or communications or advocacy. It had been around since the Obama administration; it had survived the first Trump administration. But that was taken down on February 5. Again, because the code had been made public, we had been able to either make copies of that data or, in some cases, reverse engineered what the data should have been. We were able to make a copy and make it pretty much fully functional again.

CLICK TO ENLARGE. Left: FEMA’s climate resilience website in December. Right: The same site after Trump took office in January, with explicit references to “climate change” removed.
Wayback Machine

e360: When did you first get involved tracking government data?

Nost: Eight years ago, at the start of Trump’s first administration, I joined the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative [EDGI, pronounced “edgy”]. That group was formed immediately after November 2016 and Trump’s first election, taking his threat to dismantle the EPA seriously. EDGI is the main organization tracking changes to government websites.

e360: What does the work with EDGI involve?

Nost: We work with the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine. Basically, every week — and in the early days after Trump’s first win, twice a week — we would generate reports that were spreadsheets of links to government pages. We would then pull these up in our custom software and volunteers would look to see: Has anything changed? And if so, is that page or is that change significant?

e360: Who funds EDGI?

Nost: A variety of funders, mostly foundations. EDGI has been funded by the National Science Foundation; that funding has been paid out. Perhaps there could have been an issue if the timing had been different.

“It’s really disheartening. What we’re seeing is a real gutting of public infrastructure and public capacity.”

e360: Does it help being a Canadian doing this work and not someone in the U.S.?

Nost: With all the changes to research funding at NSF [National Science Foundation] and beyond, it does seem quite tough for some of my colleagues in the States to be working productively on some of these things. There may be more leeway for someone not in the U.S. to be doing this kind of work.

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e360: What happened during Trump’s first administration?

Nost: The overall story from Trump 1.0 was we didn’t see a whole lot of data go missing, per se. But what we did see was the removal and alteration of many different web resources. So, web pages were taken offline. Text on web pages was modified to change how climate issues were presented, often weakening climate language towards more palatable but perhaps vague statements. We saw a lot of that. We published a report in 2019.

e360: Have the courts gotten involved with the issue of missing data and resources?

Nost: This is not something we really saw in the first Trump administration, but we are now seeing legal activism. The USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture], for instance, took down a number of climate-related resources, and now a group of farmers is suing to have those resources restored. This follows a similar lawsuit filed by doctors against the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] when it removed a bunch of public health data sets and web pages. They were able to successfully argue that the CDC has to bring it back in the interest of public health, and they have done so.

President Trump signs an executive order flanked by members of his cabinet on February 14.
Andrew Harnik / Getty Images

e360: Are any records protected?

Nost: One of the reasons why we haven’t seen a lot of biophysical climate data go missing yet is because a lot of it is congressionally mandated. For instance, reports from industry on how many greenhouse gasses they release each year — that’s congressionally mandated. Same thing with a lot of NOAA data sets. Which isn’t to say that the Trump administration won’t flout those at some point, as it has with some other congressional requirements, like USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] funding. But that’s why we don’t see a lot of that data going missing — yet.

e360: Of course it’s not just data going missing, but peoples’ jobs. Thousands of government workers, including research scientists, have been fired. Any comment about that?

Nost: It’s really disheartening. What we’re seeing is a real gutting of public infrastructure and public capacity. That’s both in terms of people and data sets. Those are investments, in people and data, that the public has made over decades. What are we gutting it for? A tax cut for the wealthy?

Those people are the ones who make the data, collect it, and steward it. NOAA might be mandated to collect certain data, but it’s not mandated to have a certain-sized workforce. If there’s not the people there to produce the data, we get gaps in the records.

“The U.S. government is the world’s biggest publisher. People from around the world turn to it as a source of information.”

e360: What else is different for this administration?

Nost: One of the things that we see this time around that we didn’t see the first time around is the removal of access to information from folks outside the U.S. Like with FEMA, the county-by-county tracking of risk to natural disasters is no longer available to folks outside of the U.S.

e360: Why do these changes matter?

Nost: This Trump administration has undone 30 years of environmental justice work by rescinding Clinton’s 1994 executive order that required agencies to make achieving EJ a part of their mission. By getting the EPA to evaluate, for example, whether it is permitting polluters disproportionately in Black communities. It didn’t necessarily have a whole lot of teeth, and a lot of complaints were written about it over the years, but at least it was there. That was gone on day one.

The U.S. government is the world’s biggest publisher. People from around the world turn to it as a source of information. So when you start taking down this information, changing how issues are described, and doing so in misleading ways, really, what it is, is censorship and propaganda.

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e360: What can or should people be doing?

Nost: Advocacy for policy change. Joining organizations like EDGI — we would always like more volunteers. Even if you have one website you routinely use, make a copy on the Wayback Machine. It’s easy — just put the link it. It helps build this public backup and public record.

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