Trump administration removes climate information from federal websites
If President Trump’s first term was an indication, many government websites with environmental information on climate science will change drastically in the first months of his new administration.
NASA’s climate website, for example, already displays a message about moving to a “more integrated portal on science,” with the word “climate” removed from the URL.
Some of the changes may already be making it harder for U.S. climate scientists to collaborate internationally.
David Ho, a University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa climate researcher, said last week he found an error message when he tried to look for reports related to his work on ocean carbon cycles on the White House Office of Science and Technology website.
On Bluesky, Ho wrote, “But when I visited, they’re just gone. Sad.”
Such disruptions can undermine trust and confidence in U.S. science, he said.
“Many of these international collaborations take time to build and execute,” he said. “Our international partners want to know that our agreements and policies have endurance and won’t just change suddenly because of politics.”
The U.S. has long been a key funder of international climate research, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and has pursued policies that drive international research, he said. “If those websites disappear, or if those policies change, we may not have the data or funding to pull off our international collaborations,” he added.
Not Just Climate Info
Altering or removing science information on federal websites is only part of the disruption to the U.S. science community resulting from several of President’s Trump’s executive orders. The journal Nature reported Jan. 30 that U.S. science was “in chaos” following Trump’s order to freeze many grant and loan programs that help fund research in all scientific areas.
And the administration hasn’t limited its scrubbing of federal websites to those with documents and data explicitly focused on climate change.
Duke University researcher Tyler Norris recently noticed his work on energy grid interconnection had been removed from the Department of Energy’s website.
Trump and his allies have been critical of FERC Order 1920, a policy meant to improve grid interconnection that experts say is critical to decarbonization.
“Trump’s appointees have removed web access to USDOE’s interconnection innovation webinars, including my presentation from 2024,” Norris wrote on social media. “Is interconnect efficiency…woke?,” another user responded.
“Mr. Trump signaled on day one that he intends to use all available levers to promote fossil fuels while sidelining energy technologies he opposes, and his administration’s apparent efforts to censor key technical publications appear consistent with this objective,” Norris told Inside Climate News.
The Trump administration is also removing climate information and documents from the U.S. State Department website, which a few days ago had a climate section filled with documents related to U.S. climate policies aimed at meeting the terms of the 2015 Paris climate pact, as well as materials outlining recent plans to cut emissions of greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide, including methane.
But searching the current State Department website for the term “global warming” now just leads to a long list of non-functioning links, with the Biden-era climate materials relegated to archives that have to be searched for separately.
Stop-work orders by the State Department have had an immediate impact on American scientists.
Indiana University Earth scientist Gabriel Filippelli posted a screenshot of the notification on Bluesky, and wrote, “And just like that, my new award from the @StateDept to help Pakistan grapple with air pollution and climate change is no more, thanks to this new administration.”
At another federal research facility, an Inside Climate News request for an interview about clean energy was met with this response: “I appreciate the interview request (it’s always exciting to hear that people are reading our papers!), but at this time we have been asked to not give interviews during the transition.”
White House officials did not immediately answer questions about the removal of information or about future plans for climate information, and a State Department spokesperson said the removal of climate information was a normal part of a transition between administrations.
A search for “climate policy” on the White House website leads only to a list of proposed rollbacks of Biden’s climate initiatives, as well as to a page outlining the incoming administration’s plans to increase domestic fossil energy production.
By contrast, the last archived OSTP web page from the Biden administration features climate science and environmental justice front and center, and promises to make the federal government “a source of credible, useful, science-based information on climate, nature, and the environment.”
The purge of science websites extends to institutions like the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, where Indigenous Earth science researchers’ networks like Rising Voices have been removed.
NCAR spokesperson David Hosansky said the institution closed its offices on diversity, equity and inclusion to remain in compliance with President Trump’s executive orders.
“We are in the process of evaluating all of our programs and webpages to ensure compliance with new exe
cutive orders. This has included un-publishing the Rising Voices webpages,” he said. “We are still working to understand these orders, and as we get more detailed guidance, we may make adjustments to what programs can or cannot be supported or what information can be published on our websites.”
Data Preservation Efforts
Much of the web material from previous administrations going back to 2008 is preserved in the End of Term Web Archive, a collaboration of nonprofit groups, universities and two federal agencies, the U.S. Government Publishing Office and the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration,
The End of Term Archive project uses web crawlers to scour federal websites and preserve important scientific data and other information, often based on nominations from the public. The archived web pages enable researchers, journalists and members of the public to view information that was available on federal webpages at the end of each administration and allow for comparison of each administration’s pages.
The Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that collaborates on preserving governmental websites during transitions, says in a post on its own website that preservation of government records in the digital age has become even more important because “government publishing has shifted from the distribution of unalterable printed books to digital posts on government websites. Such digital publications can be moved, altered, and withdrawn at the flick of a switch.” By contrast, in the print era, “it was taken for granted that, once government information was released to the public, it would not be withdrawn or altered or lost.”
Other organizations are also backing up critical climate information, including the Urban Ocean Lab, a policy research group that has already preserved documents that might otherwise be much harder to find, like White House reports with important information on adapting to climate impacts.
The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a nonprofit watchdog group, is focused more specifically on preserving important data sets from federal websites, and is also accepting suggestions for data gathering. And the Data Liberation Project, run by MuckRock and Big Local News, also focuses on identifying and reformatting government datasets of public interest.
The incoming administration, however, “has promised an all-out war on science and scientists,” said Melissa Finucane, vice president of science and innovation with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit science integrity watchdog group.
“And they’re working hand in hand with corporate polluters to intimidate scientists,” she said. “At the end of the day, it endangers people, communities, our economy, and, of course, the planet.”
Research Shows Past Science Tampering
During the first Trump presidency, the Union of Concerned Scientists cataloged dozens of instances of how the administration may have altered or deleted science information from federal websites, or altered other scientific information with potentially harmful consequences for the public.
Interventions in climate-related government information included censoring the word “climate” in press releases, Finucane said, noting a pattern of the previous Trump administration downplaying human-caused global warming. In 2019, for instance, the U.S. Geological Survey delayed a press release about the cost of climate damage to California’s economy before releasing a version that omitted references to climate change, she said.
In another, more blatant attempt to misrepresent climate science at the highest level of government, two political appointees to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy tried to publish several research papers promoting discredited climate science theories under OSTP auspices.
In 2019, Trump himself tried to convey inaccurate information about Hurricane Dorian by altering a National Weather Service map with a marker, potentially increasing un
certainty and anxiety both within and outside the broad region that was hammered by the hurricane.
More confusion about weather and climate threats could also result from Trump’s attempt to rename the Gulf of Mexico. During a recent outbreak of unusual cold and snowy weather in the South, the State of Florida posted weather info and followed Trump’s lead by referring to the Gulf of America, which no Gulf region resident had ever heard before, in an official communication. At the same time, the National Weather Service’s warnings continued to refer only to the Gulf of Mexico.
From 2017 to 2021, the Trump administration removed science-based information on environmental issues, such as water pollution, climate change and endangered species, from agency websites about 1,400 times, according to a 2021 report from the Environmental Data Governance Initiative, a research collaborative promoting evidence-based policy-making and public interest science.
In 2022, a study documented 428 unique instances of anti-science behavior during the first Trump administration, a number the researchers suspected was an undercount. “There is reason to believe that many anti-science actions were not reported and thus are not captured in the tracker, and therefore the total represents a conservative estimate of anti-science actions taken between November 2016 and January 2021,” they wrote.
A 2020 report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of the Inspector General included a survey showing that almost 400 EPA scientists had noticed violations of the agency’s scientific integrity policy in just the second half of 2018. Most of them didn’t report the violations because they feared retaliation, perceived suppression or interference by agency leadership or felt that reporting would make no difference.
Other scientists said similar, sometimes demoralizing threats loom in the years ahead.
“We face a genuinely hostile moment in the U.S. for advancing action on climate change that is informed by science,” Timmons Roberts, director of the Climate Social Science Network, wrote in Friday’s member newsletter. “This is a new era of obstruction, one where the state is itself blocking action.”
Science Institutions as Bulwarks?
Darya Minovi, a senior analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists Center for Science and Democracy, said she hopes scientific institutions can be a bulwark against potentially harmful decisions to alter or purge climate and other scientific information.
“Hopefully, the National Academies and organizations like ours will be able to call out when anti-science decisions are being made,” she said. “When you sideline science, it can cost lives and I think we are seeing that with the gag order on health agencies.”
That’s especially concerning in the midst of “an ongoing and worsening bird flu outbreak,” she said.
“The information that the Center for Disease Control provides is helpful for public health researchers, for hospitals, and for doctors that are responding to the CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which they’ve put out every week for over 60 years, except for last week.”
She added that, even though some people think it’s irrelevant that federal websites are being purged, there are people who go to those websites “every single day to gather authoritative information about issues that impact their health, their family, their community,” she said. “When that’s distorted or removed there’s a potential for life threatening-consequences.”
Minovi said every presidential transition brings some website changes, but she is especially concerned about the potential scope of changes under the new Trump administration.
“I think one thing that we’re really seeing now is a weaponization of language, and especially science-based language,” in the ongoing culture war, she said, using climate science as an example. There is no scientific debate about global warming or its causes, “but we saw during the last Trump administration, and we’re starting to see it now, that climate change is treated like a dirty word, despite obviously widespread scientific support for the concept and that it’s happening.”
What Will Change?
There are concerns that NASA’s climate information page may soon be hidden, but for now, key climate indicators—skyrocketing carbon dioxide, methane and temperatures and record low global ice extent—are still spread across the bottom of the webpage, along with the message that “There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Human activity is the principal cause.”
Similarly, the as-yet unchanged EPA website on climate’s effects on health states: “The changing climate impacts society and ecosystems in a broad variety of ways. For example, climate change can alter rainfall, influence crop yields, affect human health, cause changes to forests and other ecosystems, and even impact our energy supply. Climate-related impacts are occurring across the country and over many sectors of our economy.”
How long those science-based climate statements will remain is unclear with a president who has declared that climate change a hoax and has filled his administration with officials who have announced their intent to rewrite rules to allow more greenhouse gas emissions and ease the development of fossil fuels. By the end of Trump’s first term, watchdog groups had tracked hundreds of cases of climate-related information being altered or removed from the EPA website.
Key websites to watch include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climate webpage, which has not changed yet, and remained fairly active in posting up-to-date science-based climate information during Trump’s first term.
But NOAA is specifically targeted by Project 2025, a transition guide for the new administration written by a coalition of conservative organizations. Backers of Project 2025 have referred to NOAA as a source of climate alarmism, and in one section, the document calls for dismantling the agency and privatizing its services.
For now, the heart of NOAA’s global climate data distribution system, the National Centers for Environmental Information website, is also unchanged, and continues to feature public access to climate data in an endless stream of configurations, including data and graphics that show the impacts of global warming such as the rise of record warm days per year compared to the decline of cold days.
Political tug-of-war is not unusual for federal agencies in polarized political times, but NOAA has a long record of independence and bipartisan support that could be tested in the coming years. Trump’s previous record has left the Union of Concerned Scientists especially concerned that the attacks on science will intensify during the second Trump administration.
But scientists and science institutions are often slow to respond to political attacks and manipulations, Finucane said.
“When there is someone at the very top saying, ‘Don’t trust scientists,’ because it’s to their advantage, if there’s an administration that wants to create confusion for a political reason, they’re very good at doing that.
“Scientists are more methodical and slow-moving, because we build evidence over time,” she said. “So we’re often caught on the back foot, thinking, how did this happen?”
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