Why Donald Trump’s environmental data purge is so much worse this time
Now that we’re about halfway into the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, we can take stock of his administration’s destruction of online environmental resources. It’s worse than last time. It’s also, seemingly, just the beginning — paving the way forward for the president’s polluting agenda.
A watchdog group that monitors publicly-available environmental data has recorded 70 percent more federal website changes during Trump’s first 100 days in office in 2025 compared to the start of his first term in 2017.
Federal agencies are taking broader swings to ax public resources from their websites this time around, the report shows. They’re hiding which communities are most affected by pollution. The Trump administration has not only tossed out the most authoritative national reports on climate change, they’re starting to replace facts and evidence with disinformation. We’re seeing a revisionist history unfold.
“You can say anything you want to say if you remove evidence to the contrary.”
“If you suppress data … you can say anything you want to say if you remove evidence to the contrary,” says Gretchen Gehrke, one of the lead authors of the report published this week by the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI).
Looking just at the first 100 days of Trump’s second term compared to the start of his first term, EDGI noted 632 important changes to federal websites this year compared to 371 in 2017. That’s despite EDGI only keeping tabs this year on 20 percent of the websites it monitored during the first term, due to capacity constraints and because the group chose to home in on webpages it thought would be most vulnerable.
They’ve tracked 879 significant changes to 639 different federal webpages during the first 6 months of the current administration. That includes changes to content, like replacing the term “climate change” with “extreme weather,” and the wholesale removal of entire webpages.
Any information about disparities in pollution and the health impacts of climate change have been the biggest targets of deletion. The Environmental Protection Agency’s EJScreen mapping tool, designed to show which populations are disproportionately impacted by air pollutants and other public health hazards across the US, was one of the first resources lost. Federal agencies had essentially purged any of their publicly-available websites on environmental justice by mid-February, according to the report.
“The thing that is the most different is this total erasure of information about environmental racism and the evidence of environmental racism,” Gehrke says. “In the second Trump administration, information control was about removing evidence of inequality.”
As global warming pushes up sea levels, for example, a 2021 EPA report found that Hispanic and Latino individuals are roughly 50 percent more likely than others to live in coastal areas with the highest estimated increases in traffic delays from worsening high-tide flooding. A press release and PDF of the report are still available online. (Did it escape scrutiny because it’s described as a “social vulnerability report” rather than an environmental justice report?) A link in the press release to more “information about environmental justice,” however, is dead. It simply says “Sorry, but this web page does not exist.”
“Information control was about removing evidence of inequality.”
For resources on climate change more broadly across federal websites, changes have “started really ramping up,” Gehrke says. “That story is yet to unfold.” So far, the EPA’s climate change website is still intact. But the Trump administration has terminated the content production team behind climate.gov, and the URL started redirecting people to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website in June. It’s a warning sign that “it is possible that another significant removal of climate change information is currently unfolding as of the writing of this report,” the EDGI report notes.
Scientists raised alarm in July when the Trump administration took down the federal website that houses national climate assessments. The Congressionally-mandated assessments show how climate change affects each region of the US, from threatening ice fishing in the Midwest to raising the risk of window-smashing hail over the Northern Great Plains. During his first term, Trump got flak for releasing the report on a Friday after Thanksgiving — accused of trying to bury it during a holiday weekend. This year, the Trump administration just went ahead and dismissed all the researchers working on the next iteration of the report. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright went so far as to suggest in an interview with CNN this week that the administration would review previously published assessments and “will come out with updated reports on those.”
Wright, who led an oil and gas company before joining Trump’s cabinet, also commissioned climate skeptics to release a misleading report on greenhouse gas emissions last week that rejects scientific consensus on climate change, It comes on the heels of the Trump administration attempting to take away the EPA’s ability to regulate planet-heating pollution by countering the landmark 2009 “endangerment finding” that accurately finds that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health. Climate change, caused by greenhouse gas emissions, is projected to lead to roughly 250,000 additional deaths each year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat illness between 2030 and 2050, according to the World Health Organization.
Neither the Department of Energy nor NOAA immediately responded to inquiries from The Verge. “President Trump was elected with a mandate from the American people to create a more effective and efficient federal government that serves all Americans, and EPA is doing just that,” Brigit Hirsch, EPA Press Secretary, said in an email to The Verge.
Access to as much as 20 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency website was removed throughout Trump’s first term, according to research EDGI published in 2021.
Fortunately, EDGI and other groups have also been working to make data available elsewhere online for the public. The nonprofit Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine can pull up snapshots of what webpages have looked like over the years. Archiving tool Webrecorder also has created mirrors of climate.gov and the US Global Change Research Program website that used to house national climate assessments.
Farmers and environmental groups have also filed suit to force the Trump administration to restore federal resources. Farmers won a legal battle to bring climate content back to US Department of Agriculture webpages. Sierra Club and other groups have sued to bring back EJScreen. In the meantime, a copy of the tool is available from The Public Environmental Data Partners.
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