With Donald Trump stepping back into office, advocates are warning that access to important environmental and public health datasets could be at risk.
Information about climate change vanished from federal websites under Donald Trump, who has repeatedly called climate change “a hoax.” Now, federal agencies could face deep staff and budget cuts overseen by Trump cronies Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. The proposed cuts not only threaten what kind of data the government shares but also whether it can collect and organize it at all.
“The funding, the people, the cultural knowledge associated with these tools and the data are just as, if not more, important than the data itself.”
Federal agencies gather all kinds of data — from air quality readings to research on extreme weather events. Researchers and advocates have been scrambling to save as much data as they can, a skill they honed during Trump’s first term. Even so, relying on outdated information has its pitfalls. Gaps in government data collection or maintenance could leave city planners and community groups stuck with an incomplete picture of the risks posed by pollution and climate change in their area.
“The funding, the people, the cultural knowledge associated with these tools and the data are just as, if not more, important than the data itself,” says Gabriel Watson, data science and applications lead at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center.
Updating data
One key resource that could languish under the Trump administration is the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool, EJScreen.
This tool helps urban planners, people who work in health and education, and community advocates understand whether certain populations are disproportionately impacted by smog, toxic waste, or other hazards in a specific area. The EPA uses EJScreen in its own environmental assessments and permitting decisions, while nonprofits use it for grant applications.
Even if it stays online, the tool is not as useful without constant upkeep. Watson compares that scenario to a computer running on an old operating system. “If we stopped development at Windows 95 and that’s all we were still using, there would be a lot of questions asked in terms of, well, what happened?” he says.
Much of the environmental data included in EJScreen is collected by the EPA itself. The EPA isn’t likely to abandon its air quality monitors anytime soon, but Project 2025 — a conservative roadmap for the second Trump administration — proposes eliminating the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights that manages the tool.
There are also socioeconomic indicators included in EJScreen, such as information about the percentage of people of color, low-income households, and residents with limited English language skills within a census block group.
“On the ground, realities change very fast.”
Project 2025, which Trump disavowed during the campaign but has since embraced after the election, proposes to reconsider questions about race and ethnicity in the decennial census. It also suggests adding a citizenship question, something Trump tried to do during his first term. Civil rights advocates warn that doing so could make it harder to collect responses from Latino and Asian American communities, which might further marginalize those groups and lead to less accurate data.
The roadmap also calls for drastic staff cuts at federal agencies including the EPA. That sentiment is echoed in Musk and Ramaswamy’s plans for the new Department of Government Efficiency Trump tasked them with leading.
To be sure, EJScreen managed to survive round one of PresidentTrump. The EPA released the tool publicly in 2015 on a “shoestring budget,” and the agency has been able to update it each year since then, according to Matthew Lee, who co-leads EJScreen at the EPA. “Now we have a more robust budget associated with EJScreen … whether or not we continue with that budget, I trust that we’ll be able to get the annual updates out.”
“Having that most up to date data is paramount to the success of the [EPA environmental justice] program,” Lee adds. “On the ground, realities change very fast,” he says. People move in and out of a neighborhood, and new sources of pollution add to the existing mix.
Archiving data
A scrappy, grassroots effort to archive government data cropped up in response to Trump’s election in 2016. After he tapped a notorious climate change denier to head up his transition team for the EPA, researchers quickly came together to form the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI). They organized “guerrilla archiving” events, enlisting hundreds of volunteers to help them identify and save environmental datasets.
They were able to archive 200 terabytes of data and content from government websites between the fall of 2016 and the spring of 2017. Their work attracted so much attention that EDGI members think they might have deterred the Trump administration from outright deleting data; much of what they archived stayed up on federal websites.
Even so, there were losses when it came to how much information agencies shared with the public about climate change. The group documented a near 40 percent decline in the term “climate change” across websites for federal environmental agencies. Access to as much as 20 percent of the EPA website was removed, according to EDGI.
Trump’s team is likely better prepared now to limit access to information, EDGI warns. “I think it’s a much bigger threat this time around,” says Gretchen Gehrke, EDGI cofounder and website monitoring program lead. “We may see massive data deletion, but we also might see just the deterioration of data because it’s not being actively managed or becomes inaccessible.”
“I think it’s a much bigger threat this time around.”
But EDGI and its partners are more prepared now, too. Back in 2016, it teamed up with the End of Term Web Archive project, an effort to save content on federal government websites during every presidential transition. Since 2008, it has saved snapshots of what those websites looked like from administration to administration through the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library of sorts. That work has been underway again since the fall. Instead of needing to organize impromptu guerrilla archiving events to identify datasets to save like it did in 2016, they’ve been collecting suggestions from partners for months.
Over the past four years, the Biden administration has launched new web tools to provide information about climate change and its effects on extreme weather and public health. There’s now Heat.gov to monitor heatwaves across the US, for example, and the Climate Mapping for Resilience & Adaptation (CMRA) website for a broader picture of disasters including drought, wildfires, and flooding.
For more than 100 years, as the federal government published studies and other documents on paper, copies were distributed to some 1,200 libraries across the US through the Federal Depository Library Program. That’s been a deterrent in the past for any single government that might want to make information disappear because they’d have to physically destroy all of those copies, Mark Phillips, an associate university librarian at the University of North Texas, tells The Verge. Now, it’s easier for information to vanish if that content is housed in a single website.
“We want to make sure that this work that was done for United States citizens is available … and that it can be used to further science, further policy,” Phillips says. “So that it doesn’t go away and just become lost.”
