The George Washington University's National Security Archive published a comprehensive chronology on , documenting the systematic removal of federal climate information under the Trump administration. The document, called the Disappearing Data Chronology, tracks changes to the federal information landscape that began in the first days of the administration's second term and have continued without pause. What it describes is not a single policy decision but an accumulating pattern: government databases altered or deleted, federal websites shuttered, scientific programs canceled, and expert staff dismissed. Scientists, archivists, and former federal employees have been working since January 2025 to preserve what was removed, but the effort is running into limits that no private initiative can easily overcome.
What Has Been Removed
The list of federal climate resources that have been altered, restricted, or deleted since the start of the administration's second term in January 2025 is long and spans multiple agencies. The National Climate Assessments, which represented the United States government's most authoritative periodic synthesis of domestic climate science, were removed from federal websites in June 2025. The website of the USGCRP, the government body that publishes the assessments, was deleted at the same time. The Trump administration subsequently tapped a group of climate contrarians to lead the next installment of the assessment series.
NOAA's climate.gov, a public-facing website that aggregated climate data, tools, and educational resources for scientists and general audiences alike, was sidelined in June 2025 and its staff dismissed. The billion-dollar disaster database, a NOAA tool that tracked the country's costliest weather events and was widely used by insurers, planners, emergency managers, and researchers, was discontinued. The EPA's EJSCREEN mapping tool, which allowed users to identify environmental justice concerns by location, was erased in February 2025. The EPA subsequently proposed terminating its greenhouse gas reporting program entirely.
| Resource | Agency | Status | Replacement Effort |
|---|---|---|---|
| National Climate Assessments (all 5) | USGCRP | Removed from federal websites June 2025 | AGU/AMS U.S. Climate Collection (partial) |
| climate.gov | NOAA | Sidelined June 2025, staff fired | climate.us nonprofit (under development) |
| Billion-dollar disaster database | NOAA | Discontinued | Climate Central launched own version |
| EJSCREEN | EPA | Erased February 2025 | Various archival copies |
| GHG reporting program | EPA | Termination proposed | Data Foundation GHG Coalition |
| Hundreds of scientific datasets | Multiple agencies | Removed or altered | PEDP coalition archiving |
The Rescue Effort: What's Working and What Isn't
Scientists began organizing to archive federal data even before the administration took office in January 2025, drawing on lessons from the first Trump term when climate information also disappeared from government websites. The PEDP coalition, which includes the nonprofit Open Environmental Data Project and other data-focused organizations, has been working continuously to download, store, and make publicly available the federal information being removed. Brittany Janis, executive director of the Open Environmental Data Project, described the coalition's work as "rapid response triage" focused on datasets that the scientific community identified as most immediately at risk.
"PEDP kind of emerged as a rapid response triage to what was happening, what we were hearing from the federal government. We focused almost entirely on things that people have said, datasets that people say matter to them."
Brittany Janis, Executive Director, Open Environmental Data Project
Rebecca Lindsey, a former program manager for NOAA's climate.gov who was fired alongside her colleagues, launched a nonprofit called climate.us in September 2025 to rebuild the resources formerly housed by its federal counterpart. A crowdfunding campaign raised approximately $200,000. That amount is not sufficient to maintain the full-time staff that previously worked on climate.gov, including science writers, data visualizers, and a web programmer. Lindsey has been reaching out to philanthropists and foundations for additional funding, but the pool of available private funding is constrained: many other organizations and scientists are competing for the same limited sources of support after the administration's widespread cancellation of federal grants in 2025.
- National Climate Assessments represent years of work by hundreds of specialized contributors
- climate.gov served scientists, educators, journalists, emergency managers, and the general public
- The billion-dollar disaster database was a primary source for insurance industry risk modeling
- EJSCREEN was used to document environmental justice conditions for legal and regulatory purposes
- PEDP has prioritized thousands of datasets by community input and risk of deletion
- The GWU National Security Archive's Disappearing Data Chronology was published March 30, 2026
The Authority Problem
Archiving files is the tractable part of the problem. The harder part is that the value of federal climate resources was never purely informational. It derived from institutional authority: the federal government's ability to convene leading scientists, direct resources at national scale, and publish findings that carried the legal weight of government conclusions. Private organizations can reproduce some of the data and some of the content. They cannot reproduce the authority.
"A report that comes from the American Geophysical Union is not gonna have the same leverage or gravitas as a report that comes from the federal government. It's not a statement of the federal government."
Andrew Dessler, Climate Scientist, Texas A&M University
Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University who led an independent fact-check of a Department of Energy climate report released in July 2025, found the report to be rife with inaccuracies. More than 80 scientists collaborated on that critique. It received substantial media coverage. But Dessler is under no illusions about the asymmetry of influence: "The federal government has the biggest megaphone. They can really control the narrative. And if they really want to say climate change is not real, it's extremely difficult for everybody else to push back against it."
That fact check, and others like it, have legal dimensions beyond public communication. The Trump administration has proposed repealing the EPA's endangerment finding, the scientific conclusion that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare that underpins much of the agency's authority to regulate emissions. The Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists have filed suit to block that proposal. Dessler's critique of the DOE report, which the administration cited in support of the endangerment finding repeal, could be used in that litigation. Independent scientific work, even without government institutional backing, can still function as evidence.
What Comes Next
The organizations working to preserve and replace federal climate resources are operating under financial uncertainty heading into 2026. Climate.us faces a decision about whether private funding will materialize in sufficient quantity to sustain its work. PEDP continues prioritizing datasets by community input. The AGU and the American Meteorological Society are building the U.S. Climate Collection, a compilation of peer-reviewed research intended to maintain some continuity with the National Climate Assessments, though organizers are explicit that it is not a direct replacement. The AGU has also established the U.S. Academic Alliance for the IPCC to nominate American scientists for international climate assessment work after the federal government declined to do so in 2025.
For the scientific community, the disappearance of federal climate resources is not primarily a problem of data loss: most of the underlying data still exists in some form, archived by various organizations. It is a problem of infrastructure and legitimacy. The systems that turned raw climate data into authoritative public resources, the programs, the staff, the peer-review processes, the institutional knowledge accumulated over decades, cannot be reconstructed quickly from outside the institutions that built them. What remains after a year of removals and cuts is a patchwork of independent efforts doing what they can with the resources available, while the federal government's capacity to produce the kind of comprehensive, authoritative climate science the country has relied on for fifty years continues to contract. The scientific evidence on the state of the Earth's climate system does not pause while the infrastructure for communicating it is dismantled. The observable effects of accelerating warming are continuing regardless of what appears on federal websites.
