A Year of Threats to Our Public Information

Over the past year, the Trump administration has moved aggressively to remove public access to federal data, information, and tools. The fields of climate, health, environment, and justice have been particularly targeted. Decades of scientific expertise and institutional knowledge have been lost in cuts to federal staffing and funding for research. Beyond the data itself, the infrastructure supporting it—especially people, technology, and governance—is under attack.

This is the first piece in a series. Over the next four days, we will publish four more pieces that detail what we’ve seen and how we have responded to these attacks.

The federal data apparatus is complex and far-reaching. Federal agencies produce and maintain hundreds of thousands of datasets, and taxpayers have invested billions of dollars into this system. There are four main pillars of this federal data ecosystem: policies, people, data and information, and data access. This administration is systematically dismantling all four of these pillars.

Policy

The Trump administration has dramatically reshaped the federal information environment in unprecedented ways. This effort has included executive orders, agency directives, and wielding the destructive power of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). 

In the first days of his second term, Trump signed executive orders on “gender ideology” and diversity, equity, and inclusion that led to widespread webpage removals and terminations of federal employees. Numerous executive orders targeting the federal information environment have followed, e.g. “Restoring Gold Standard Science,” “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government.” Often, these represent assaults on our public knowledge.

Official and unofficial agency communication and guidance enumerated a few hundred “banned” words that were to be removed from government sites, flagged in grant proposals, and purged in internal materials. This list of offending terms included such dangerous words as “women,” “pollution,” and “climate science.”

Agencies have also moved to dramatically restrict their own information sharing and collection in line with administration priorities—for example the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dissolving its Office of Research and Development; EPA’s proposal to dismantle reporting requirements for the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP), the program through which large polluters report emissions; or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information halting updates to the Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disaster Database, which tracked high-cost disasters affecting the United States.

People

Datasets do not maintain themselves. There is significant work involved in collecting, processing, and publishing data. Even if a dataset has not been explicitly targeted, that does not mean that the agency still has the capacity to maintain it. Staff responsible for the data may have been fired or reassigned, critical equipment may have been decommissioned, or dataset funding may have been slashed.

Federal science agencies lost a fifth of their staff in 2025, through mass layoffs and deferred resignations. More than 25,000 staff left across the science agencies, many of those early in their careers. In its 2026 budget, the administration requested 35% cuts to the research and development budget for non-defense applications—though Congress appears to reject most of the deep cuts.

As the government decimates the federal workforce—eliminating or hobbling teams that track disease, measure snowpack, monitor forests, and map environmental hazards—we're not just at risk of losing data, we're losing our understanding of, and our ability to protect, the world around us.

Data and information

Information suppression is an explicit and central component of this administration’s broader agenda to reshape the form and function of the federal government.

There’s content alteration, from making COVID.gov into a website espousing the “Lab Leak” origin theory for the pandemic, to making the Department of Energy’s climate change page into a platform for mis- and dis-information. But more than anything, this administration has pursued widespread information removal, largely focusing on federal websites.

A year ago, on January 31, 2025, the United States saw a vast takedown of public information. Thousands of federal government webpages and datasets were taken down to comply with Trump’s executive orders targeting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, gender, and climate data. Some of these resources are back in the public realm, while some were permanently changed and others are still missing. During any presidential transition we can expect shifting priorities and updated agency websites, but not wholesale scrubbing of information.

Looking across the landscape of federal datasets, there is a deceptive, superficial calm. But, under the surface, deep changes are already in process. It is important to note that we have not seen the widespread removal of environmental datasets—full removals are on the order of dozens, not hundreds or thousands—and yet far more datasets are at risk given the deep staff, budget, contract, and advisory committee cuts. Changing federal policies and the profound loss of talent and experience at federal agencies threaten far more datasets than we have seen removed through outright deletion.

Access

More often than targeting datasets directly, the administration has targeted tools that grant people access to data. These tools allow all people—not just data scientists—to analyze and visualize data that matters to them. Tools that allow them to explore flood risk, visualize how the climate crisis will affect their city, or map how marginalized communities disproportionately suffer worse air quality than more affluent communities.

Environmental justice and climate risk tools were some of the first on the chopping block for the administration. The Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool was taken down on January 22, 2025. EPA’s EJScreen and EJAM followed soon after, as did FEMA’s Future Risk Index. We at the Public Environmental Data Partners have rebuilt all of these tools and more, ensuring that the American people retain access to this crucial information.

Sometimes access is not completely removed, but made burdensome. EPA’s Risk Management Plans—emergency management plans developed by facilities that deal with extremely hazardous substances—were once available via the online Risk Management Public Data Tool but now are only available to the public if they visit specific federal reading rooms or submit requests via the Freedom of Information Act.

It’s important to note that barriers existed to federal data and information access before this administration, but it’s unprecedented to see such a concerted effort to remove public access to information.

Broad response in the community

Though dire, these challenges have not gone unanswered. Numerous organizations—new and existing—stepped up to preserve the knowledge and expertise we’re losing and to advocate for science and data policy that benefits all of us. Philanthropic and crowd-funded support has been crucial to the rapid response necessary to meet this moment.

New organizations have formed to address this crisis of information suppression. The Public Environmental Data Partners is composed of about ten organizations and dozens of volunteers that came together shortly after the election in 2024 to safeguard our federal data. The Data Rescue Project, DataIndex.us, Climate.us, Grant Witness and many more groups all form essential pieces of the larger data preservation landscape. 

Established organizations have also stepped in, including the Internet Archive, ICPSR, the American Geophysical Union, the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab, the Data Foundation, Climate Central, and more. 

As we enter the second year of this administration, our organizations will continue to work to preserve what we have and to build what we deserve.

The urgency of this moment

The data ecosystem can seem abstract, but it underpins our understanding of the world. Weather data informs whether we put on a coat or slather on sunscreen. Climate projections help insurance companies set rates. Disease tracking helps us stay healthy and know when to take precautions. Americans paid for this data ecosystem. Our tax dollars have funded data collection, tool development, and public servants’ time. This data and these tools belong to us. Now our substantial investment in them is being intentionally laid waste.

This is a dire moment, but also presents an opportunity to reimagine what our data ecosystem looks like and how it works for the American people.