As Donald Trump returns to office, advocates warn that access to important data sets related to the environment and public health may be at risk.
Information about climate change It disappeared from federal websites Under Donald Trump, who has repeatedly described climate change as an “A.” trickNow, federal agencies may face deep staffing and budget cuts overseen by Trump’s friends, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. The proposed cuts threaten not only the type of data the government shares, but whether it can collect and organize it at all.
“The funding, people, and cultural knowledge associated with these tools and data are just as important, if not more so, than the data itself.”
Federal agencies collect all kinds of data — from air quality readings to research on severe weather events. Researchers and advocates are seeking to preserve as much data as possible, a skill they honed during Trump’s first term. However, relying on outdated information has its risks. Gaps in government data collection or maintenance may 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, people, and cultural knowledge associated with these tools and data are just as important, if not more so, than the data itself,” says Gabriel Watson, data science and applications lead at the Center for Environmental Policy Innovation.
Update data
One key resource that could be weakened under a Trump administration is the EPA’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 population groups are disproportionately affected by smog, toxic waste, or other hazards in a given area. Environmental Protection Agency EJScreen In their environmental assessments and licensing decisions, while non-profit organizations use it in grant applications.
Even if you stay online, the tool is not useful without constant maintenance. Watson compares this scenario to a computer running an outdated operating system. “If we stopped development on Windows 95, which is all we were still using, there would be a lot of questions as to what happened?” He says.
Much of the environmental data included in EJScreen is collected by the EPA itself. The EPA is unlikely to abandon air quality monitors anytime soon, but Project 2025 — a conservative roadmap for a second Trump administration — proposes eliminating the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and Foreign Civil Rights that administers 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 skills within a census block group.
“On the ground, facts change very quickly.”
The 2025 project, which Trump disavowed during the election campaign, however It has since been embraced After the election, it is proposed to reconsider issues of race and ethnicity in the decennial census. It is also suggested Add a citizenship questionThis is something that Trump tried to do during his first term. Civil rights advocates warn that doing so could make it more difficult to collect responses from them Latino and Asian American communitiesThis may further marginalize these groups and lead to less accurate data.
The roadmap also calls for drastic staff cuts at federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency. This sentiment is echoed in Musk and Ramaswamy’s plans to manage the new government efficiency that Trump has tasked them with leading.
EJScreen certainly managed to survive President Trump’s first round. The EPA publicly released the tool in 2015 on a limited budget, and the agency has been able to update it every year since, according to Matthew Lee, who Co-lead EJScreen At the Environmental Protection Agency. “We now have a more robust budget associated with EJScreen… Whether we continue with this budget or not, I am confident that we will be able to issue annual updates.”
“Having the most up-to-date data is critical to success [EPA environmental justice] Lee adds. “On the ground, facts change very quickly,” he says. People move in and out of the neighborhood, and new sources of pollution are added to the existing mix.
Data archiving
Sporadic grassroots efforts to archive government data emerged in response to Trump’s election in 2016. After he clicked A notorious climate change denier To head his EPA transition team, researchers quickly came together to form the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI). They organized “guerrilla archiving” events and recruited hundreds of volunteers to help them identify and preserve environmental data sets.
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 has attracted so much attention that EDGI members believe they may have deterred the Trump administration from deleting the data entirely; Much of what they archived remains on federal websites.
However, there have been losses when it comes to the amount of information that information agencies share with the public about climate change. The group documented a roughly 40 percent decline in the term “climate change” across the websites of federal environmental agencies. Access to up to 20 percent of the EPA website has been removed, According to EDGI.
EDGI warns that Trump’s team is likely better prepared now to limit access to information. “I think it’s a much bigger threat this time,” says Gretchen Gehrke, co-founder of EDGI and head of the website monitoring program. “We may see massive data deletion, but we may also see data degradation because it is not managed effectively or is inaccessible.”
“I think he’s a much bigger threat this time.”
But EDGI and its partners are more prepared now, too. Back in 2016, I teamed up with… End-of-term web archive The project, an effort to preserve content on federal government websites during each presidential transition period. Since 2008, she has preserved snapshots of what those sites look like from department to department through the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library of sorts. This work has begun again since the fall. Instead of needing to organize impromptu archiving events to identify datasets for preservation as happened in 2016, they have 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 impacts on extreme weather and public health. There is now Heat.gov to monitor heat waves across the United States, for example Climate mapping for resilience and adaptation CMRA website for a broader picture of disasters including drought, bushfires and floods.
For more than 100 years, when the federal government published monographs and other documents on paper, copies were distributed to about 1,200 libraries across the United States through the Federal Deposit Library Program. This has been a deterrent in the past for any government that might want to hide information because they would have to physically destroy all those copies, says Mark Phillips, an associate university librarian at the University of North Texas. Edge. Now, it’s easy for information to disappear if that content is all on one website.
“We want to make sure that this work that’s been done for U.S. citizens is available … and that it can be used to advance science and further policy,” Phillips says. “So that it does not disappear and get lost.”