Government science data may soon be hidden. They’re racing to copy it.

Gretchen Gehrke, an environmental scientist who helped found the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, works at her home in Durham, N.C., March 17, 2025. Vast quantities of climate and environmental information have been removed from official websites in the past months, but scientists are trying keep it available. (Sebastian Siadecki/The New York Times)

By Austyn Gaffney

Amid the torrent of executive orders signed by President Donald Trump were directives that affect the language on government webpages and the public’s access to government data touching on climate change, the environment, energy and public health.

In the past two months, hundreds of terabytes of digital resources analyzing data have been taken off government websites, and more are feared to be at risk of deletion. While in many cases the underlying data still exists, the tools that make it possible for the public and researchers to use that data have been removed.

But now, hundreds of volunteers are working to collect and download as much government data as possible and to re-create the digital tools that allow the public to access that information.

So far, volunteers working on a project called Public Environmental Data Partners have retrieved more than 100 data sets that were removed from government sites, and they have a growing list of 300 more they hope to preserve.

It echoes efforts that began in 2017, during Trump’s first term, when volunteers downloaded as much climate, environmental, energy and public health data as possible because they feared its fate under a president who has called climate change a hoax.

Little federal information disappeared then. But this time is different. And so, too, is the response.

“We should not be in this position where the Trump administration can literally take down every government website if it wants to,” said Gretchen Gehrke, an environmental scientist who helped found the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative in 2017 to conserve federal data. “We’re not prepared for having resilient public information in the digital age and we need to be.”

While a lot of data generated by agencies, like climate measurements collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is required by Congress, the digital tools that allow the public to view that data are not.

“This is a campaign to remove public access,” said Jessie Mahr, the director of technology at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center, a member group of the data partnership. “And at the end of the day, American taxpayers paid for these tools.”

Farmers have sued the Department of Agriculture for deleting climate data tools they hope will reappear. In February, a successful lawsuit led to the republication of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Social Vulnerability Index. A banner at the top of the CDC webpage now notes that the Department of Health and Human Services was required to restore the site by court order.

Screen shots of error messages from the Environmental Protection Agency and other government websites that have been taken offline under the Trump administration. (Photo Illustration by The New York Times)

The Public Environmental Data Partners coalition has received frequent requests for two data tools: the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, or CEJST, and the Environmental Justice Screening Tool, or EJScreen.

The first was developed under a Biden administration initiative to make sure that 40% of federal climate and infrastructure investments to go to disadvantaged communities. It was taken offline in January. EJScreen, developed under the Obama administration and once available through the Environmental Protection Agency, was removed in early February.

“The very first thing across the executive branch was to remove references to equity and environmental justice and to remove equity tools from all agencies,” Gehrke said. “It really impairs the public’s ability to demonstrate structural racism and its disproportionate impacts on communities of color.”

Just a dozen years ago, the EPA defined environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income.” The EPA’s new administrator, Lee Zeldin, recently equated environmental justice to “forced discrimination.”

Nonprofit organizations used both screening tools to apply for federal grants related to environmental justice and climate change. But the EPA closed all of its environmental justice offices last week, ending three decades of work to mitigate the effects on poor and minority communities often disproportionately burdened by industrial pollution. It also canceled hundreds of grants already promised to nonprofit groups trying to improve conditions in those communities.

“You can’t possibly solve a problem until you can articulate it, so it was an important source of data for articulating the problem,” said Harriet Festing, executive director of the nonprofit group Anthropocene Alliance.

Christina Gosnell, co-founder and president of Catalyst Cooperative, a member of the environmental data cooperative, said her main concern was not that the data won’t be archived before it disappears, but that it won’t be updated.

Preserving the current data sets is the first step, but they could become irrelevant if data collection stops, she said.

Some data have, so far, been left alone, like statistics from the Energy Information Administration, among other agencies. Zane Selvans, a fellow co-founder of Catalyst Cooperative, said the group had worked for the past eight years to aggregate U.S. energy system data and research in the form of open source tools. The goal is to increase access to federal data that is technically available but not necessarily easy to use.

“So far we’ve been lucky,” Selvans said. “Folks working on environmental justice haven’t been as lucky.”