Comment: Trump climate data purge risks Americans’ health, more

Groups are working to secure the data, but much could be lost that benefits health and economy.

By Mark Gongloff / Bloomberg Opinion

Compared with President Trump’s many attacks on science so far in his second term, his affront to climate science feels like a mere flesh wound at the moment. Delaying cancer research, depriving HIV and AIDS patients of life-saving medicine and divorcing from the World Health Organization in the middle of a bird-flu outbreak all feel like more urgent emergencies.

But Trump has already started erasing web tools that scientists and policymakers use to study climate change and its impact on vulnerable people, hinting at a further-reaching purge that could have long-term impacts on the health of millions of Americans.

When Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida makes the words “climate change” disappear from government websites, it has local impacts, including but not limited to making DeSantis look ridiculous whenever a supercharged hurricane slams into his state. But when a U.S. president tries to do a Joseph Stalin to the very concept of global warming, the effects are broader-reaching.

That’s because the federal government gathers, stores and analyzes mountains of climate-related data, which helps scientists everywhere study what’s happening to the planet and helps people, businesses and policymakers prepare society for a hotter, riskier future. The data it collects is so important that several experts and nonprofit groups have set aside other, more constructive work to desperately archive as much federal climate information as they can, like a Dunkirk of data.

One such group, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), said last month that it had created its own version of the White House’s Climate and Environmental Justice Screening Tool (CEJST), which uses pollution, economic, health and demographic data to identify communities most at risk of physical and financial harm from climate change. (EDGI has received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable organization of Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News’ parent company.)

Soon after Trump took office, the CEJST disappeared from the White House website, where it had lived under President Joe Biden, because protecting vulnerable people from suffering is unacceptably woke. The White House Council on Environmental Quality, which hosted the tool, has also been memory-holed.

EDGI was founded in November 2016 to preserve data during Trump’s first administration, as part of another Data Dunkirk spurred by fear that Trump and his climate-denying appointees would purge it. Groups like the Azimuth Climate Data Backup Project, the Data Refuge Project and the Climate Mirror painstakingly downloaded many terabytes of data. Ultimately, their efforts were unnecessary; though the Trump administration made it harder for the public to access the data by deleting links, it left the underlying information alone.

Trump 2.0 is already being more ruthless. Along with CEJST, other climate- and justice-related web tools have disappeared from the websites for the departments of Energy and Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency, Gretchen Gehrke, who runs EDGI’s website monitoring program, told me. The EPA’s Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool, which functions similarly to the CEJST, was still available as of this writing, though who knows how long that will last.

Thus Data Dunkirk 2.0 has begun. It shouldn’t be necessary.

“This is ridiculous,” Gehrke said. “The fact that we need to protect against widespread data information suppression is really telling of the kind of moment we’re in. A hallmark of democracy is free and open information for an informed republic. The fact that this is at risk is really deeply concerning.”

Another risk is that Trump could try to break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or privatize parts of the National Weather Service; as Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for his second term, has recommended. The NOAA and NWS are key collectors and providers of climate data, and the NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information runs “the primary global clearinghouse for many kinds of weather data,” collating information from hundreds of national agencies, Berkeley Earth’s chief scientist Robert Rohde told me in an email.

Rohde suggested losing NOAA climate data would be a blow but one from which the scientific community could ultimately recover, given how much of the information is duplicated elsewhere. One result could be that the U.S. loses its standing in the global climate conversation, with Europe and China already building products that compete with and sometimes top those of NOAA. State and local governments will keep gathering data, and nonprofit groups will keep collecting and analyzing it, getting funding from wealthy benefactors.

But checking out of this effort would still be tragic for both the fight against catastrophic global heating and the U.S. government itself. No NGO has the weather satellites, the air-quality monitors, the computing power, the funding and the depth of expertise the federal government has; though Trump has already undermined this by freezing research grants and purging EPA science advisers.

Climate science is a boon to the whole country’s physical and economic well-being. Weather disasters caused up to $799 billion in long-term economic damage in the past year, AccuWeather has estimated. Climate change affects the health and lives of millions of Americans, whether Democratic or Republican, causing everything from asthma and heart disease to unemployment.

Limiting this damage will require everybody working in the same direction. The federal government has tools that are tested and ready for that job; even if some have descriptors that might irritate some people, such as “justice.”

“No matter who you are, you deserve to know if your water is safe, if your air is clean. These tools let us match you with appropriate programs to address your problems,” Jessica Mahr, director of technology at the nonprofit Environmental Policy Innovation Center, said of the CEJST and other climate-justice tools. Her group was involved in building the CEJST and has joined Dunkirk 2.0. “That kind of data-driven decision-making is something we need at all levels of government if we want to improve people’s lives.”

Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal. ©2025 Bloomberg L.P., bloomberg.com/opinion. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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