File:A War on Science.png

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February 2025


Purge Is the Word

"Climate Change" Becomes Verboten in the Trump Administration
Climate-Related Policies Being Targeted with Deletions, Erasures, Agency and Department Firings
Online Websites Are Being Scrubbed of Climate and Renewable Energy Content, Earth Science Research, Statistics, Data, and Educational Tools



The Washington Post and multiple news sources have begun reporting that Trump Executive Orders to government agencies are rapidly resulting in widespread purging of online references to "climate change".


>The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) website overhaul reprises a similar move by Trump’s first administration, which touched off a “Don’t Say Climate” movement among Republican-led state governments. Climate change is no longer listed on the EPA’s main environmental topics drop-down menu, which is instead populated with topics like bedbugs and radon.

>David Doniger, senior attorney with the environmental nonprofit the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the EPA’s “Orwellian” website changes “of a piece with [Trump] denying climate as a problem” and “trying to bury inconvenient facts and pretend these problems don’t exist.”

>At the Department of Energy, the webpage for the Office of Energy Justice and Equity is gone — as are all of its employees, who were placed on administrative leave earlier this week as part of the Trump administration’s purge.

>The web address for the department’s Low Income Energy Affordability Data Tool now redirects visitors to a page headlined “Restoring Energy Dominance” and links out to a description of the president’s promise to end a pause on liquefied natural gas exports.

>Another program no longer specified that it would help develop programs for an energy future that was equitable or clean.

>“Climate change” was also removed from a page describing an Environmental Protection Agency tool used to analyze greenhouse gas emissions and air quality.

>Several Department of Transportation references to “climate change” have been replaced with “climate resilience,” a more generic term that describes protections from disasters, without investigating their root causes, according to Alys Campaigne, Climate Initiative Leader at the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization.

>An agency within the Department of Transportation even went as far as to remove goals around “achieving net-zero emissions and increasing equity.” Instead, the new goals for the Advanced Research Projects Agency — Infrastructure now read to “enhance resilience, and make America more globally competitive.”

>Meanwhile, at the Agriculture Department, a page on the USDA’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities has been taken down. The Forest Service’s website has been similarly scrubbed. And at least two pages are gone that informed visitors about how climate change is affecting the nation’s 193 million acres of federally managed forests and grasslands.


Washington, D.C., February 6, 2025 - In the first two weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term, the administration has begun to scrub critical environmental resources and datasets from federal agency websites. To combat this effort to suppress and censor public data, the National Security Archive’s Climate Change Transparency Project today publishes a selection of materials on climate change and environmental justice that have been deleted from agency web pages and spotlights the environmental and archivist organizations working to identify, scrape, and preserve these critical data.

During President Trump’s first term, organizations like the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) documented the administration’s widespread campaign to suppress climate and environmental data, like when it deleted all webpages, fact sheets, and emissions and financial incentives calculators related to President Obama’s 2015 Clean Power Plan. Since the 2024 presidential election, EDGI and environmental advocacy organizations alike have anticipated the targeting of federal environmental and climate data and have been archiving datasets and preparing to rebuild public access to web tools.

So far, one of the most glaring deletions from the current administration has been the removal of the White House pages on the Council of Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), divisions within the Executive Office of the President that coordinate federal environmental and scientific efforts and work closely with federal agencies and other White House offices on environmental energy policies and initiatives.

Read more:


Trump Era Enviro-Rollbacks (2016-20)


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