The Trump administration is reportedly removing key environmental and public health data from federal websites, raising concerns about the potential loss of valuable information. This move follows a pattern of attempts to suppress data related to climate change, racial equity, and gender identity.
Key resources for environmental data and public health have been removed from federal websites , with more potentially disappearing as the Trump administration seeks to eliminate anything related to climate change , racial equity , or gender identity. Social media warnings today about an impending purge at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) prompted calls to save as much data as possible.
The CDC shares data on a wide range of topics, from chronic diseases to traffic injuries, tobacco use, vaccinations, and pregnancies in the US — and it’s just one of the agencies under scrutiny. Fortunately, researchers have been archiving government websites for months. This is standard practice with every change in administration, but it was even more crucial with Donald Trump’s return to office. During Trump’s first deregulatory push, access to as much as 20 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency’s website was removed. Now, similar moves appear to be happening rapidly. Within the past week, the CDC’s social vulnerability index and environmental justice index — tools that could reveal whether specific populations face disproportionate health risks — have both been taken offline. The social vulnerability index (SVI) was developed by social scientists, geographers, and statisticians starting in 2007 during the Bush administration. It incorporated demographic and socioeconomic factors, including poverty, race, and ethnicity, over the years. The Biden administration launched the environmental justice index (EJI) in 2022. “Too many communities across our nation, particularly low-income communities and communities of color, continue to bear the brunt of pollution,” then Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a press release at the time. “Meeting the needs of these communities requires our focused attention, and we will use the Environmental Justice Index to do just that.” Since taking office, Trump has tried to reverse previous administrations’ efforts to address health disparities related to race and gender. In an executive order to overturn Biden-era policies, the president stated that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) has “corrupted” government institutions. He also claimed that “climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation.” During his first term, there was a near 40 percent decline in the term “climate change” across websites for federal environmental agencies. It’s too early to gauge the extent of the damage this time, but some web pages have already vanished. The US Department of Transportation’s “priorities” website has removed pages on both “climate and sustainability” and “equity.” This follows an internal memo sent this week instructing USDOT operating administrations to identify and eventually “terminate” Biden-era activities related to climate change and DEI. Donald Trump’s efforts to restrict foreign aid appear to have also resulted in the removal of information on HIV and AIDS. This week, the data webpage for the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR) was taken down. PEPFAR, established in 2003, has helped more than 20.6 million people access antiretroviral therapy in 2024 alone, according to a snapshot of the website taken by the Wayback Machine on January 26th, before it was removed. The End of Term Web Archive project has preserved content on federal government websites during every presidential transition since 2008. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), which formed after Trump’s initial election, also documents changes to government websites and works to make archived datasets accessible elsewhere. It has backed up data from the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index and Environmental Justice Index and shared it on a webpage for The Public Environmental Data Project. Even if these datasets have been archived, they are less useful if they aren’t updated. “Any dataset has a lifespan of utility,” says Dan Pisut, senior principal engineer at GIS software company Esri. Aging datasets might not fully reflect the current situation on the ground, so people need to be cautious about how they use them, Pisut points out. It could be risky, he says, but “better than nothing.
Science Trump Administration Environmental Data Public Health Data Climate Change Racial Equity Gender Identity Federal Websites Data Purge Wayback Machine Archive Data Accessibility
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