It’s been a dizzying few weeks since President Donald Trump entered office. He’s signed more than 40 executive orders, many of which have direct implications for the climate. His team issued a sprawling memo that paused already approved federal grants and loans, then rescinded it amid protests and lawsuits, but left many funding freezes in place. The administration withdrew the U.S. from several international agreements and organizations, including the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization.
These moves have sown confusion among many people across the country who are struggling to keep track of changes that could inhibit their access to everything from clean water to disaster recovery. Compounding the problem, federal agencies are carrying out orders to modify or eliminate government websites and limit access to databases with crucial information about climate change and health.
In response, a growing number of community-led groups and universities are scrambling to download disappearing data and launch trackers that monitor regulatory rollbacks to help the public understand the onslaught—and elimination—of information.
Rollback Recap: It would take way more than a short newsletter to try to explain all of the executive actions that Trump has taken since his inauguration. But my colleagues and I have been covering moves that could have the biggest impact on U.S. and global climate policies, so here’s a quick recap on some of the main ones: During his first day in office, Trump issued a barrage of executive orders, one of which declared a “national energy emergency.” His team has yet to elaborate on all of the specifics related to this unprecedented declaration, but it is likely to help oil and drilling companies bypass much of the usual regulatory processes necessary to start new operations, Reuters reports.
The executive orders could face pushback from courts or Congress. But Congress is in Republican control.
My colleagues Kristoffer Tigue, Keerti Gopal and Marianne Lavelle zeroed in on how several of Trump’s orders target Biden-era climate policies, including one that terminates all federal environmental justice offices, positions, programs and activities. Those Biden-era efforts aimed to reduce long-standing disparities in pollution and climate impacts, with poorer areas and communities of color most affected.
In a similar move, the new head of the U.S. Department of Transportation, Sean Duffy, issued memos last week that direct the department to “identify and eliminate” nearly all initiatives relating to climate change, racial equity, gender identity, DEI or environmental justice implemented during the Biden administration, which my colleague Dennis Pillion covered.
Along with eliminating climate-related jobs, the Trump administration has also been rapidly removing climate language and scientific data from federal agency websites. Employees at the U.S. Department of Agriculture were recently directed to scrub the landing pages discussing climate change across agency websites, according to an internal email obtained and verified by Politico. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removed data on gender, vaccines, climate change, HIV and long COVID.
Meanwhile, an analysis by the Lever found that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency removed much of the information about climate change from its homepage.
The White House, EPA and USDA did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but the EPA told Lever News that they could not comment on the changes and had no information about where the directive came from to remove the climate section, beyond saying that the agency’s website staff are responsible for making changes. The CDC told Stat that its website changes “are in accordance with President Trump’s January 20 Executive Orders” and implementation guidance.
It’s not the first time this has happened, said Gretchen Gehrke, a scientist and cofounder of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI). The research group documents, contextualizes and analyzes changes to environmental data and governance practices. During Trump’s first term, many federal websites eliminated or replaced references to climate change and renewable energy, according to a 2018 EDGI report.
“That information is not protected and can come down at any point,” Gehrke told me.
While removing certain language and data can make it hard for the public to grasp climate-related issues, trying to follow the flurry of actions being taken by the Trump administration can also make it difficult to understand what’s going on, Gehrke said.
“I think part of the strategy of [the Trump administration’s] fire hose approach is that it’s almost too hard to keep on top of … there’s almost too much to hold in your brain,” she said. “I think the purpose is chaos, and the purpose is to be overwhelming.”
However, just because the data has been removed from federal websites doesn’t mean it’s gone for good.
Information Blitz: At the end of each of the past five presidential terms, a coalition of nonprofits and universities complete a web crawl of U.S. government websites, which captures and saves millions of web pages. Led by the Internet Archive, this initiative is designed to “preserve a record of government websites for historical and research purposes,” according to the group’s website.
It also comes in handy for accessing pages and datasets that are now no longer hosted on these websites, said Gehrke, whose group is part of the annual crawl.
“I was very much expecting this Trump administration to be more prepared than the last Trump administration, but we are too,” Gehrke said. EDGI and other organizations recently helped build a publicly accessible database based on the Climate and Environmental Justice Screening Tool, which was taken down under the Trump administration but was used to help direct federal funding in climate and energy initiatives toward underserved communities.
Anyone can view the web pages saved by the end-of-term web crawl through the Internet Archive collection, though not all of them are indexed yet. The Internet Archive runs a tool called the “Wayback Machine,” which allows users to view archived web pages that have been saved at different points in time (a tool frequently used by journalists).
Trump’s web data and language removal push has triggered a movement among researchers to help archive similar data repositories, the Journalist’s Resource reports. A number of groups have also created tools to help people track regulatory rollbacks issued by the Trump administration. For example, Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law recently launched three publicly accessible online tracking tools, including the Climate Backtracker, which records the administration’s actions to weaken or eliminate federal climate protections.
“I think there are many audiences around the country, even around the world, that want to follow what’s happening,” Michael Gerrard, an environmental lawyer and the director of the Sabin Center, told me. “Either they want to figure out how to fight back, or they want to know how it will affect their own operations.”
More Top Climate News
The White House has tapped meteorologist Neil Jacobs to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Andrew Freedman reports for Axios. He’s got some experience in the role: During Trump’s first term, Jacobs was chosen as acting administrator for NOAA. However, he was criticized by climate experts and reprimanded by the Department of Commerce’s inspector general when he backed Trump’s opinion that Hurricane Dorian would pass through Alabama. Trump used a black marker to draw on an official NOAA map showing the actual projected track of the storm, giving the controversy the nickname “Sharpiegate.”
Since 2022, Jacobs has been working for the NOAA-funded Earth Prediction Innovation Center to develop open-source weather models that can be used by governments, universities and private sector forecasters.
A new study projects that climate change could drive a $1.47 trillion decline in home values across the U.S. by 2055. Published by the climate risk modeling nonprofit First Street Foundation, the analysis found that population shifts and insurance costs will largely be to blame as consumers look for houses in areas that are less susceptible to extreme weather (though as studies show, there is no such thing as a “climate haven” anymore). The biggest projected population losses are set to occur in certain areas of New Jersey and California.
Reflecting this trend, the insurance firm State Farm is seeking approval for a 22 percent rate hike for homeowners in the wake of the Los Angeles area fires. The company sent a letter on Monday to the state’s insurance commissioner, Ricardo Lara, stating that State Farm General has received more than 8,700 claims and already paid more than $1 billion to customers as of Feb. 1, but needs “urgent assistance in the form of emergency interim approval of additional rate to help avert a dire situation for our customers and the insurance market in the state of California.” As I wrote about in January, many homeowners in California are already struggling to pay for insurance as climate shocks become increasingly common.
Meanwhile, Indonesia is considering withdrawing from the Paris climate accords in the wake of the United States’ exit, Hans Nicholas Jong reports for Mongabay.
“If the United States does not want to comply with the international agreement, why should a country like Indonesia comply with it?” Hashim Djojohadikusumo, Indonesia’s special envoy for climate change and energy, said at a sustainability forum in Jakarta on Friday. Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, has also mulled leaving the international agreement in recent weeks. Experts say these decisions could mark the ripple effects of the U.S. pulling away from its climate goals, a trend in Trump’s first term as well, which my colleague Marianne Lavelle wrote about in July ahead of the presidential election.
Meanwhile, activists recently purchased part of a tract of land slated for a federal penitentiary in Kentucky with the intention of transforming it into bison habitat, Katie Myers reports for Grist. Dubbed the Appalachian Rekindling Project, this initiative aims to rewild the site and hopes to stop the prison’s development.
“It’s a return of an ancestor,” Taysha DeVaughan, an enrolled member of the Comanche Nation, told Grist. “It’s a return of a relative.”
This article has been corrected on Feb. 5, 2025 to include the correct spelling of Hans Nicholas Jong.
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Kiley Price is a reporter at Inside Climate News, with a particular interest in wildlife, ocean health, food systems and climate change. She writes ICN’s “Today’s Climate” newsletter, which covers the most pressing environmental news each week.
She earned her master’s degree in science journalism at New York University, and her bachelor’s degree in biology at Wake Forest University. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Time, Scientific American and more. She is a former Pulitzer Reporting Fellow, during which she spent a month in Thailand covering the intersection between Buddhism and the country’s environmental movement.
