As Donald Trump returns to office, supporters warn that access to important environmental and public health data sets could be at risk.

Information about climate change has disappeared from federal websites under Donald Trump, who has repeatedly called climate change "a hoax." Now, federal agencies may face deep staffing and budget cuts overseen by Trump cronies Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. The proposed cuts threaten not only the type of data governments share, but also whether they are able to collect and organize that data.

Federal agencies collect data on everything from air quality readings to studies of extreme weather events. Researchers and supporters have struggled to preserve as much data as possible, a skill they honed during Trump's first term. Even so, relying on outdated information has its pitfalls. Gaps in government data collection or maintenance can prevent city planners and community groups from fully understanding the risks posed by pollution and climate change in their areas.

“The funding, people, and cultural knowledge associated with these tools and data are just as important, if not more important, than the data themselves,” said Gabriel Watson, director of data science and applications at the Center for Environmental Policy Innovation.

One key resource that may be in trouble under the Trump administration is the Environmental Protection Agency's environmental justice screening and mapping tool, EJScreen.

The tool helps city planners, health and education workers, and community advocates understand whether certain populations in specific areas are disproportionately affected by smoke, toxic waste, or other hazards. The EPA uses EJScreen in its own environmental assessments and permitting decisions, while nonprofits use it for grant applications.

Even if it stays online, the tool won't be as useful without ongoing maintenance. Watson compared the scenario to a computer running an older operating system. "If we stop developing Windows 95 and we're still using Windows 95, then some people will ask, what happened?" he said.

Most of the environmental data contained in EJScreen is collected by the EPA itself. The EPA is unlikely to give up its air quality monitors anytime soon, but Project 2025, the conservative road map for Trump's second administration, proposes eliminating the EPA's Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, which administers the tool.

EJScreen also includes socioeconomic indicators, such as information on the percentage of residents within census blocks who are people of color, low-income households, and those with limited English language skills.

Trump denied Plan 2025 during the campaign but embraced it after the election, which proposed revisiting questions on race and ethnicity in the decennial census. It also recommends adding a citizenship question, something Trump tried to do during his first term. Civil rights advocates warn that doing so could make it more difficult to gather responses from Latino and Asian American communities, which could further marginalize those groups and lead to less accurate data.

The roadmap also calls for significant layoffs at federal agencies, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. That sentiment is echoed in Musk and Ramaswamy’s plans for the new Department of Government Effectiveness, which Trump tasked them with leading.

To be sure, EJScreen managed to survive the first round of President Trump’s election. The EPA publicly released the tool in 2015 on a "slim budget," and the agency has updated it every year since, said Matthew Lee, EPA's EJScreen co-lead. "Now that we have a more robust budget related to EJScreen...whether or not we continue with that budget, I am confident that we will be able to issue an annual update."

“Having the most up-to-date data is critical to the success of the (EPA Environmental Justice) program,” Lee added. "In reality, reality changes very quickly," he said. People move in and out of a community, and new sources of pollution add to existing ones.

After Trump was elected in 2016, grassroots groups began archiving government data. After Trump appointed a notorious climate change denier to lead his EPA transition team, researchers quickly came together to form the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. EDGI). They organized "guerrilla archiving" campaigns, recruiting hundreds of volunteers to help them identify and preserve environmental data sets.

They were able to archive 200 terabytes of data and content from government websites between the fall of 2016 and the spring of 2017. Their work attracted so much attention that EDGI members believe they may have prevented the Trump administration from completely deleting the data; much of their archive remains on federal websites.

Even so, agencies are losing ground on how much information they share about climate change with the public. The group documented a nearly 40% drop in the term "climate change" on federal environmental agency websites. According to EDGI, access to up to 20% of EPA websites was removed.

EDGI warned that Trump's team may now be better prepared to limit access to information. "I think the threat is much greater this time," said Gretchen Gehrke, EDGI co-founder and director of the website monitoring project. "We may see significant data deletions, but we may also see data degradation because the data is not actively managed or becomes inaccessible."

But EDGI and its partners are also now better prepared. Back in 2016, it partnered with the End-of-Term Web Archive Project, which works to preserve content on federal government websites during each presidential transition. Since 2008, it has preserved a snapshot of these sites from administration to administration through the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library. This work has been ongoing again since the autumn. Instead of organizing an ad hoc guerilla archiving campaign to identify which datasets to preserve, as they did in 2016, they have been gathering suggestions from partners for months.

Over the past four years, the Biden administration has launched new web tools to provide information on climate change and its impact on extreme weather and public health. For example, there is now Heat.gov, which monitors heat waves across the United States, and the Climate Resilience and Adaptation Mapping (CMRA) website, which provides a more complete picture of hazards such as droughts, wildfires, and floods.

For more than 100 years, the federal government has published research reports and other documents in paper form and distributed copies to approximately 1,200 libraries across the United States through the Federal Depository Library Program. Mark Phillips, associate dean of libraries at the University of North Texas, said that in the past, this was a deterrent for any single government that might want information to disappear because they would have to physically destroy all those copies . edge. Now, it's easier for information to disappear if it's stored in a single website.

"We want to make sure that this work for American citizens is available ... and that it can be used to further the science, to further the policy," Phillips said. "So that it doesn't disappear and just get lost."