Our friend from the Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI), Gretchen Gehrke, just wrote an extremely important op-ed for The Hill. It is a succinct but powerful statement about what the Trump administration is doing to destroy the accessibility of federal data and the long-standing trust of the federal statistical ecosystem. I hope all of our readers will contact their members of Congress, forward this op-ed to them, and “advocate Congress to fund our agencies and their critical programs and assert public pressure on agencies to lift hiring freezes and rebuild staff.”
The Trump administration is disappearing climate change data. The Hill.
BY GRETCHEN GEHRKE, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR – 02/27/26
…For the last year, the federal government has threatened the existence, accessibility and integrity of federal data. It has pulled down critical data, like the EPA’s Risk Management Plans (preserved here) that provided communities with information about the hazardous chemicals stored and used in nearby facilities. It has discontinued data collections such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Billion Dollar Disasters, which helped show the economic impact of climate disasters.
The federal government has also removed ways of accessing and using data, like taking down federal tools to quantify or visualize disproportionate environmental impacts on certain groups of people, with a court ordering one of them to be restored. The federal government has even manipulated data and misrepresented scientific findings in consequential reports.
The Trump administration employs three methods to hide data from the public: deregulation such as gutting the Greenhouse Gas Report Program, defunding in the manner of EPA’s drastic staff cuts, and outright deletion, like in the case of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Future Risk Index……Protecting data is about more than data. It’s about protecting the public’s right to data, our right to information, our right to knowledge. Protecting data is about preserving a fundamental pillar of democracy.
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