is a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home , a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Now that we’re about halfway into the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, we can take stock of his administration’s destruction of online environmental resources. It’s worse than last time. It’s also, seemingly, just the beginning — paving the way forward for the president’s polluting agenda.
A watchdog group that monitors publicly-available environmental data has recorded 70 percent more federal website changes during Trump’s first 100 days in office in 2025 compared to the start of his first term in 2017.
Federal agencies are taking broader swings to ax public resources from their websites this time around, the report shows. They’re hiding which communities are most affected by pollution. The Trump administration has not only tossed out the most authoritative national reports on climate change, they’re starting to replace facts and evidence with disinformation. We’re seeing a revisionist history unfold.
“You can say anything you want to say if you remove evidence to the contrary.”
“If you suppress data … you can say anything you want to say if you remove evidence to the contrary,” says Gretchen Gehrke, one of the lead authors of the report published this week by the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI).
Looking just at the first 100 days of Trump’s second term compared to the start of his first term, EDGI noted 632 important changes to federal websites this year compared to 371 in 2017. That’s despite EDGI only keeping tabs this year on 20 percent of the websites it monitored during the first term, due to capacity constraints and because the group chose to home in on webpages it thought would be most vulnerable.
They’ve tracked 879 significant changes to 639 different federal webpages during the first 6 months of the current administration. That includes changes to content, like replacing the term “climate change” with “extreme weather,” and the wholesale removal of entire webpages.
“The thing that is the most different is this total erasure of information about environmental racism and the evidence of environmental racism,” Gehrke says. “In the second Trump administration, information control was about removing evidence of inequality.”
... continue reading