EPA Removes Information about Agency and Environmental History

By EDGI CommsBlog, Highlights From the Change Log
Two webpages side by side.
A side-by-side view of the homepage for “EPA History” on May 28, 2025 (left), and November 24, 2025 (right), after links to several pages about EPA and environmental history were removed. Text highlighted in red has been removed; text highlighted in green has been added.

Highlights From the Change Log:
EPA Removes Information about Agency and Environmental History

Welcome! This post is part of the EDGI Website Governance Team’s “Highlights From the Change Log” blog series. The purpose of this series is to highlight interesting changes we have observed in the content of, or access to, federal websites. We want to share these changes to encourage public engagement with and discussion of their significance, as well as understanding of the ephemeral nature of website information. These website changes happened in Summer 2025 and feature the removal of information about EPA and environmental history.

What Happened

Over the past several months, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency altered significant information about the agency’s history and environmental history more broadly. One change came in August, when the EPA removed from its website all information about and links to the agency’s updated scientific integrity policy released in January 2025. For example, on the EPA’s “What’s New in Scientific Integrity?” page, all details about the scientific integrity policy were taken down, including key information on performance standards. Additionally, a link to a page about scientific integrity milestones throughout EPA’s history, featuring an interactive timeline, was also removed and now returns a “page not found” message. While the EPA has retained very vague information about scientific integrity goals in coming years (e.g. “Scientific integrity is highly visible at EPA”), the only policy that remains accessible is from 2012.

The EPA also removed and reduced access to significant historical information more broadly, including important events in EPA and environmental history. For example, in June, links to historical photos and images, as well as a webpage about the EPA’s origins, were removed from the “EPA History” home page. These webpages remain online but are no longer accessible from the EPA History home page. The “Milestones in Environmental History” webpage, featuring extensive information about the agency’s accomplishments, was removed and the link to it was deleted from the “EPA History” home page. In its place is a link to a page listing EPA Administrators.

Why we think it’s Interesting

The reversal to a scientific integrity policy from 2012 has significant implications for the quality of scientific research and the role of science in addressing climate change and other environmental issues. The Biden administration spearheaded the EPA’s 2025 scientific integrity policy in response to the 2021 memorandum “Restoring Trust in Government Through Scientific Integrity and Evidence-Based Policymaking,” a central theme of which was mitigating political interference in science. Several of the altered EPA webpages explicitly discussed this issue as a key update to the new policy, but mentions of political interference in science have since been removed across EPA webpages, along with information about the new policy.

EPA’s erasure of information about the policy, compounded by the removal of information about EPA and environmental history, also has significant implications. By eliminating information about the past, the Trump administration is treating monumental historical events as though they never happened and reshaping our historical narrative. The Trump administration’s erasures threaten our shared understanding of history and the research, activism, and science that led to the policies, programs, and agencies we have today. 

Removing information about scientific integrity and environmental historical context magnifies the threat to accurate and historically situated science. Changes like these reveal concerning vulnerabilities within our information policies, suggesting these policies are insufficient to protect information integrity in the digital age.

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