In the first 100 days of Trump’s second term in office, a barrage of removals disappeared environmental data and information across agency websites. In this blog, we reflect on the suppression of environmental information in the second Trump administration, beginning with a look back at Trump’s first 100 days in 2017 to see how the two terms compare.
As soon as President Trump first took office in 2017, the administration began removing information about climate change from federal websites. Within days, the Trump administration removed multiple agencies’ Climate Action Plans as well as information about the environmental and health consequences of burning fossil fuels. A critical moment for climate information suppression occurred late on April 28, 2017 – the eve of the People’s Climate March that would draw 200,000 protesters in DC and more than 300 sister protests around the world – when the administration redirected EPA’s Climate Change website, www.epa.gov/climatechange. All pages in this domain led to a splash page stating, “We are currently updating our website to reflect EPA’s priorities under the leadership of President Trump and Administrator Pruitt.” This page remained in place for 18 months, and then started returning “Page Not Found 404” errors in October 2018.
The second Trump administration is doubling down on climate denialism, attacking climate policy, programs, agency and academic research, and public information. In many ways, these moves are faster and more thorough than during the first Trump administration. However, climate change has not been the primary target of the second Trump administration’s information suppression, and at the time of this writing EPA’s Climate Change website (reestablished by the Biden administration), is still live.
Rather, the initial target of information suppression has centered on equity and marginalized communities. In an executive order on his first day in office, President Trump called for the termination of all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and environmental justice offices and positions. That same week, we saw the eradication of terms such as “equity” and “environmental justice” across federal webpages. For example, page sections were renamed from “Equity and Environmental Justice” to “Population Impacts.” Meanwhile, information on marginalized communities, such as EPA’s Careers webpages about African Americans and the LGBTQ community at EPA, were removed.
Within a month, EPA’s Environmental Justice website was taken down along with its flagship environmental justice data tool, EJScreen. Across federal agencies, all nine equity screening tools have been removed (EDGI and partners have rebuilt six of them here). These changes to public information and data come alongside staff layoffs and the shuttering of environmental justice and equity offices across several agencies.
Over these first 100 days, the second Trump administration has deleted information about trans people, vaccines, COVID-19, climate change, and more. In the environmental sphere, the most thorough information suppression to date has been about environmental justice and the health impacts of structural racism.