On February 5th, EPA removed several web pages about the environmental justice mapping and screening tool, EJScreen, as well as the tool itself. These pages, which now cannot be accessed or simply say, “Sorry, but this web page does not exist,” include:
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has renamed its “Climate Resilience” website to “Future Conditions,” and has removed much of the climate-specific language from the site’s landing page. For example, FEMA replaced the introductory sentence from “Climate change is the defining crisis of our time” to “Disaster incidents are rising due to increased human vulnerability, exposure and a changing climate.”
Less than three days after CEJST was taken offline, EDGI and fellow members of Public Environmental Data Partners (PEDP) stood up an unofficial but functional copy, restoring public access.
In the first couple of days of the second Trump administration, the EPA removed several web pages related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts at the EPA.
In anticipation of a second and likely more significant assault on federal environmental information by the Trump administration, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) is ramping up its website monitoring work, coordinating a broad multi-organizational data preservation effort, and expanding its civic data science tools for accessing federal environmental data. EDGI is also supporting the End of Term Archive as it works to build the largest archive of federal web-based data and information ever created.
Tuesday July 19, 2022, after recently announcing the planned sunsetting of portions of its online archive, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency updated their Web Archive website with an announcement that the archive in its entirety will remain online until at least July 2023. The EPA stated that they extended the timeline “to assess the use of archive content and to continue to analyze, inventory, and transition key content to our main website.” This comes after EDGI and other environmental groups sent an open letter to the agency, urging them to keep this critical public resource online.
January 20, 2022 – Today, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI)’s Website Monitoring Team releases Work in Progress: Governance of Digital […]
Today, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI)’s Website Monitoring Team releases Crossing the Line: Analyzing EPA news releases under Trump and ensuring trust in federal information in the future. This report examines the politicization of EPA’s news releases under the Trump administration and recommends guidelines for protection of the integrity of information coming from the EPA’s press office.
On Friday, November 12, 2021, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative’s (EDGI’s) Website Monitoring Team submitted a public comment to the Environmental Protection Agency on their 2022-2026 strategic plan, which sets the agency’s priorities for the next four years.
On August 12, 2021, the EPA published extensive additions of at least 38 webpages to its “Climate Change” website, www.epa.gov/climate-change. These additions include webpages regarding EPA’s activities addressing climate change, from its various partnership initiatives to regulatory actions.