On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency quietly removed all information about climate change from its home page and other prominent areas of its website, burying it deep in sections that are harder to find.
Environmental advocates condemned the deletions, part of sweeping efforts to revise federal websites to reflect President Donald Trump’s agenda, saying the information suppression comes at a time when climate upheaval is intensifying damage and harm.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) website overhaul reprised a similar move by Trump’s first administration, which touched off a “Don’t Say Climate” movement among some Republican-led state governments. The new erasure came two days before the US Senate confirmed Trump’s nominee to lead the agency: former representative Lee Zeldin (R-NY), who has pledged to slash EPA funding, roll back environmental protections, and promote more fossil fuel production.
In a related push, Trump’s new transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, is aiming to eliminate fuel economy standards, one of President Joe Biden’s more ambitious environmental initiatives.
Climate change was a featured topic on the front page of the EPA’s website through the final days of the Biden presidency and lingered in the first week of Trump’s. The previous version of the home page noted, “Understanding and addressing climate change is critical to EPA’s mission of protecting human health and the environment,” and included links to information on climate change risks, impacts, and causes.
Shortly after 5 p.m. EST on January 27, all of that climate information was removed and relegated to the site’s “A-Z Topic Index.”
Despite its scientifically proven threats to the future of humanity, climate change is no longer listed on the EPA’s main environmental topics drop-down menu, which is instead populated with topics like bedbugs and radon.
EPA officials said they could not comment on the changes and had no information about where the directive came from to remove climate information from the agency’s home page, except to say that EPA’s website staff are responsible for making website changes.
The EPA’s shift in messaging is not a surprise. On January 20, just after his inauguration, Trump issued an executive order on “Unleashing American Energy,” which calls for expanding oil, gas, and coal while rescinding or “streamlining” numerous environmental protections. The order also aimed to terminate the “Green New Deal” by pausing disbursements of Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which together committed nearly $300 billion for climate initiatives.
The EPA’s recent website revisions echo Trump’s first term. Within days of his 2017 inauguration, he ordered the EPA to delete climate change information.
David Doniger, senior attorney with the environmental nonprofit the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the EPA’s “Orwellian” website changes “of a piece with [Trump] denying climate as a problem” and “trying to bury inconvenient facts and pretend these problems don’t exist.”
Doniger added, “This administration is becoming a tool and advocate of the oil and gas industry, which obviously doesn’t want the administration publishing facts of climate change or the industrial causes behind it.”
Climate experts warn that removing and burying climate change information is especially dangerous as the climate crisis and its harm intensify, threatening science and democracy.
“Especially with social media, we have a vacuum of authoritative information,” said Gretchen Gehrke, of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. “We’re supposed to be an informed republic, and suppressing information is antithetical to democracy.”
Environmental scientists created the initiative in November 2016 “to document and analyze changes to vulnerable federal environmental data and governance practices under the Trump administration” and have continued to monitor and document public scientific information since then.
The nonprofit Environmental Protection Network, comprised of more than six hundred EPA alumni, “is very concerned that the Trump administration is scrubbing websites, hiding facts, suppressing science, and making the American people more vulnerable,” said Michelle Roos, the organization’s executive director. “We’re concerned about this because any time you’re hiding information from the public, you’re obstructing science.”
The burying of EPA information on climate change is part of a larger Trump administration overhaul of the White House and federal agency websites, as NBC and others reported. This makeover includes deleting the White House’s Spanish-language version, and erasing references to diversity, equity, and inclusion. “The White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, active as of Saturday, is also gone,” NBC reported.
Following a torrent of eighty executive orders on everything from energy to diversity in its first ten days, the Trump White House removed numerous portions of federal agency websites relating to diversity and equity, including climate and economic justice training tools that were erased from the EPA site on January 21, according to Gehrke.
In Trump’s first couple of days in office, Gehrke’s group documented, “the EPA removed several webpages related to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at the EPA.” Those erased pages include EPA’s Office of Inclusive Excellence; Equality EPA; EPA’s Equity Action Plan; African Americans at EPA; Asian American and Pacific Islanders at EPA; Hispanics at EPA; Native Americans at EPA; Members of EPA’s LGBTQ Community.
The Public Environmental Data Project, a volunteer coalition working to preserve federal environmental data, saved and republished some of the deleted EPA pages, including on climate and environmental justice.
As Gehrke wrote in a blog documenting the erasures, “Trump has used his first hours in office to disparage and dismantle Biden-era efforts to expand equity and environmental justice, bury information, and adopt McCarthy-era tactics with the federal workforce.”
The Trump administration also deleted the White House website’s information page on the US Constitution, the Hill reported. On January 21, a White House spokesperson told USA Today the site for the Constitution would be back up soon — but as of January 30, the link still went to a “404 error” page, signaling a broken link.
While corporate media has described Zeldin, Trump’s new EPA administrator, as “moderate,” the former congressman is promoting major shifts in environmental policy.
According to the League of Conservation Voters, during his eight-year congressional career starting in 2015, Zeldin had an “abysmal” environmental voting record of supporting just 14 percent of environmental-related measures.
In 2022, the League documented that Zeldin supported just one environmental measure while opposing 18 such bills. Zeldin’s votes included opposing numerous climate job-creation bills, legislation cracking down on oil drilling expansions, eliminating lead, protecting wildlife in national parks, and funding renewable energy projects.
Between 2015 and 2022, Zeldin voted against dozens of climate protection bills, opposing reductions to methane emissions, bills to strengthen the Clean Air Act, and legislation to create jobs around climate protection initiatives and boost climate resiliency. Zeldin also voted against the Clean Air Act, which, among other things, protects public health and the environment by regulating toxic and harmful air emissions.
Although Zeldin, who represented New York’s coastal Long Island districts, “successfully fought in Congress for coastal resilience and nature preservation projects,” he “never advanced any proposal to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and like other Congressional Republicans in the Trump era, consistently voted against those proposals,” according to Inside Climate News.
Apart from “the occasional common sense vote on a few issues,” Zeldin’s record in Congress was “solidly aligned with Trump’s disastrous antiscience, pro-polluter agenda,” said Food & Water Watch Managing Director of Policy and Litigation Mitch Jones. “Zeldin was an aggressive backer of harmful fracking in New York, and he’s been casually denying the realities of fossil fuel-driven climate change for more than a decade.”
The former congressman has ties to the fossil fuel sectors he is now charged with regulating. According to nonprofit campaign finance tracker Open Secrets, Zeldin received roughly $270,000 from oil and gas interests since he first ran for federal office in 2008.
One industry publication crowed, “Trucking has high hopes for Zeldin’s EPA,” adding the EPA administrator “plans to follow Trump’s agenda in weakening emissions regulations.”
In an interview with the New York Post just after his confirmation, Zeldin stressed economic and industrial growth more than environmental policy. “Most of the energy supply for Americans come from coal and natural gas, and turning off those two spigots will cause an existential disaster for this country,” Zeldin told the outlet.
The newly minted EPA administrator emphasized his plans to “unleash energy dominance, bring back American auto jobs, pursue permitting reform, and make America the AI capital of the world.” Artificial intelligence is consuming ever larger amounts of water and electricty, while spewing considerable emissions.
Trump’s “Unleashing American Energy” executive order requires Zeldin to submit recommendations to the Office of Management and Budget within 30 days “on the legality and continuing applicability” of the Clean Air Act’s “Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases.” This item may sound wonky and obscure but could pave the way for undermining the Clean Air Act, Doniger said, by attacking the evidence and findings that uphold the law’s standards.
The EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding” — still on the agency’s website — states that six major greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, and hydrofluorocarbons, “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.”
As of press time, an EPA page on “Causes of Climate Change” still included this opening sentence: “Since the Industrial Revolution, human activities have released large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which has changed the earth’s climate.”