Key resources related to environmental data and public health have already been removed from federal websites, and more may soon disappear as the Trump administration attempts to dispose of anything related to climate change, racial equality, or gender identity.
On Friday, warnings of an upcoming purge at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) surfaced on social media, prompting calls to save as much data as possible as soon as possible. The CDC shares data on a wide range of issues, from chronic diseases to traffic injuries, tobacco use, vaccinations, and pregnancy in the United States – and it is just one of the agencies that is in the crosshairs.
Until Friday evening, the CDC’s main data portal, which contained most of these datasets, was offline. “Data.CDC.gov is temporarily offline to comply with Executive Order 14168, Protecting Women from Gender-Based Ideological Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth in the Federal Government,” the website said, adding that it would be available again as soon as it was “brought into compliance” with the executive order.
Fortunately, researchers have been archiving government websites for several months. This is typical for every change of administration, but with Donald Trump’s return to power, the need has become even more urgent. During the first round of Trump’s deregulatory campaign, 20 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency’s website was shut down. And now, similar steps seem to be happening quickly.
The CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index and Environmental Justice Index – tools that could show whether certain populations may face disproportionate health risks – were taken offline over the past week. In 2007, during the Bush administration, sociologists, geographers, and statisticians began developing the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI), which incorporated demographic and socioeconomic factors, including poverty, race, and ethnicity over the years.
In 2022, the Biden administration launched the Environmental Justice Index (EJI). “Too many communities in our country, especially low-income communities and communities of color, continue to bear the brunt of pollution. Addressing the needs of these communities requires our close attention, and we will use the Environmental Justice Index to do just that,” said then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra in a press release.
Since taking office, Trump has sought to reverse the work of previous administrations to address health disparities based on race and gender. In the executive order that Trump signed to reverse the Biden-era policy, the president wrote that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) had “corrupted” government institutions.
He also argued that “climate extremism has caused inflation to explode and overburdened businesses with regulation.” During his first term in office, federal environmental agency websites saw a nearly 40 percent drop in the use of the term “climate change”. It’s too early to tell what the damage might be this time around, but some web pages have already disappeared. Pages on “climate and sustainability” and “equity” have been removed from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s “priorities” website. This comes after an internal memo was sent out this week instructing the US Department of Transportation’s operating administrations to identify and ultimately “terminate” Biden-era activities related to climate change and the DEI.
Donald Trump’s efforts to restrict foreign aid also appear to have led to the removal of information on HIV and AIDS. This week, a webpage with data from the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) was removed. PEPFAR has been in existence since 2003 and helped more than 20.6 million people access antiretroviral therapy in 2024 alone, according to a Wayback Machine snapshot of the website on January 26, before it was removed.
The End of Term Web Archive project has been preserving the content of federal government websites during every presidential transition since 2008. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), formed after Trump’s first election, also documents changes to government websites and works to make archived datasets available elsewhere. It has worked with partners, including the Open Environmental Data Project, to back up data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Social Vulnerability Index and Environmental Justice Index, and they have shared the data on the Open Environmental Data Project website.
But even if these datasets have been archived, they are not as useful if they are not updated. “Every data set has a life cycle,” says Dan Pisut, principal engineer at GIS software company Esri.
