The Women Saving America’s Climate Data
A couple weeks after Donald Trump was elected president for the second time, a group of federal data-watchers gathered in Denice Ross’ dining room.
As chief U.S. data scientist under the Biden Administration, Ross had a clear window into just how much information the government collects—and just how useful it is: whether monitoring a fleet of ocean buoys that help guide safe shipping routes to tracking how vulnerable communities are to disaster.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Over the course of that evening, Ross and her guests took down all the pictures decorating her walls, and in their place began sticking Post-It Notes mapping out everything that could, in their view, go wrong if the administration targeted the bedrock of science: the collection, analysis, and sharing of data. It had happened in 2017, and could happen again if his campaign promises to once again undo climate policy (along with targeting other areas like health) were anything to go by.
Soon, the room was full of little paper squares detailing all the information that could be at risk, and ideas for how to monitor and protect against its possible dilution—or even its removal from public view.
One year into Trump’s presidency, “pretty much everything has come to pass,” says Ross, now a senior advisor at the Federation of American Scientists based in the D.C. area, “except much quicker than I expected.”
It started the day after Trump’s inauguration last year when the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool—launched under President Joe Biden—was taken offline. But not for long. Forty-eight hours later, it had been resurrected thanks to the Public Environmental Data Partners (PEDP), a new coalition launched in November 2024 specifically to save federal data.
For over a year now, more than a dozen groups have been working together to rescue environment and climate data—and the majority are being led by women. Behind the scenes, countless other volunteers and organizations are plugging away, preferring to stay out of the limelight. They’re part of a vast web that’s largely emerged since President Trump’s election victory, made up of dozens of organizations across sectors, all working to keep federal databases alive and accessible to the public.
One group has pre-emptively archived at least 360 environmental datasets—with some 67 others in the works. Another has backed up nearly 710 terabytes of Smithsonian data—690 of which represent historical environmental information. More than 311,000 datasets from data.gov are archived (on a website created by Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab); this includes those from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Bureau of Land Management. The EPA’s Environmental Justice screening tool was independently restored. Climate.gov is being recreated by a new startup. The list goes on.
It’s about more, though, than just archiving data that might be restricted or deleted. For historical and reference purposes it is vital to create copies of information you think might be lost. Past data is useful to give a picture of society and the planet at a given point in time, and it’s essential for analyzing trends. But unless this digital library of data—a library funded by taxpayers—is available to everyone, it won’t be able to do what it was gathered to do, which is to help inform our understanding about the world and guide decisions.
So now, the question becomes, “How do we actually make it so that these aren’t just sitting in servers somewhere without people using them?” says Brittany Janis, executive director of the Open Environmental Data Project (OEDP), a collaborative group launched in 2020. “Because the whole goal of this was for this data to continue being usable and accessible.”
The first 100 days after Trump’s election are a blur for Gretchen Gehrke.
Everything was moving so fast, and coming from every direction. It was like drinking from a firehose. “I’m very grateful we’re no longer in January [2025],” says Gehrke, the website monitoring program lead at the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI)—which is part of the PEDP coalition along with OEDP. Much like Ross, Gehrke got to work on saving data before the administration took office. In December ahead of Trump’s inauguration, Gehrke directed EDGI’s engineer to scrape an EPA database of 21,500 risk-management plans for facilities with toxic or hazardous chemicals—invaluable information to have at hand, for example, if one of these places were hit by a storm or fire and began leaching into the community.
This wasn’t a first for Gehrke. She helped found EDGI in November 2016 when President Trump was elected for his first term.
The anti-climate efforts came swiftly then, with the administration removing several agency Climate Action Plans along with deleting information about the environment and health impacts of burning fossil fuels during its first days. In April 2017 it redirected the EPA’s climate change website to a different landing page, which by October 2018 simply gave visitors a 404 error message. And everything related to President Barack Obama’s 2015 Clean Power Plan was scrubbed from websites, including fact sheets and emissions and financial incentives calculators. Because of this experience over eight years ago, many people in the climate world like Gehrke were primed for another anti-environment push. And everyone was eager to coordinate better.
Still, no one was prepared for the scale and speed at which events were about to unfold. To the researchers watching from the outside, it quickly became clear that the first Trump Administration would not be a blueprint for the second.
In its first three months, the second Trump Administration made 70% more changes to official environmental websites than were made during the same period of his first presidency. During the first six months, the Union of Concerned Scientists documented at least 847 “substantive” changes to federal webpages focused on the environment and climate—67% of these were changes that reduced public access.
The pace of change has been stunning. In December, the EPA scrubbed at least 80 pages related to climate change from its website. And as of Dec. 1, 2025, 18 federal data resources had either been taken down, discontinued, or had significant elements removed from them. This includes terminating the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, and taking down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters tracker (which has since been relaunched by the nonprofit Climate Central). For its part, the administration has said that the erasure of various data resources has been due to reasons ranging from “evolving priorities” and “staffing changes” to a push to end the “shameful discrimination” of diversity initiatives.
“In 2017, not a lot of stuff actually went down,” says Lynda Kellam, a co-founder of the Data Rescue Project launched in February 2025. “This [time] is just a completely different ball game.” What surprised her the most, says Kellam, was the “relentlessness” of the administration’s actions that might endanger data. Others describe it similarly. Jessie Mahr, director of technology at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center (EPIC), says she was startled by the “robustness of the assault.”
“There was definitely a realization that there was no sense in being territorial about it because it was just too big and happening so fast,” says Kellam of how groups have been working together.
The Data Rescue Project’s place in the mix is to focus on keeping information accessible to the public. That’s opposed to scraping and backing up data, for which others like Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab are responsible; between November 2024 and January 2025 the innovation lab’s public data project was busy copying all of the information from data.gov.
Nothing was certain during the first weeks. Everyone was sprinting as fast as they could. “We had folks within agencies saying ‘I’m about to lose my job,’ or ‘I’m the last person within this agency that has this data, can you please back it up,’” says Mahr. There was a spreadsheet that prioritized the various data sets that needed to be saved and everyone just worked their way down the list.
At the top? Environmental justice information. Kameron Kerger had been working on federal environmental justice data since 2021 when she joined the U.S. Digital Service as environmental justice team lead before eventually working at the White House Office of Environmental Justice at the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). At the end of 2024, Kerger became concerned about what might happen to the data she’d dedicated her federal career to.
Others outside the government were also worried. So, one of the first big efforts was to save the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, which Kerger had worked on as lead designer and researcher. Launched in 2021 by CEQ and the U.S. Digital Service, the database allowed users to determine a community’s degree of environmental and economic risk, collating information on everything from air pollution and nearby wastewater to the prevalence of asthma and income levels.
It’s thanks to several groups’ coordination that PEDP was able to rebuild the tool so quickly during Trump’s first days. Similarly, when the EPA’s Environmental Justice Screening tool (better known as EJScreen) was taken offline last February, PEDP rallied to reconstruct it. Once her government service ended on Jan. 25, 2025, Kerger joined EPIC (which is part of the PEDP coalition) as a services and systems designer, and promptly began working on their copy of the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool.
“To this day,” says Gehrke, “the most thoroughly eviscerated information and data are about equity.”
It’s hard to measure the number of decisions that rely on environmental data. It helps determine how to keep drinking water safe and informs the permitting process for new buildings. Federal and local governments need it. Researchers—both in the U.S. and abroad—rely on it. The data can prove essential for tracking emissions, legal cases, and protecting public health. Everyone depends on it. “Whether you’re making business decisions, or deciding whether to buy a house in a certain area that might be flood prone,” says Ross, “government data can’t be replaced.”
The range of things being tracked, and why, might surprise you. There’s the North American bat monitoring database. Sounds odd? Not if you dig into it: knowing where the bats are helps protect them—and the economic value they provide farmers via free pest control.
Then there’s the vegetation health index, a critical input for the U.S. drought monitor—and a key resource for drought-affected farmers while applying for tax relief. And if a hurricane is about to make landfall, emergency planners and responders can use the American Community Survey conducted by the Census Bureau to know which households don’t have access to a vehicle, and thus how many seats on evacuation buses they might need. Federal data, says Ross, “touches every corner of our lives and livelihoods, and if it disappears, we’ll definitely feel the pain.”
At the end of last May, everyone working on climate.gov—NOAA’s climate science repository—was fired. Then in July, the administration redirected the site (that would no longer be updated) to a different NOAA landing page managed by the communications team. For climate.gov’s website manager, Rebecca Lindsey (who was fired that February), that’s when a larger sense of unease set in. It wasn’t just about losing their jobs now. Questions about climate.gov’s fate ran through Lindsey’s head: “Are they going to delete it? Are they going to take it completely offline? Worse, might they begin to use it to spread misinformation about climate, using our reputation and the readership that we built over 15 years?” These worries spurred her last summer to lead the effort to set up a nonprofit, similarly nonpartisan, successor: climate.us. There was a slight delay though, as she quickly pivoted to help to create a clone of the Fifth National Climate Assessment after the government in July took down the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s website—an interagency program that was Congressionally mandated to produce the climate reports. Now that that’s done, Lindsey is finally readying climate.us and hopes it’ll be set to release new content within a few months.
The work is wonky, unglamorous, and often slow. Only in October 2025 did Molly Hardy, project lead for Harvard’s public data project, help launch a new interface for the public to explore all of the data.gov information her team had collected a year ago. Next in line is the Smithsonian data which they saved in September—the goal is that within the next few months or so it’ll also be publicly available.
But for many, including Lindsey, figuring out how to build a website, how to fundraise, has been an entirely new experience. In the meantime, life’s pressures are mounting. And for those who are doing this voluntarily, or with minimal donor support, the question of maintaining personal finances looms overhead.
When Lindsey and others from climate.gov were laid off, that meant an end to their employer health insurance. There are three of them from their original climate.gov team now working on the new site. While they’ve had some successful crowdsource funding come in, which will help run the website, it’s not enough yet to cover multiple full-time salaries. If health care premiums spike, or sustained philanthropic backing doesn’t come through, that may force some to leave the project for full time jobs with secure incomes and health insurance. It’s just one more stress added to the pile.
It’s clear that if many of these efforts are going to continue for the long-term, more money is needed, says Kellam: “We’re going to have to have major funding.”
In the fall, a handful of the data protection groups met up in San Francisco. The goal was to talk through their efforts, and how they could keep helping each other as the year waned on. A few weeks later, another meeting took place in D.C. to discuss funding. It’s no small feat to bring together philanthropy, academia, volunteers, nonprofits, libraries, you name it, to try and replicate nation-wide, sector-wide, micro and macro information banks. To say nothing of then trying to keep all of that information up-to-date, or improve upon it. It’s a behemoth (not to mention, expensive) task realistically only fit for, well, the federal government.
“We should not be doing this,” says Mahr. “This is insane. This level of archiving typically happens when a country is under attack from another country, and this is an attack from within. … Yes, there are phenomenal people working on this—and they shouldn’t be doing it.”
Perhaps, though, it’s a sense of duty that keeps everyone powering forward.
“Like many working for the federal government, we felt like climate.gov wasn’t just a job, it was a mission,” says Lindsey. “We believed in the service that we were providing to the American public: trying to help people understand climate science and data, and how it’s collected, and what it means for our future.”