Amid a rapid rapid on executive orders signed by President Trump, it affected directives that affected the language of government web pages and public access to government data on climate change, the environment, energy and public health.
Over the past two months, hundreds of terabytes have been taken from government websites to analyze data, and are feared to risk deletion. In many cases, the underlying data still exists, but tools that make it possible for the public and researchers to use it have been removed.
But now hundreds of volunteers are recreating digital tools that collect and download as much government data as possible, making it accessible to the public.
So far, volunteers working on a project called Public Environmental Data Partners have acquired over 100 datasets that have been removed from government sites, with an increasing list of 300 that they want to store.
It repeats efforts that began in 2017 during Trump's first term as volunteers downloaded as much climate, environmental, energy and public health data as possible, as they feared its fate under a president who called climate change a hoax.
Federal information has since disappeared. But this time it's different. And that's also a response.
“We shouldn't be in this position where the Trump administration can literally overthrow all government websites if they want,” said environmental scientist Gretchen Gerke, who helped find environmental data and governance initiatives in 2017 to protect federal data. “We are not ready to have resilient public information in the digital age. We need it.”
Much of the data generated by the agency, including climate measurements collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is needed by Congress. This is a digital tool that data can generally be considered unrelated.
“This is a campaign to remove public access,” said Jesse Marl, technology director at the Centre for Environmental Policy Innovation, a member group for the data partnership. “And at the end of the day, American taxpayers paid for these tools.”
The Public Environment Data Partners Coalition has received frequent requests for two data tools: Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, CEJST, Environmental Justice Screening Tool, or EJScreen.
The first was developed under the Biden administration's initiative, and confirmed that 40% of federal climate and infrastructure investments go to underprivileged communities. It went offline in January. EJScreen, developed under the Obama administration and previously available through the EPA, was removed in early February.
“The first thing in the entire enforcement department was to remove references to fairness and environmental justice and remove fairness tools from all institutions,” Dr. Geke said. “It really hinders the public's ability to show structural racism and its disproportionate impacts to communities of color.”
Just a few years ago, the EPA defined environmental justice as “fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of race, color, national origin, or income.” Lee Zeldin, the new EPA administrator, recently identified environmental justice with “forcible discrimination.”
The nonprofit has used both screening tools to apply for federal grants related to environmental justice and climate change. However, the EPA closed all environmental law firms last week, finishing 30 years of work, mitigating the impact on poor and minority communities, and often disproportionately burdened by industrial pollution. It also cancelled hundreds of grants already promised to nonprofits seeking to improve the conditions in these communities.
“We can't solve the problem until we can clarify that, so it was a key source of data to clarify the problem,” said Harriet Festing, executive director of the nonprofit Anthropocene Alliance.
Christina Gosnell, co-founder and president of Catalyst Cooperative, a member of the Environmental Data Cooperative, said her main concern is that data will not be archived before it disappears, not that it will be updated.
Storing the current dataset is the first step, but she said it could become irrelevant if data collection stops.
Over 100 tribal countries, cities, and nonprofits have used CEJST to show where and why communities can reduce city fever, and have since applied for funding for the Arbor Day Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has received a $75 million grant from inflation-reducing actions. The Arbor Day Foundation was planning to plant more than 150,000 new trees before the grant ended in February.
How difficult it is to replicate complex tools depends on how you create and maintain your data. CEJST is “open source”, meaning that the raw data and information that backed up it was already publicly available to coders and researchers. Mahr said it was returned by the three within 24 hours.
However, EJScreen is not an open source tool and reproducing it was more complicated.
“We put a lot of pressure on Ejunkarien to be open source in the last few weeks of the Biden administration, so they released as much code and documentation as possible,” Dr. Geke said.
It took at least 3 weeks to create a version of EJScreen that is closer to the original feature. It's similar to recreating a recipe in the ingredient list, but there are no assembly instructions. Software engineers need to remember how the last “cooking” tasted and reassemble it from memory using trial and error.
The Union is currently working to save more complex datasets, such as NOAA climate data, which hosts many petabytes.
“People may not understand how much data it is,” Dr. Geke said in an email. She said it doesn't include the cost of access of any kind. She said they will talk to NOAA staff and prioritize the most vulnerable and best impact data to keep as quickly as possible.
So far, the data they collect has been stored primarily in the cloud and backed up using servers from around the world. They settled the Pro Bono Agreement to avoid having to pay to back it up.
So far, some data has remained as is, among other institutions, like energy information management statistics. Zane Selvans, co-founder of Catalyst Cooperative, said the group had worked for the past eight years to consolidate US energy systems data and research in the form of open source tools. The goal is to increase access to federal data that is technically available but not always easy to use.
“We've been lucky so far,” Selvans said. “People who are committed to environmental justice have not been so lucky.”
