Reading · Judith Dayal · RSS Amplifier

In the first half of 2025, the Trump regime dismantled the team behind Climate.gov, one of the federal government's most trusted and widely used public sources of climate information.

For nearly fifteen years, Climate.gov had taken the enormous amount of climate science produced by the federal government and made it useful to the rest of us. It explained what El Niño could mean for the coming winter. It tracked drought, extreme heat, hurricanes, sea-level rise, greenhouse gases and changes in temperature. It produced maps and charts journalists could use, resources teachers could bring into classrooms, and explanations written for people who did not have a degree in atmospheric science but still deserved to understand what was happening to the planet they lived on.

At the beginning of 2025, if you searched Google for “climate” in the United States, Climate.gov was the top organic result. More than 15 million people visited the site every year, and more than half a million people followed its social media accounts. It had become the kind of government resource most of us probably don't think very much about until we need it. A farmer trying to understand drought conditions could use it. A teacher preparing a lesson about climate change could use it. A reporter covering a heat wave could use it. A local official planning for flooding could use it. A parent trying to understand what an increasingly hot climate might mean for where their children are growing up could use it.

Then the people responsible for keeping all of that information accessible started disappearing.

Climate.gov was maintained by a small team of federal and contract staff working with scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Rebecca Lindsey, who had spent years as the site's lead writer and editor and eventually became its program manager, lost her position in February 2025 during the federal workforce cuts. By the end of May, NOAA had terminated the remaining full-time federal and contractor staff behind Climate.gov's daily operations, including its content-production team.

That meant losing the people who took complicated scientific research and turned it into something the public could actually understand. It meant losing the writers, designers and data experts who built visualizations and explanations, maintained resources, answered questions and helped people navigate an enormous amount of federal climate science. Climate.gov had spent years becoming a place where someone could go with a question about the climate and have a reasonable chance of finding an understandable answer.

The regime dismantled the people who made that possible.

This was happening while the Trump regime was tearing through federal science far beyond one website. NOAA lost employees through firings, layoffs and departures. Research programs were targeted, grants were canceled or threatened, and scientists who had spent careers building institutional knowledge suddenly found themselves outside the agencies where they had done that work. Climate.gov was one highly visible piece of a much larger attack on the government's climate infrastructure.

Then another important piece of that infrastructure disappeared from public view. In June 2025, the website for the U.S. Global Change Research Program went offline, taking with it easy public access to the National Climate Assessments.

Those assessments exist because Congress passed the Global Change Research Act in 1990, requiring the federal government to periodically assess what climate change is doing to the United States and what it is likely to do in the future. The Fifth National Climate Assessment, released in 2023, brought together the work of hundreds of experts and examined climate change across the country, including its effects on agriculture, infrastructure, ecosystems, human health, extreme heat, flooding, drought and wildfire.

This was the federal government's own scientific work about what was happening to the country, paid for by the American public and produced so the American public could use it. Then the website where people had been able to easily access it disappeared.

At the same time, the Trump regime was also dismantling work on the next National Climate Assessment. Hundreds of scientists and experts who had already begun preparing it were dismissed, disrupting the next report before it could be completed. And a lot of this happened quietly. People notice when hundreds of books are pulled from the shelves of a library. It is much easier to miss when a government fires the people responsible for maintaining information, stops updating a website, or removes the place where millions of people used to find it.

That is part of what makes this so dangerous. The information doesn't actually have to be destroyed. It just has to become difficult enough to find that most people will never see it.

You can fire the people who maintain it, stop updating the website, remove the links people have used for years, shut down the portal where the information was organized, and scatter what remains across government servers and archives until an ordinary person has no idea where to look for it. The science may technically still exist somewhere, but that doesn't do the American public much good if they can no longer find the information their own tax dollars helped pay for.

That distinction matters because scientific information does very little for a fifth-grade teacher if she can't find it, and a climate dataset isn't particularly useful to a local journalist if finding and interpreting it requires hours they don't have. A beautifully researched federal report doesn't serve the public very well when the public no longer knows where the report went. Climate.gov existed partly to solve that problem by translating an enormous federal scientific system into something ordinary people could actually find, understand and use.

When Rebecca Lindsey later described what happened to Climate.gov, she compared it to renovating a grocery store so that its front door suddenly opened into a closet. The groceries might technically still be somewhere in the building, but good luck figuring out how to get to them.

The people who had spent years making that science available to the public weren't willing to let that be the end of it. Instead, former members of the Climate.gov team regrouped and began building Climate.us, an independent nonprofit climate-information platform where they could make that information accessible again.

The full site launched on June 23, 2026, restoring Climate.gov's fifteen-year collection of climate stories, expert blogs, maps, climate indicators, educational resources, classroom materials and pathways to climate data, along with access to the Fifth National Climate Assessment.

They didn't simply create a graveyard for the old website, either. Climate.us is continuing the work. The team is producing and updating climate information, developing explainers and visualizations, working with scientific experts and trying to preserve the thing that made Climate.gov so valuable in the first place: taking complicated climate science and making it understandable to people who need to use it.

And I love how they did it.

More than 2,500 people made small donations that provided approximately $250,000, about one-third of the funding needed to support the launch. More than 80 scientists volunteered to serve as subject-matter reviewers, helping make sure the information being published remained scientifically rigorous. The former Climate.gov team brought the experience they had accumulated over years of doing this work, and thousands of people who believed the information should remain public helped give them the money to build a new home for it.

There is another detail here that makes this even better. Much of the original Climate.gov material was produced by the federal government, which means that material belongs to the public and is generally in the public domain. The American people had already paid for this science, the maps, the explanations and the research. Losing the federal website did not suddenly make that knowledge the private property of the people who had decided to make it harder to access.

So the people rebuilding it used what already belonged to us.

Climate.us is very clear that it is not a government website, and there are important limits to what an independent nonprofit can replace. A small organization supported by donors and volunteers cannot recreate the staffing, institutional resources, scientific capacity or enormous data infrastructure of a fully functioning federal agency. The damage being done inside NOAA and other scientific institutions is real, and the existence of Climate.us should never be used as an excuse to minimize it.

But independence also gives this particular resource something it didn't have before. Its existence is no longer entirely dependent on whether the person occupying the White House finds the science behind it politically convenient.

Rebecca Lindsey explained the reason for building Climate.us in one sentence when the full site launched: “Trusted climate information should not disappear when politics change.”

She is right, and climate science is hardly the only place where that principle matters. Public-health information should not disappear when politics change. Environmental data should not disappear. Historical records shouldn't disappear. The accumulated knowledge of thousands of people working across generations should not become something Americans gain or lose every four years depending on who wins an election.

There is a much larger lesson in this story because we have spent the past year watching institutions we thought were permanent turn out to be much more fragile than many of us realized. Programs that took decades to build can be gutted astonishingly quickly. Experienced people can be fired. Websites can vanish. Entire offices can be dismantled. The machinery of government is ultimately made of people, and when enough of those people are removed, the things we assumed would simply always be there can disappear with them.

Watching that happen over and over again can make resistance feel impossibly small. When you watch something enormous being dismantled by people with the power of the federal government behind them, it is easy to wonder what your twenty-dollar donation is supposed to do about it, or what difference one scientist volunteering a few hours can possibly make. It is easy to look at the amount of money and institutional power on one side and conclude that ordinary people simply cannot compete with it.

Climate.us is a pretty good answer to that feeling of helplessness. A few thousand people gave what they could, dozens of scientists gave what they knew, and the people who had been fired contributed their time, experience and years of knowledge about the resource they had helped build. Together, they brought it back.

Not exactly as it was, and certainly not with the enormous resources of the federal government behind it, but the information is there. You can open Climate.us right now and look through fifteen years of climate information. You can pull up maps, read about carbon dioxide, find teaching materials, learn about sea-level rise and read the Fifth National Climate Assessment. You can access the kind of scientific information that had become significantly harder to find after the federal resource built to make it accessible was dismantled, because the people who had spent years doing this work refused to let it disappear.

The government took away their jobs. They made sure it couldn't take this knowledge away from the rest of us.

I spend a lot of time writing about people with extraordinary amounts of power. Presidents, billionaires, cabinet secretaries, corporations and lawmakers have access to institutions and money that most of us will never come close to possessing, and it is very easy, especially right now, to mistake that enormous imbalance of power for our own helplessness.

But someone else having more power does not mean the rest of us have none.

Most of the things worth protecting have always depended, at some point, on ordinary people deciding they are worth protecting. Libraries stay open because people fight for them. Journalism survives because people support it. Scientific knowledge survives because people preserve it. Communities survive because people continue showing up for one another after the cameras leave and everyone else has moved on to the next disaster.

Resistance doesn't always look like millions of people filling the streets. Sometimes it looks like more than 80 scientists volunteering their expertise because they refuse to watch years of public knowledge disappear. Sometimes it looks like 2,500 people reaching into their own bank accounts and collectively finding a quarter of a million dollars. Sometimes it looks like a handful of people losing the jobs they cared about and deciding that being fired does not mean the work they were doing suddenly stopped mattering.

There is so much being dismantled right now that I think it is important to stop occasionally and pay attention to the things people are managing to save. That doesn't mean everything is fine, and it certainly doesn't mean one nonprofit website can replace a functioning federal scientific infrastructure. It means that even while we acknowledge the scale of what is being lost, we should also pay attention when ordinary people manage to protect something someone with far more power tried to take away.

Hopelessness has a way of convincing us that power only moves in one direction, from the people who have the most of it down onto everybody else. Stories like this matter because they remind us that isn't always true. Governments have enormous power, but they don't own people's knowledge, their expertise, their willingness to organize or their determination to preserve something they know belongs to everyone.

The Trump regime dismantled the team behind one of the country's most useful public climate resources and made years of publicly funded climate information harder to access. The people who knew that resource best found one another again, thousands of strangers helped fund them, dozens of scientists volunteered to help them, and together they built another doorway to the information.

They tried to close one door to public knowledge, so people built another one.

And they left it open for all of us.

Hey, friends. More and more corporate media is being censored and pressured to back away from the truth. We need independent journalists who won't! If you value my work and want to help me become a full-time independent journalist, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $5/month. ❤️

Trump Fired the Team That Made Climate Science Accessible. So They Built Their Own Website and Put 15 Years of It Back Online.

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