Environmental justice is the principle that everyone—regardless of race, income, or background—deserves equal access to a clean, safe environment and an equal voice in decisions affecting their community. Federal agencies, scientists, advocates, and community members working towards environmental justice rely on publicly available data from the US government to identify areas where people face higher levels of pollution and worse health outcomes, and have less economic and political power to address these challenges. Advocates use this information to challenge policies and practices that perpetuate these disparities.
Alarmingly, the Trump administration has removed thousands of federal data sources in recent weeks. Almost overnight, environmental and public health data critical for evaluating environmental justice vanished from government websites like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Census Bureau, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Many of us feared this would happen—as my colleague Darya Minovi predicted—but the reality is far worse than we anticipated.
The erasure of vital public data has far-reaching consequences for researchers, policymakers, and everyday citizens who rely on these resources to make informed decisions. This loss of essential data jeopardizes the health and prosperity of communities across the country and directly undermines our nation’s pursuit of opportunity and justice for all.
Public data = public good
The federal government collects vast amounts of information—on topics ranging from public health and the economy to transportation and the environment—that policymakers use to guide decisions. But federal data repositories aren’t just for policymakers; they belong to the people whose taxes fund the research and whose lives are reflected in the data.
For centuries, federal data have been made publicly available, first through printed reports and presentations and now through federal open-data websites. By publicly sharing its data and reports, the federal government practices accessibility standards that are central to what is known as data justice. This transparency fosters accountability and helps ensure that the government is responsive to the communities it serves.
“When it comes to free data and transparency, United States of America is one of the best!,” proclaimed Swedish public health professor Hans Rosling in 2009. But the Trump administration has upended this longstanding tradition. The removal of information undermines trust in government institutions and erodes government accountability. It creates barriers to understanding issues that directly affect public health, safety, and well-being. As Harvard professor Nancy Krieger stated, “There’s been a history in this country recently of trying to make data disappear, as if that makes problems disappear. But the problems don’t disappear, and the suffering gets worse.”
The removal of environmental justice data also eliminates powerful advocacy tools for community members fighting for environmental justice. One notable example is the Trump administration’s deletion of EJScreen from the EPA website on February 5, 2025. EJScreen was a mapping tool developed to help users identify areas where vulnerable people may be exposed to high levels of pollution. In 2023, when the site was still active, the Center for Public Integrity advised community members to reference EJScreen in discrimination complaints to the EPA, and community members successfully used it to advocate for environmental justice.
In a 2024 report, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) relied on EJScreen to identify Tyson meatpacking plants that were polluting water in overburdened communities. These findings informed UCS’s advocacy for stronger regulations on these facilities, including our formal comment urging the EPA to strengthen water protections against contamination from the meat and poultry industry.
Where to find rescued data
Federal data belong to the people, and we must not let it disappear. That’s why UCS has joined advocates and scientists across the globe in data rescue operations to preserve the information that the Trump administration doesn’t want you to see:
- Climate Mirror preserves and shares US federal climate data.
- The Data Liberation Project publishes federal data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.
- The Data Rescue Project, a clearinghouse for data rescue efforts, provides a tracker of downloaded federal data.
- The End of Term Archive captures and hosts government websites at risk of disappearing during changes in administrations, and provides tips on using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to view older versions of changed or deleted government websites.
- The Harvard Dataverse hosts data from researchers around the world (including UCS).
- Harvard Law School’s Data.gov Archive currently hosts more than 300,000 datasets harvested from federal sources in 2024 and 2025, along with open-source tools to help others preserve data.
- The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research archives US government and other social data at DataLumos.
- IPUMS collects and disseminates social and economic data from around the world, including from the United States.
- The Public Environmental Data Partners Screening Tools website provides public access to disappeared federal environmental justice data including the EPA’s EJScreen, the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index and Environmental Justice Index, the Council of Environmental Quality’s EJ Scorecard, and the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool.
- Many university libraries, including the University at Albany SUNY, the University of Minnesota, the Ohio State University, Syracuse University, and Tulane University, offer tips for finding disappeared federal data.
UCS is working to facilitate access to lost government resources by republishing deleted materials and connecting folks to external repositories that house rescued data. You can find UCS’s collection of rescued government data and websites here.
Of course, we can only save what the federal government has previously published. It is critical for the future of public health and environmental justice that federal research programs continue to collect, analyze, and publish data that enhance our understanding of the country and enable us to direct government programs and resources to the places that need them most.
If access to federal data remains limited, environmental justice researchers and advocates may be able to utilize state data and screening tools such as California’s CalEnviroScreen and Minnesota’s environmental justice map. A 2022 Urban Institute report identified more than 20 additional local screening tools that can aid in evaluating environmental justice within specific states. But this approach highlights the fragmented nature of data availability in the absence of federal resources. Ultimately, the lack of comprehensive federal data will hinder efforts to understand and address environmental justice issues on a national scale.
What you can do
Identifying, downloading, cleaning, archiving, and releasing large amounts of federal data at risk of deletion is incredibly resource-intensive. You can help preserve federal data by participating in data rescue efforts and supporting organizations doing the work.
UCS is working to defend federal science and to advocate for a healthy, safe, and just future. If you’re a scientist, you can join more than 17,000 fellow experts in UCS’s Science Network and use your expertise to assist our local, state, and national efforts. And everyone can call on Congress to oppose the Trump administration’s attacks on science and data. Together, we can work to restore environmental justice data to its rightful place on government websites that are easily accessible to all.