Trump administration shuts down U.S. website on climate change

The Trump administration on Monday shut down a federal website that had presented congressionally mandated reports and research on climate change, drawing rebukes from scientists who said it will hinder the nation’s efforts to prepare for worsening droughts, floods and heat waves.

The U.S. Global Change Research Program’s website, globalchange.gov, was taken down along with all five versions of the National Climate Assessment report and extensive information on how global warming is affecting the country.

“They’re public documents. It’s scientific censorship at its worst,” said Peter Gleick, a California water and climate scientist who was one of the authors of the first National Climate Assessment in 2000. “This is the modern version of book burning.”

The climate reports were required by Congress, and there will still be alternative ways of finding them even without the website, Gleick said. “But this information will be harder and harder for the American public to find.”

The White House didn’t immediately provide comments about the removal of the website.

In May, Trump signed an executive order saying that his administration is committed to “restoring a gold standard for science to ensure that federally funded research is transparent, rigorous,” and that federal decisions are informed by “the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available.”

The president cited an example relating to climate science, saying federal agencies previously used a “worst-case scenario” of warming “based on highly unlikely assumptions.”

The U.S. Global Change Research Program was established under a 1990 law, which also mandated that climate assessments be prepared every four years. In April, however, the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and other experts who had begun to write the latest National Climate Assessment report.

“This is scientific information that the American taxpayers paid for, and it’s their right to have it,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University who was an author of four previous versions of the climate assessment report. “It’s information that I, as a scientist, can say is absolutely critical to making good decisions for the future, whether you’re a farmer, a homeowner, a business owner, a city manager, or anyone really who wants to ensure a safe and resilient future for themselves and for their children.”

Hayhoe noted the 1990 law mandates that the program’s research findings be available to all federal agencies and departments, and that the National Climate Assessments be available digitally.

Hayhoe said the website’s many resources had included an interactive atlas of projected changes in hot and cold days, rainfall amounts and other effects per degree of warming.

“Climate is changing faster than any time in human history, and we know that if we don’t adapt, if we don’t build resilience into all of our systems — our food and water systems, our infrastructure and our health systems — that we will suffer the consequences,” Hayhoe said.

She said the National Climate Assessments have helped “bridge the physiological distance” for Americans.

“It tells people in your region, here is what is already happening and here is what is going to happen, and here is how it is affecting your home, your insurance rates, your water, your food, the plants and animals that you see around you,” she said.

Until Monday, the website globalchange.gov made available more than 200 publications. They included the research program’s yearly reports to Congress and studies on the Arctic, agriculture and human health. A few were republished reports from other organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The globalchange.gov website, shown June 29, 2025, was taken down the next day.

The site also hosted dozens of webpages, educational podcasts and videos on topics including sea level rise, greenhouse gases, biodiversity and drought.

The top item on the homepage was the Fifth National Climate Assessment, which it described as “the preeminent source of authoritative information on the risks, impacts, and responses to climate change in the United States.”

But the Trump administration has cut funding for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which oversees the assessments.

Around April 10, a small yellow banner appeared at the top of the site, reading: “The operations and structure of the [U.S. Global Change Research Program] are currently under review.”

Previous versions of the website can still be found using the nonprofit Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which keeps snapshots of sites to help track changes.

The shutdown of the website comes after the Trump administration also took down another site, climate.gov, which had been maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That occurred after much of the staff that had worked on the site were reportedly dismissed. (The climate.gov website now redirects users to noaa.gov/climate.)

Gleick said the new NOAA website is a “pale substitute” for the extensive information that was previously available. He said he believes the removal of websites with scientific research on global warming, driven by fossil fuels and rising levels of greenhouse gases, appears aimed at hiding the risks from the public.

Hayhoe and other climate scientists said that following the dismissal of the team that had been working on the Sixth National Climate Assessment, they still don’t know what the Trump administration’s plans are for the next congressionally required report.

“The deeper threat to the country is that we won’t do the new assessments that are necessary to understand the latest research on climate threats to the country,” Gleick said. “It seems like anything climate related is being either cut to the bone or completely eliminated, with no assessment of its value or importance.”