Trump administration reverses plan to publish climate reports on NASA site
The Trump administration has decided not to make national climate assessments publicly available through NASA, walking back a previous commitment to maintain access after shuttering the main government site that hosted the reports.
Seth Borenstein reports for The Associated Press.
In short:
- NASA announced it will not host the legally required National Climate Assessment reports on its website, despite a prior promise to do so after globalchange.gov went offline.
- The reports, which outline climate change impacts across the United States, remain available only through limited access points like NOAA’s internal library and a standalone link to the 2023 assessment.
- Critics, including former federal scientists, say the administration is deliberately burying scientific findings that show climate risks to Americans’ health, property, and livelihoods.
Key quote:
“This document was written for the American people, paid for by the taxpayers, and it contains vital information we need to keep ourselves safe in a changing climate, as the disasters that continue to mount demonstrate so tragically and clearly.”
— Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy
Why this matters:
The National Climate Assessments are meant to inform public understanding and guide local decision-making on weather extremes, food supply, disease risk, infrastructure planning, and disaster preparedness. By making these assessments harder to find, federal leaders are obscuring data that cities, businesses, and health systems use to plan for rising seas, deadly heat waves, worsening wildfires, and storm-driven floods. These threats are already straining public health systems and displacing communities, especially in historically underserved areas. Restricting access to peer-reviewed science weakens transparency and erodes the ability of citizens to hold government accountable for environmental protection and resilience.
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