USDA and Forest Service Ordered to Remove Climate Change References From Websites

According to internal guidelines obtained and reviewed by various sources including Politico, The Hill and The Guardian, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has begun removing references to climate change on its webpages and sites, including the U.S. Forest Service website.

As The Guardian reported, the internal memo stated that the department must “identify and archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change” and record all instances of references in a spreadsheet by Friday for further review.

Trump orders USDA to take down websites referencing climate crisis

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— The Guardian (@theguardian.com) January 31, 2025 at 5:30 PM

At the time of this writing, some of the pages and sites are still online, including the Climate Hubs page and a general information page on climate change adaptation in agriculture. However, one Forest Service webpage on climate change that The Hill had pointed out as being online as of 6 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 31 has since been removed. Now, visiting that link prompts a message that reads, “You are not authorized to access this page.”

Many of the former USDA pages and sites mentioning climate change provided important information regarding wildfires and climate resiliency in agriculture, Politico reported. A webpage with information on vulnerability assessments for wildfires is also gone, despite the recent deadly wildfires that blazed around Los Angeles.

The removal of climate change references on official government websites follows executive orders from President Donald Trump that have targeted sustainability goals and actions as well as what content departments and agencies can share on government websites.

Already, the new administration has removed climate change-related information from official WhiteHouse.gov and other official websites. For instance, the Department of Homeland Security’s webpage on addressing climate change now shows that it has been archived. 

Searching the official White House website for the term “climate change” currently produces four results, including an order on “Unleashing American Energy” (which includes reversing the EV mandate and promoting fossil fuels, among other actions) and “Putting America First In International Environmental Agreements” (which withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement for a second time).

The removal of climate change and sustainability references on U.S. government websites is not a surprise, as this happened the first time that Trump held office.

But the censorship by the new administration is extensive, with additional orders given for governmental staff in the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) told to remove pronouns from their email signatures and disband gender resource groups, The Guardian reported.

Information on contraceptives, support for transgender and non-binary schoolchildren and National Transgender HIV Testing Day, among several other details related to health and safety, have also been removed from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website, The Guardian reported.

Federal health agencies have also been ordered to pause communications, Axios reported, and Trump withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization.

Experts are concerned over how these actions will affect health in the face of extreme weather events and disease spread, all of which is worsened by climate change.

“In my lifetime, in the United States I don’t know of another situation where researchers have been this concerned about losing access to data that they’ve had access to their whole career. It’s dire,” Jonathan Gilmour, a data scientist researching the impacts of climate change on human health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told The Journalist’s Resource. “It’s really important to understand that we can’t have a full picture of what’s going on in the United States and around the world if we stop making data available. I don’t want to start thinking about or listing the risks if we don’t have this data, because it imperils our way of life.”