In the first few days of Donald Trump’s second term as president, the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST, for short) disappeared from government websites. It was an interactive map of U.S. Census tracts that are “marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution,” as the pre-Trump federal government put it—something researchers and the public could use to quickly locate and zoom in on specific communities and analyze the problems they face.

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine stored a copy of the webpage, but even there, the map was gone. However, thanks to a team of researchers from multiple universities and other organizations, a new working version was posted online Friday.

“One of the first tools the Trump admin took down was CEJST. It sure would be frustrating to the administration’s anti-EJ, anti-climate goals if someone had … saved it,” Jonathan Gilmour, a data scientist at Harvard University’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health, wrote in a post on LinkedIn—a post sharing a link to a copy of the tool. After the post, he told Inside Higher Ed, “I got an incredible outpouring of gratitude, messages from folks in the community who were saying, ‘We use this every day in our work to help better serve our community.’”

Gilmour is part of the Public Environmental Data Project, a coalition working to preserve data resources that have been, or may soon be, taken off-line by an administration that has targeted environmental initiatives and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts from the first day Trump returned to the White House.

Members of the group said other resources have gone off-line since Trump’s return. Those include the Environmental Justice Scorecard, which, according to the Biden administration, had shown federal agencies’ actions “to advance environmental justice” and helped enforce “environmental and civil rights laws.” Gone too is the entire website of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Climate Change and Health Equity. Also missing are multiple resources hosted by the Department of Energy, including the Energy Justice Mapping Tool for Schools and the Energy Affordability Resource Map.

White House spokespeople didn’t respond to questions Tuesday about why these resources are no longer functional—including whether their disabling was intentional and whether it was permanent. Harrison Fields, special assistant to the president and principal deputy press secretary, did share a comment from an unnamed Department of Energy spokesperson.

“The Department of Energy is conducting a department-wide review, which includes funding such as grants and loans, to ensure all activities are consistent with President Trump’s executive orders and priorities,” that statement said. “The American people provided President Trump with a mandate to govern and to unleash ‘American Energy Dominance.’ The Department of Energy is hard at work to deliver on President Trump’s promise to restore affordable, reliable and secure energy to the American people.”

When contacted by Inside Higher Ed, someone at the Council on Environmental Quality said no one was available Tuesday to say why the resources were no longer online.

Eric Nost, an associate professor at Canada’s University of Guelph and another member of the Public Environmental Data Project, said CEJST and the Environmental Justice Scorecard, which he said provided “accountability” for federal agencies, emerged from former president Biden’s Justice 40 initiative. That initiative set a goal across the federal government for 40 percent of federal benefits, such as pollution-reduction spending, to “flow to disadvantaged communities.”

Lourdes Vera, another member of the project and an assistant professor at the University at Buffalo, said CEJST was useful when teaching— helping students analyze the prevalence of lead exposure, poverty and other factors alongside maps of communities that were redlined. She said it also helped community members formulate public comments on proposed government actions. But the Biden executive order that started Justice 40 was among the many Trump repealed on Inauguration Day.

The government hasn’t scrubbed the underlying data for such resources, though it may be much harder to access, Vera said. She said the government has taken down tools for searching and presenting such data that are helpful for the public and for researchers themselves. She said it’s hard to even file open records requests for removed data if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

Whatever the rationale for the resources going off-line, the Public Environmental Data Project is attempting to make them available again—and even improve upon the original tools as they do.

Putting Together a Team

The work to preserve these resources began before Trump was sworn in.

In November, Gilmour said, he and the other volunteers “started talking and preparing for climate and environmental justice and health information to disappear.” Vera said some preparation happened even before the election.

Nost said they had been forewarned: “This is something I think we were expecting all along, given Trump’s previous administration, given the campaigning he did.”

Gilmour, who’s also on the data team for the Harvard–Boston University Climate Change and Health Research Coordinating Center, said people in different parts of the country were working on saving these resources after Trump’s re-election. “We saw all these disjointed nodes and wanted to have one central coordinating center that was sort of a collaborative effort,” Gilmour said, so they created the Public Environmental Data Project. He said this prevents duplication of what are sometimes difficult efforts at preservation.

The project’s website says it includes environmental, justice and policy organizations alongside scholars. “To gather insights on what data to preserve, we reached out to our networks, which consist largely of environmental justice groups and networks, state and local government climate offices and academic researchers,” it says. Members of the group said about 20 people are now regularly participating in the effort.

“We collectively archived dozens of different data sets that we prioritized, that we thought would be at risk,” Nost said.

“It’s been an all-hands-on-deck operation to try to save this data,” said Gilmour. “And I’ve been on threads with folks all across the U.S., at different institutions, some folks in government who saw this coming prior to Inauguration Day and since, who have been responding in real time to threats of things being taken down and have reached out to us.”

As of late last week, the group reported on its website that “we have identified 57 high-priority databases, of which we’ve archived 37 thus far.”

The project has a tracking sheet with roughly 500 data sets, Gilmour said.

“I’m just grabbing everything using a programmatic tool that I’m running on the computer and just essentially telling my computer to go and grab all the data recursively from a site by starting at the landing page,” he said. “We’re just trying to grab as much as we can, and we’re going to try to put the puzzle pieces back when we have a little bit more time to think—we probably have saved some things that have gone down, whether or not we know. It’s this gigantic amount of data—terabytes and terabytes of data from a few dozen federal sites.”

After Trump shocked the world back in 2016 by winning the presidency, environmental researchers also rushed to copy and save federal data and resources that they feared the incoming administration would delete. Among other statements that worried scholars, the president-elect had called climate change a “hoax.”

Politico’s E&E News reported that, at least on the issue of climate, that past effort “was an overprecaution … Federal databases, containing vast stores of globally valuable climate information, remained largely intact through the end of Trump’s first term.” But after his re-election, researchers feared that things would be more serious this time—plus, the current effort also focuses on saving public-facing and easily accessible data resources.

Jennifer Jones, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said she doesn’t know why these federal data resources have gone off-line, but it’s “in line with the kinds of things this administration has promised.”

“The goal so often is to silence science and the data that gets in the way of this government, which is clearly a government of billionaires for billionaires,” Jones said. “What I know is that for weeks and months leading up to the inauguration, the incoming administration had made it very clear their goal was to threaten and silence scientists.”