Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has launched a major effort to limit public access to information about climate change. After the president canned the official government site that hosted the national climate assessments earlier this month, NASA has broken its promise to publish them on its own site.
On Monday, July 14, NASA Press Secretary Bethany Stevens told the Associated Press that NASA will not host any data from globalchange.gov, which served as the official website for the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). This interagency program publishes national climate assessments about every four years as mandated by the Global Change Research Act of 1990. These reports provide authoritative scientific information about climate change risks, impacts, and responses in the U.S. After the USGCRP website went dark in early July, the White House and NASA said the space agency would publish the reports on its site to comply with the 1990 law, according to the AP. Apparently, that is no longer the case.
“NASA has no legal obligations to host globalchange.gov’s data,” NASA Press Secretary Bethany Stevens said in an email. Fortunately, copies of past reports are still available in NOAA’s library, and the latest report and its interactive atlas can be found here.
The Trump administration essentially dismantled the USGCRP in April when it removed federal employees from their positions. It also terminated the program’s contract with ICF International, a technology and policy consulting firm that provided technical, analytic, and programmatic support for the USGCRP and particularly its national climate assessments. Later that month, the administration dismissed all scientists working on the next assessment, which was supposed to be published in 2028. Now, past reports are more inaccessible to the public than ever before.
Eviscerating the USGCRP and squirreling away its national climate assessments are just part of the all-out assault the Trump administration has launched against U.S. climate information. Thousands of employees across other federal agencies that study and track global warming—including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—have lost their jobs since Trump took office in January. His administration has also frozen climate-related grants, killed major federal climate programs, proposed significant cuts to federal research programs, and purged references to climate change from federal websites.
Trump’s effort to obscure the realities of climate change will have real consequences, but it’s ultimately futile. Americans confront this crisis every single day as they navigate new challenges driven by rising global temperatures. The fifth national climate assessment, published in 2023, warned of “potentially catastrophic outcomes” for the nation as climate change exacerbates extreme weather. Many parts of the U.S. are already feeling these effects.
Multiple severe flooding events have already killed scores of Americans in the first half of 2025. Most recently, at least two people in New Jersey died when torrential rain triggered flash floods across much of the Northeast on Monday, July 14, and over 100 people in Texas—including at least 36 children in Kerr County—died during the devastating July 4 flash floods. While it’s difficult to link a single weather event directly to climate change, numerous studies show that rising global temperatures are increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme rain in the U.S. and around the world, thus heightening flood risk. This is because warmer air increases both evaporation and the amount of water vapor the atmosphere can hold. An atmosphere that contains more moisture can produce more intense precipitation events, which is exactly what the U.S. has been experiencing lately.
Wildfires are also becoming more difficult to manage. This was apparent in January, when more than a dozen fast-moving, destructive wildfires decimated parts of Los Angeles. In Arizona, firefighters have struggled to contain two active blazes near the Grand Canyon’s North Rim that destroyed a historic lodge, triggered evacuations, and forced officials to close this part of the national park on Sunday, July 13. Both fires remained 0% contained as of Tuesday, July 15. In the fifth national climate assessment, experts concluded that fires in the Southwest have become larger and more severe, according to climate.gov. Human-driven warming is playing a significant role in this trend, drying out the vegetation that feeds wildfires. One study found that climate change may be responsible for nearly two-thirds of the observed increase in summer fire weather conditions over the past 40 years.
Everywhere Americans look, they see evidence of climate change. It’s not just deadly floods and rampant wildfires—it’s severe heatwaves, shifting seasons, and sinking shorelines. It’s farmers losing their livelihoods, families facing rising insurance costs, and infrastructure buckling under extreme weather conditions. Making it harder to access information about this ongoing crisis won’t shield the public from its effects, but it will make it more difficult for governments and communities to adapt to them.
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