Experts fired by Trump resurrect mothballed climate website

Experts fired by Trump resurrect mothballed climate website June 23, 2026With 100,000 federal science agency jobs and funding for weather and ocean monitoring falling victim to current US policy, experts are warning that the US is ceding its global lead in climate research. But a group of undeterred former government workers have secured funding they say will help keep the nation in the picture about the realities of a warming world. Climate.us, built by former staff of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Climate.gov, aims to restore access to "accurate, accessible and scientifically rigorous" climate information, raising awareness around heat waves, storms, sea level rise and more. The staff started rescuing information from the old website after the project fell victim to terminations and funding cuts soon after president Donald Trump — who has called climate change a scam and a hoax — took office for the second time in early 2025. Climate.gov, which had about 15 million page views in 2024 and was growing yearly, was redirected to a different NOAA site controlled by political appointees put in place by an administration hostile to climate action. "Trusted climate information should not disappear when politics change," said Rebecca Lindsey, managing director of Climate.us. Lindsey told DW the popularity of the old Climate.gov site showed people "in the US do want unbiased, trustworthy information about climate. They're interested in it. They're concerned about it." Climate.us first came online in 2025 to house information from the old government website but the new iteration will now start providing additional content, including news, stories, expert blogs, data visualizations, reports on climate indicators and classroom resources. Scientists will work voluntarily to vet the content for accuracy, and the site is being supported by thousands of small donations from the US and around the world. "It's just so heartening to get this outreach from other countries because I'm aware that other nations would have every right to think, well, America, you've shot yourself in the foot," said Lindsey, who lost her Climate.gov job in February 2025. The relaunch is part of a wider fightback to preserve access to scientific data and knowledge, as the Trump administration cuts funding for public science. The cuts — including a proposal to slash $1.6 billion (€1.464 billion) from NOAA in the next federal budget — risk the US losing "hundreds of years of collective expertise in a variety of areas" and is a "threat to innovation," warned Jules Barbati-Dajches of the Union of Concerned Scientists. What's the big deal if funding and jobs are cut in the federal workforce? The US federal workforce has shrunk by around 12% under Trump, but some 40% of those losses came from science agencies, according to the Partnership for Public Service. Federal science agencies shed close to 118,000 employees in the 18 months between September 2024 and February 2026, with grant funding for environmental research and innovation — including monitoring how chemicals and heat harm human health — falling by 79%. The impact is being felt in communities where contracts have been canceled abruptly and research spaces suddenly shuttered, leaving those populations more vulnerable to polluted water and air, extreme weather and infectious diseases spread by insects whose range is expanding as temperatures rise, said Lardy. "That also obviously has impacts on communities and their long-term health and well-being," he added. Some 10,000 of those who left the government workforce in 2025 had PhDs in the fields of science, technology, engineering, math (STEM) or health. "When I think about sitting down in the dentist chair or boarding a plane, I want someone with the expertise to do their job and to do it well, right?" said Barbati-Dajches "It's the same thing with thousands of experts in the federal government who specialize in environmental toxicants, epidemiology, and meteorology. We need experts in these positions to help keep us safe." Where are federal workers and scientists going? Rebecca Lindsey had been working as editor of Climate.gov for more than a decade before being fired. The first thing she worried about was losing her health insurance, which is tied to a person's job in the US. Then came the question of what to do next, retire early or go into another line of work. "It was extremely stressful and scary and you just multiply that by tens of thousands of stories from across the government," she told DW. Ultimately, Lindsey and others decided to build Climate.us because the work felt like a "vocation." "It was something that we felt really mattered to the country and to the public. And we felt proud of being involved in it," she said. But she is "deeply worried" about the impact on young scientists. "There is some science that only the government does," she said — regulating the nuclear industry, protecting fisheries and human communities. "That isn't the kind of thing that the private sector would ever do, right? They're not going to make money from that," Lindsey added. "What happens when young people say, I can't trust that if I study this thing, that I could go to work for government and have a job in this field?" Partnership for Public Service has found that some former federal scientists remain unemployed, while others have moved to local or state government or other organizations — and some are considering leaving the country altogether. A Nature poll found 75% of 1,600 US scientists said they were considering looking abroad for work. "The brain drain is a real concern," said Lardy, whose parents were life-long federal workers. "We're hearing reports of scientists in particular leaving to go to Canada or China or the EU and that obviously is concerning when it comes to the US's ability to be a leader in the scientific space." There have been some pushbacks. Federal lawmakers rejected deep funding cuts to science agencies at the start of the year, and the administration was recently forced to reverse a decision to dismantle a deep-sea monitoring system. But even when decisions are reversed, Lardy warned, "it will take generations to fix a lot of the damage that's been done" and "convince young people that government is a viable and attractive option for them to build their careers." Edited by: Tamsin Walker