The National Climate Assessments. Climate.gov. The billion-dollar disaster database. Hundreds of scientific datasets.
They’re all government resources that have been altered, deleted or curtailed since President Donald Trump returned to office nearly one year ago. Now, all of those resources have been rescued, in some form or another, by organizations that are determined to combat Trump’s cuts to federal science.
But whether these grassroots missions are making a difference — or are able to fully replace their canceled counterparts — is hard to say. Even as some efforts to preserve the information show promise for purposes like public education or climate-related lawsuits, they’re also running up against big challenges.
Funding, staffing and technological infrastructure can be tricky to come by for these projects — resources that were plentiful at the agencies that previously housed them. And most organizations don’t have the same clout that the government has historically enjoyed, raising questions about whether climate assertions made by non-federal groups will convey the same amount of influence.
“A report that comes from the American Geophysical Union is not gonna have the same leverage or gravitas … as a report that comes from the federal government,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “It’s not a statement of the federal government.”
AGU is one organization that has tried to fill the holes left by the Trump administration’s widespread staff reductions, funding cuts and canceled federal resources over the Past 11 months. It’s helping to coordinate a collection of research that’s intended to partly compensate for Trump’s removal of the National Climate Assessments — a series of reports widely regarded as the country’s most authoritative sources of information on U.S. climate change.
The American Geophysical Union has also spearheaded the U.S. Academic Alliance for the IPCC, an effort to nominate American scientists to work on reports by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading scientific authority on global warming. The federal government typically nominates U.S. scientists for these positions, but declined to do so in 2025.
It’s not the only organization that’s stepping up. The science nonprofit Climate Central recently launched its own version of NOAA’s billion-dollar disaster database, which tracked the country’s costliest weather events before it was discontinued by the Trump administration in May. The nonprofit Data Foundation established a coalition in 2025 to monitor and report U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, while the EPA has proposed terminating its own greenhouse gas reporting program.
Former federal scientists have teamed up to revive NOAA’s now-defunct science and information resource climate.gov with a new website. And multiple organizations across the country have rushed to archive federal datasets while the Trump administration deleted them by the hundreds in 2025.
Meanwhile, the government itself has become an antagonist to many of the groups trying to preserve its vanishing resources. The Trump administration has promoted a variety of scientific misinformation this year, researchers say, including widely discredited theories about vaccines and climate change.
Dessler, himself, spearheaded an independent fact-check of a federal climate report released in July by the Department of Energy, a document scientists say was rife with inaccuracies. His collaborators included more than 80 scientists across the U.S.
It was important for mainstream scientists to debunk what Dessler described as “government-sanctioned misinformation.” But taking on the Trump administration is a big lift, he added.
“The federal government has the biggest megaphone,” Dessler said. “They can really control the narrative. And if they really want to say climate change is not real … it’s extremely difficult for everybody else to push back against it.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Many projects, few resources
Rebecca Lindsey knows firsthand the challenges of recreating a federal resource. She was formerly a program manager for climate.gov, a NOAA website that contained climate-related data, tools and information before it was sidelined by the Trump administration in June.
After Lindsey was fired, along with other climate.gov staff, she set out to revive the website in another form. The result is climate.us, a nonprofit group that’s working to archive the resources formerly housed by its federal counterpart.
But the project, launched in September, has already hit some snags.
Access to climate experts is one concern. Climate.gov formerly benefited from fact-checking and other free input by federal scientists who considered the website’s resources part of their professional purview. Lindsey would like to have a similar team of scientists at her disposal for climate.us, but she’s not sure if an independent initiative will draw as many volunteers.
Meanwhile, funding is one of the project’s biggest challenges. A crowdfunding campaign has raised around $200,000 for climate.us to support the construction of a new website. But it’s not enough to maintain all the full-time staff members that previously worked on climate.gov, including science writers, data visualizers and a web programmer.
Lindsey has started reaching out to philanthropists and foundations, hoping to secure additional funding. But it’s a tough climate for private funding at the moment. Amid the Trump administration’s dramatic funding cuts, including thousands of canceled grants in 2025, there’s a profusion of scientists and organizations competing for other resources.
“When we come into the first part of 2026, we are gonna have to start making some decisions about whether we decide to keep trying to obtain that funding,” Lindsey said. If it doesn’t come through, she may decide to use the crowd-sourced funding to build the best replacement website she can — and then, she said, “we may have to move on.”
‘Rapid response triage’
Scientists have been working to archive federal datasets since Trump was elected for the second time. It’s a lesson they learned eight years ago, when the first Trump administration altered and deleted climate information from scores of federal websites.
The current administration has deleted hundreds of federal datasets in the last year, said Brittany Janis, executive director of the nonprofit Open Environmental Data Project and a member of the data preservation coalition Public Environmental Data Partners, or PEDP, speaking at a panel hosted by the American Geophysical Union in December.
Scientists worry that the government is quietly altering or eroding untold numbers of other databases containing valuable information on topics like public health and climate change. Coalitions of data-focused organizations have been working all year to track these changes and download federal information, store it and make it publicly available in case it’s destroyed.
The problem is that there are thousands of federal datasets to choose from — and it’s hard to decide which ones to prioritize.
“PEDP kind of emerged as a rapid response triage to what was happening, what we were hearing from the federal government,” Janis said. “We focused almost entirely on things that people have said, datasets that people say matter to them.”
Earlier in the year, the organization focused largely on datasets that members had heard were in danger of immediate deletion. It also prioritized environmental justice tools, like EPA’s former mapping and screening tool EJSCREEN, which the Trump administration erased in February.
“Now that we’re a bit further away from the boom, the immediate destruction of things, we are still taking nominations,” Janis added.
‘An enormous undertaking’
Some federal science resources may be too intensive for independent groups to replicate. Experts say the National Climate Assessment is one example.
The assessment was formerly the country’s most authoritative resource on climate change, updated every few years in the form of a major federal report. The reports are a valuable resource for scientists and other members of the public. They’ve also been used to help justify federal environmental regulations and climate actions, making them an important resource for the government as well.
The Trump administration removed all five previous National Climate Assessments from federal websites in June and deleted the website for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the government body that publishes the reports. POLITICO’s E&E News reported in December that the Trump administration had tapped a group of climate contrarians to helm the next installment.
Some organizations are working to keep the vision behind the National Climate Assessments alive. The American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society have teamed up on an initiative they’ve dubbed the “U.S. Climate Collection,” which will compile scientific studies focused on U.S. climate change and make them freely available to the public.
It’s not meant to be an exact replacement for the National Climate Assessment, organizers caution — and outside experts say that’s probably not possible anyway. The reports involve years of work and input from hundreds of specialized contributors, resources that would be difficult for most private organizations to coordinate. Much of their legitimacy in the scientific community and their usefulness for federal rules derive from their origins in the government.
“Writing a report like the National Climate Assessment is an enormous undertaking,” said Dessler, the Texas A&M scientist. “It’s extremely expensive. It takes years to write. There’s really no way for a self-selected group of people to self-organize to do that.”
‘It’s pretty inspirational’
Building trust in independent projects is a challenge for scientists.
Researchers and members of the public alike have historically viewed the federal government as the gold standard for U.S. science, said Sonia Wang, a senior adviser at The Data Foundation, speaking at the AGU annual conference in December. But much of the public has recently lost faith in science and in government.
That makes it a challenge for independent science initiatives to build confidence in their work. But it’s not impossible — that kind of trust “comes from people and goodwill,” Wang said.
Meanwhile, scientists say it’s important for independent groups to keep pushing back on federal cuts and misinformation.
Dessler said his fact check of the DOE climate report has been widely cited in the media. Extensive news coverage of 85 scientists accusing the federal government of misinformation “might make a general difference in the public debate over this,” he said.
The fact check could also play a role in certain kinds of lawsuits, Dessler added.
The Trump administration in July proposed repealing the endangerment finding, a scientific conclusion highlighting the harms of global warming that was used to underpin many federal environmental regulations. The administration used the DOE climate report, which downplayed the seriousness of climate change, to justify its proposal.
The Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists swiftly filed a lawsuit to block the proposed repeal. And Dessler’s fact check of the DOE report, which highlighted dozens of inaccuracies, could be “widely used in any litigation that takes place over the endangerment finding,” Dessler said.
Chris Marchesano, a staff attorney with the nonprofit Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, agreed that Dessler’s efforts could play a role in lawsuits over the endangerment finding.
“I think it’s critically important that academics and scholars are sort of stepping up to fight back against misinformation,” he said. “It has important legal implications.”
He also suggested that exposing federal misinformation is a public service.
“I know climate scientists have been really dedicated to developing better science communication skills, not only to communicate the realities of climate change to the public, but also to policymakers,” he said. “In times that are super challenging, like now, I think it’s pretty inspirational to see how many people have rallied around the planet.”
