Farmers depend on climate data. They’re suing the USDA for deleting it. todayheadline

In late January, the director of digital communications at the U.S. Department of Agriculture sent an email to staff instructing them to remove agency web pages related to climate change by the end of the following day. 

Peter Rhee, the communications head, also told staff members to flag web pages that mention climate change for review and make recommendations to the agency on how to handle them. The new policy was first reported by Politico. 

The result is that an unknown number of web pages — including some that contained information about federal loans and other forms of assistance for farmers and some that showcased interactive climate data — have been taken down, according to a lawsuit filed this week on behalf of a group of organic farmers and two environmental advocacy groups. The plaintiffs are demanding that the USDA stop erasing climate-related web pages and republish the ones taken down. 

“Farmers are on the front lines of climate change,” said Jeff Stein, an associate attorney with the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice, who is representing the plaintiffs. “Purging climate change web pages doesn’t make climate change go away. It just makes it harder for farmers to adapt.”

One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit is the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, or NOFA-NY, a group that helps educate and certify producers in organic farming practices. The organization has a hotline that often directs interested farmers to USDA websites as a starting point for more information. 

“All of a sudden, it’s like anything marked with climate is starting to disappear,” said Wes Gillingham, the board president of NOFA-NY. According to the complaint, the Farm Service Agency and Farmers.gov, both part of the USDA, removed information about how farmers could access federal loans and technical assistance to start adopting practices that help reduce emissions and sequester carbon, known as climate-smart agriculture. 

The speed with which websites were taken down encouraged NOFA-NY to move quickly when it came to filing a lawsuit. “We want to prevent good science and information that farmers need from disappearing, especially this time of year,” Gillingham added, since the colder winter months are when farmers plan for the growing and harvesting seasons ahead. 

Gillingham emphasized that access to scientific information about drought, extreme weather, and other climate impacts is essential to farmers’ ability to stay in business. “Farmers are constantly trying to improve their situation. They’re under immense economic pressure,” he said. 

One tool that allowed farmers to assess their risk level when it came to climate impacts was an interactive map published by the U.S. Forest Service, which combined over 140 different datasets and made them accessible to the general public, said Stein. Land managers could see how climate change is expected to impact natural resources throughout the country; for example, they could look up which watersheds are projected to face the greatest climate impacts and highest demand in the future. But this tool is no longer available. (At the time of writing, a link to information about the map on the Forest Service’s website turned up dead.)

When tools like this go offline, they disrupt farmers’ ability to protect their lands and their livelihoods. In New York, where Gillingham’s group is located, the majority of farms are small: under 200 acres. “The margin of error to be successful, it’s pretty slim already,” said Gillingham. “So taking away information that allows farmers to make decisions about their business, and that also protects the planet, protects their soil, enhances their crop yields, it’s really insane to be doing that.”

In its complaint, filed Monday, Earthjustice referred to emails sent on January 30 by Rhee, the director of digital communications at USDA, instructing staff to remove web pages. These emails were obtained by multiple news outlets last month. It’s unclear how Rhee’s directives were meant to be implemented — if all web pages that were taken down also had to be sorted and flagged for review, or if the staff received further guidance on which ones to un-publish and which ones to leave online. To date, neither Rhee nor the Department of Agriculture has publicly acknowledged the emails or the removal of climate-related web pages. “That’s problematic for a number of reasons, including that we don’t know the full scope of the purge,” said Stein.

Larry Moore, a spokesperson for the USDA, said the agency is working with the Department of Justice, or DOJ, on court filings, and directed inquiries to the DOJ. The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication. 

Jason Rylander, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity who is not involved in the lawsuit, said that the agency’s move serves to diminish the public’s confidence in climate science, and the scientific community more broadly. “Once again, the Trump administration is demonstrating itself to be the most anti-science administration in history,” he said. The loss of dedicated web pages for climate research, mitigation programs, and datasets “holds back scientific inquiry and public knowledge,” he added.

In addition to NOFA-NY, the other plaintiffs in the complaint are the National Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group, an activist group focused on toxic pollution. 

A hearing date is still pending. Rylander argued it’s likely that more complaints will be filed over the removal of climate information from other federal agency websites, like the Environmental Protection Agency. He also said the Center for Biological Diversity may look into these purges.

Gillingham referred to these moves as part of “an indiscriminate political agenda scrubbing climate” from any government website. “We can’t sit by and just wait to see what happens. You know, they should not be doing what they’re doing. So it has to stop. And the courts are the only option right now.”

Editor’s note: Earthjustice and the Natural Resources Defense Council are advertisers with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.