Vera on volunteer effort to save climate data removed by Trump administration

NPR’s All Things Considered featured Switzer Fellow Lourdes Vera speaking about her work volunteering to preserve climate-related data and tools from agency websites before they are stripped by the Trump administration. The story begins: 

“Since President Trump took office in January, some climate-related data has been scrubbed from federal agency websites. While scientists are concerned about disappearing data, it also disrupts teachers' lesson planning. As Maine Public Radio's Molly Enking reports, there are efforts underway to ensure educators can still access the tools they need.”

Enking reports that Lourdes “had used one of the EPA's interactive tools in her college-level classes to show how pollution can impact low-income communities.”

“LOURDES VERA: The students can very easily see and visualize the correlation between asthma rates and whether a neighborhood was historically red-line.

ENKING: It was one of the first online resources removed by the Trump administration in 2025. But now, a new copy of the tool is available, thanks in part to a collaborative called the Public Environmental Data Partners. Established during the First Trump administration, Vera says the coalition, which she volunteers for, has rebuilt many online tools that had been removed from government websites.

VERA: During the first Trump administration that we really could build that infrastructure and create those lists of URLs to track. So, you know, we're not starting from scratch now. We've been building this for eight years.” Read or listen to the full story on All Things Considered. 

Switzer Fellow Sanjana Paul is Executive Director of the Rooted Futures Lab, one of the groups organizing this effort.