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Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Saving Public Data

 Ryan Quinn at Inside Higher Ed:

In the first few days of Donald Trump’s second term as president, the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST, for short) disappeared from government websites. It was an interactive map of U.S. Census tracts that are “marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution,” as the pre-Trump federal government put it—something researchers and the public could use to quickly locate and zoom in on specific communities and analyze the problems they face.

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine stored a copy of the webpage, but even there, the map was gone. However, thanks to a team of researchers from multiple universities and other organizations, a new working version was posted online Friday.

“One of the first tools the Trump admin took down was CEJST. It sure would be frustrating to the administration’s anti-EJ, anti-climate goals if someone had … saved it,” Jonathan Gilmour, a data scientist at Harvard University’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health, wrote in a post on LinkedIn—a post sharing a link to a copy of the tool. After the post, he told Inside Higher Ed, “I got an incredible outpouring of gratitude, messages from folks in the community who were saying, ‘We use this every day in our work to help better serve our community.’”
Gilmour is part of the Public Environmental Data Project, a coalition working to preserve data resources that have been, or may soon be, taken off-line by an administration that has targeted environmental initiatives and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts from the first day Trump returned to the White House.

Members of the group said other resources have gone off-line since Trump’s return. Those include the Environmental Justice Scorecard, which, according to the Biden administration, had shown federal agencies’ actions “to advance environmental justice” and helped enforce “environmental and civil rights laws.” Gone too is the entire website of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Climate Change and Health Equity. Also missing are multiple resources hosted by the Department of Energy, including the Energy Justice Mapping Tool for Schools and the Energy Affordability Resource Map.