The government deleted the country's best climate website. The people who built it are now running it from a shadow domain, with the servers humming on a budget that would not buy a single new NOAA satellite.

"We worked very hard for 15 years to build Climate.gov, and had a relationship with our readers. We decided too much had been invested and too much was at stake to let it go without a fight."

— Rebecca Lindsey, former lead writer and editor for NOAA's Climate.gov

In February of 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency began doing what it had promised it would do to the federal government. It cut. And among the casualties, buried under thousands of other terminations, was one of the most important public service projects the federal government has ever produced.

Climate.gov had been running quietly for over a decade. It was where the average American learned what El Niño meant, why the oceans kept getting warmer, what a 100-foot glacier retreat looked like in real data. A million people a month came to it. Teachers put it in their syllabi. Journalists pulled from it when they needed a clean, authoritative chart they could defend on the record.

Then, in a single administrative sweep, it was taken down.

If you go to climate.gov today, you are redirected to a page that cites Executive Order 14303, a document the White House calls "Restoring Gold Standard Science." The replacement text does not mention human-caused warming. It does not mention carbon dioxide. It does not even acknowledge that the climate is changing at an accelerating rate. The site that had been the country's primary window into its own environmental reality now says, in the language of compliance, that you have been moved to another page.

The people who built it have not accepted the move.

What has happened in the year since is harder to explain than it is to admire. A group of former NOAA communicators, most of them fired in the first months of the administration, have spent roughly a year rebuilding the site from whatever they had on their personal machines, their institutional memories, and their access to the underlying data. The result is Climate.us, a privately run mirror of the old government site that has, according to its editor, climbed back to nearly a million visitors per month.

Each week, new sections come online. The ENSO blog, which had been one of the most read parts of the old site, was resurrected this month with the original science lead still on board. A new global climate dashboard is live. A data set on Lake Powell, which has dropped to historic lows, went up in August. The site is not a memorial. It is still publishing.

The scientific advisory network behind it includes former National Weather Service employees, university climate specialists, and a NASA scientist who asked to remain anonymous. The NASA researcher told Truthout that the work was being done partly because the data was "useful to the U.S. military, to the states," and partly because the people in power had made clear they did not want it to be available.

"Climate information shouldn't be available to the public just on a political basis or a whim," Lindsey said.

That last line is worth sitting with for a moment. The government built a public website. It spent public money to build it. And then the current administration decided that the information it carried was a political liability, and the response was not to correct the data, or to add context, or to run a more balanced presentation of the evidence. The response was deletion.

Translation: the data did not change. The people who were supposed to be neutral stewards of it changed their minds about whether it was allowed to exist.

This is not the first time an administration has moved against climate science. It is not even the most aggressive example. But it is the most complete one, and it has drawn the most determined response from the people who lost their jobs.

Former EPA communicators are working on a similar project, trying to resurrect climate-related pages that were taken down from the agency's site. A group called the Public Environmental Data Partners is attempting to save specialist environmental monitoring tools. The American Geophysical Union, which most U.S. Earth scientists belong to, has stepped in to keep the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change running after the administration withdrew its support for the agency's annual reports.

It is a patchwork. It is underfunded. It is held together by people who, in many cases, are doing this work on top of other jobs, without pay, out of a sense that something had to be done.

The irony is not lost on the people doing the work. The government built Climate.gov because it was useful. The government killed it because it was useful. The people who were fired to build it are now building it again, out of the same instinct, for free.

The timing is not coincidental. The ENSO blog's relaunch post, published on August 13, carries a footnote that reads like a warning: NOAA's latest forecast gives a 69 percent chance that the current El Niño will peak later this winter as the strongest event in the historical record going back to 1950.

That is a number that should matter to everyone reading this. A record El Niño means drought in parts of the country that are already running dry. It means wetter, more chaotic winter weather in others. It means food price pressure. It means the kind of climate disruption that, for a decade, the people at Climate.gov were trying to explain to the American public in plain language.

The government stopped explaining. The fired employees started again.

Common Dreams has reported on the "perfect storm" of the current El Niño and the administration's war escalation driving food prices higher. The data behind that story is, in large part, the data that Climate.us is now serving to journalists and teachers and ordinary people who want to understand what is happening to their own climate.

There is a question worth asking that has not gotten much airtime: why does it matter who runs the site?

The answer is that it matters because the site is not just a collection of charts. It is a relationship between a government and its citizens, built on the assumption that the government has an obligation to be accurate. When the government decides that accuracy is a political problem, the relationship breaks. And when it breaks, the people who understood the data the best are the ones who are now outside the building, trying to explain it to you from the outside.

The new site is not perfect. It does not have the institutional backing of the old one. It does not have the data sets that were purged early in the DOGE cuts, some of which the team is still trying to recover. It will not survive if the people running it burn out, which is a real risk for people doing pro bono work at this scale.

But it is publishing. It is accurate. It is being read by a million people a month.

The question is not whether this is a scandal. The question is whether a government can delete its own public information infrastructure and call it policy.

The people who built Climate.gov do not think so. They have already answered, in practice, with a website that is now more alive than the one that fired them.

trump, climate, doge, science