Groups sue Trump’s USDA over purge of climate change records
Josh Russell
MANHATTAN (CN) — A trio of environmental groups sued the Department of Agriculture on Monday for removing all of its website landing pages focused on climate change after President Donald Trump returned to power in late January.
Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the D.C.-based Environmental Working Group claim in their civil complaint that the deleted websites included critical resources on climate-smart farming, climate adaptation strategies and sites to access billions of dollars for conservation practices.
Represented by attorneys from Earthjustice, based in San Francisco, and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, the groups say USDA subagencies such as the U.S. Forest Service, Natural Resources Conservation Service and Farm Service Agency also removed entire climate change sections from their websites.
“By wiping critical climate resources from the USDA’s website, the Trump administration has deliberately stripped farmers and ranchers of the vital tools they need to confront the escalating extreme weather threats like droughts and floods,” Midwest director for the Environmental Working Group Anne Schechinger wrote in a statement Monday.
“This lawsuit isn’t just about transparency — it’s about holding those in power accountable for undermining the very information that helps protect the livelihoods of food producers, the food system and our future.”
According to the complaint, the Department of Agriculture ordered staff on Jan. 31 to “identify and archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change” by “no later than close of business.”
Staff also were told to identify and categorize additional webpages related to climate change into three “tiers” based on how much they focused on the subject: pages dedicated entirely to climate change were to be designated “Tier 1;” those where a significant portion of the content relates to climate change would be “Tier 2;” and those where climate change is mentioned in passing were “Tier 3.”
Filing suit in Manhattan federal court, the groups accuse Trump's USDA of abruptly deleting climate-related policies, datasets and resources from its websites in violation the Paperwork Reduction Act, which requires federal agencies to provide adequate advance public notice when substantially modifying or terminating “significant information dissemination products.”
The groups also claim the department’s purge of climate-related websites violated the Administrative Procedure Act and Freedom of Information Act.
“In ordering staff to unpublish these webpages, USDA failed to consider how removing these resources would harm farmers, farm advisors, land managers, researchers, and other members of the public, and thus failed to engage in reasoned decision-making, in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act,” the complaint says.
Representatives for the USDA did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday afternoon.
Trump on several occasions has referred to what he calls “the global warming hoax” and has suggested that rising sea levels and other effects of climate change are nothing to worry about. He has also been critical of alternative, renewable energy sources such as wind power.
At a dinner last April at his Mar-a-Lago resort, then-candidate Trump told oil lobbyists he would peel back environmental regulations if they donated $1 billion to his campaign.
He pulled Washington out of the landmark Paris Agreement for a second time, and has also pledged to ramp up U.S. oil and natural gas production, declaring so-called national “energy emergency” on his first day back in power, and vowing in his second inaugural address, “We will drill, baby, drill.”
Nearly 200 other countries committed to the Paris Agreement, an ambitious global action plan to fight global climate change, including the threats from temperature increases and extreme weather events.
The world is now long-term 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial temperatures during the mid-1800s. Most but not all climate monitoring agencies said global temperatures last year passed the warming benchmark of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, and all said it was the warmest year on record.