Groups Sue Trump Administration Over Removal of Climate and Environmental Justice Websites and Data

A group of environmental and science organizations, represented by Public Citizen Litigation Group, today filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s removal of public information from climate and environmental justice federal agency websites.

The Sierra Club, Environmental Integrity Project, Union of Concerned Scientists, and California Communities Against Toxics joined the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Within days of taking office, the Trump administration began deleting mentions of climate change from agency websites and taking a series of actions to undermine environmental justice efforts across the federal government, including closing climate and environmental justice offices.

The lawsuit challenges the Trump administration’s removal of critical environmental justice tools like EJScreen and the Climate and Environmental Justice Screening Tool (CEJST). Until the deletion, both websites were widely used by regulators, academics, and advocates to identify communities that are disproportionately affected by pollution and climate change. The vital tools also track burdens related to climate change, energy, health, housing, legacy pollution, transportation, water and wastewater, and workforce development.

In addition, the lawsuit challenges the removal of other important environmental, climate, and energy justice tools, including the Department of Energy’s Low-Income Energy Affordability Data (LEAD) Tool and Community Benefits Plan Map; the Department of Transportation’s Equitable Transportation Community (ETC) Explorer, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Future Risk Index.

Researchers and many nonprofit organizations regularly use these tools to educate and advocate for policies or agency actions that would address the disproportionate harm overburdened communities bear, for everything from reports on proposed gas pipeline projects, disproportionate energy burdens in states like Texas or Louisiana, long-form reporting on the environmental impacts of online retail shipping practices, Environmental Integrity Project’s oil and gas operations tracker, and the Sierra Club’s LNG tracker.

“The agencies’ actions represent an attempt to sell out the health of Americans and the environment, and also to deny access to the information that allows people to advocate for change,” said Zach Shelley, an attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group and lead counsel for the groups. “These resources were developed for public use, and the government has a duty to keep them available. Stripping the public’s access to these resources is part of an unlawful attempt to undermine key environmental protections.”
“Removing public information from websites creates dangerous gaps in the data available to communities and decisionmakers about health risks from industrial pollution,” said Jen Duggan, Executive Director of the Environmental Integrity Project. “Pulling down EJScreen from the web obscures the real impact of toxic releases on low-income communities and communities of color from big polluters like oil, gas, and petrochemical operations, which is pretty ironic coming from an administration that claims to champion transparency.”

“The removal of these websites and the critical data they hold is yet another direct attack on the communities already suffering under the weight of deadly air and water,” said Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous. “Simply put, these data and tools save lives, and efforts to delete, unpublish, or in any way remove them jeopardize peoples’ ability to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live safe and healthy lives. The Trump administration must end its efforts to further disenfranchise and endanger these communities.”

“The public has a right to access these taxpayer-funded datasets,” said UCS President Gretchen Goldman. “From vital information for communities about their exposure to harmful pollution, to data that help local governments build resilience to extreme weather events, the public deserves access to federal datasets. Removing government datasets is tantamount to theft.”

“We cannot just erase the impacts that pollution is having on communities hosting our industrial infrastructure," said Jane Williams, executive director of California Communities Against Toxics. "This pollution is causing increases in asthma, COPD, low birthweight, and earlier death. Understanding these impacts allows us to reduce pollution, and protect public health. These are essential tenets of a healthy society, and the information being disappeared by this Administration is essential to protect the public from these adverse health impacts.”

The Trump administration's second-term attacks on protections for clean air and clean water standards have been relentless. A series of executive orders last week would attempt to keep uneconomic coal power plants running and push a dramatic expansion of coal mining on public lands. An additional Trump order attempts to direct some government agencies to incorporate a sunset provision into their regulations governing energy production, undermining or negating key environmental and safety safeguards currently in place. And last month, Trump’s EPA announced a plan to roll back or revoke more than 30 critical environmental safeguards that help protect everything from safe drinking water to clean air.

The documents from this case can be found here. For additional information on the case, or to request an interview with the litigation team or our plaintiffs, contact Patrick Davis, pdavis@citizen.org.