Environmentalists sue Trump Administration for taking down websites that Obama, Biden put online

A coalition of environmental and scientific advocacy organizations has filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump Administration, challenging the removal of several publicly accessible climate and environmental justice data websites that were part of the Biden Administration’s climate-change agenda.

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Monday by the Public Citizen Litigation Group on behalf of the Union of Concerned Scientists, Sierra Club, Environmental Integrity Project, and California Communities Against Toxics.

At the center of the suit are tools like the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool and EJScreen, which are platforms designed to provide interactive environmental, climate, and demographic data. The plaintiffs argue that these datasets were essential to researchers, community groups, and policymakers seeking to address pollution and climate-related health disparities in underserved communities.

The Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities website provides links to some of the tools like EJScreen, which now take the user to dead federal links. See the DOT page dedicated to environmental justice and the dead federal links here.

“These resources were developed for public use, and the government has a duty to keep them available,” said Zach Shelley of Public Citizen, lead counsel for the plaintiffs. Others involved in the suit echoed that the removal of the websites jeopardizes access to information used to protect vulnerable communities.

The tools named in the lawsuit include:

• Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST)
• EJScreen
• Department of Energy’s Low-Income Energy Affordability Data (LEAD) Tool
• Community Benefits Plan Map
• Department of Transportation’s Equitable Transportation Community (ETC) Explorer
• Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Future Risk Index

These sites had data about pollution exposure, housing conditions, energy affordability, health outcomes, transportation equity, and environmental hazards and other information that plaintiffs say is vital for public awareness and informed advocacy. In other words, these datasets gave the environmental litigation industry a motherlode of lawsuit material to work with.

However, while the latest lawsuit highlights concerns about the lack of a feed of information to environmental lawyers, there is no explicit constitutional right guaranteeing public access to federal datasets via specific government websites. Courts have historically upheld the executive branch’s discretion in how it manages and disseminates information, provided no other federal law, such as the Freedom of Information Act, is violated in the process.

In essence, their removal does not necessarily constitute an unlawful act under existing constitutional law. Information from many of these tools is still obtainable through other means, including FOIA requests, academic databases, agency reports, and non-governmental organizations that maintain similar datasets.

Still, environmental advocates argue that the removals amount to an attempt to obscure the data used to measure environmental harm in vulnerable areas.

Union of Concerned Scientists President Gretchen Goldman called it “tantamount to theft,” and Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous stated that the deletion of these tools “jeopardizes peoples’ ability to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live safe and healthy lives,” even though the information is still accessible through information requests.

The legal battle now centers on whether the Trump Administration’s actions violated administrative procedures or other statutory obligations, and it is another lawsuit by Democrat surrogate organizations going to tie the Trump Administration up in court.