Dear PERC members, affiliates, and supporters,
Over the past six months, the federal policy space has been a rapidly evolving landscape that has had significant impacts on a wide range of fields, including those of us in the environmental sciences and studies. One of the key ramifications resulting from this shift is the removal and erasure of federally accessible data sources. While it must be noted that website archival is common under each new federal administration, the defunding and removal of mass amounts of data resources is not.
Since as early as February 2nd of 2025, publicly accessible federal databases have stopped being updated and/or been removed to prevent their usage for research and public knowledge purposes. Furthermore, by the middle of February, over 8,000 websites, several of which contained database access, were removed from federal domains. As many know, this figure only grew in the following months, particularly around public health and climate-related data. For those in the environmental and environmental justice fields, the removal of key databases and tools such as the EJ Index, the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST), the Energy Justice Dashboard, the EJScreen, the FEMA National Risk Index (not an extensive list) have inhibited researchers and practitioners from utilizing key data in essential projects.
As this removal process began to unfold, PERC became aware of the situation and realized its potentially severe impact on our member institutions’ faculty, staff, and students. At the same time, passionate and skilled researchers and data handlers began to search for, compile, and republish these datasets and tools for the general public’s use. Consequently, PERC began amassing links to these publications with the intention of sharing them with our community. This undertaking results in a publicly accessible excel sheet that includes over a hundred links to databases, data archival pages, and resources. While focusing primarily on removed datasets, the workbook also includes policy and education resources, employment forums and opportunities for those impacted by federal layoffs, and an agency-specific page for easy data access for specific needs.
PERC is very excited to finally be able to share a resource we are proud of with all our members and affiliates. We hope that you find these resources useful and choose to share this workbook with those that could also benefit from access to it. PERC gives full credit to those that compiled these webpages, tools, and datasets, and thanks them for their dedication to scientific integrity and accessibility.
Thank you,
Olivia DiPrinzio, PERC Associate Director
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/upshot/trump-government-websites-missing-pages.html