Trump administration says it won't publish major climate change reports
on NASA website as promised
[July 15, 2025]
By SETH BORENSTEIN
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration on Monday took another step
to make it harder to find major, legally mandated scientific assessments
of how climate change is endangering the nation and its people.
Earlier this month, the official government websites that hosted the
authoritative, peer-reviewed national climate assessments went dark.
Such sites tell state and local governments and the public what to
expect in their backyards from a warming world and how best to adapt to
it. At the time, the White House said NASA would house the reports to
comply with a 1990 law that requires the reports, which the space agency
said it planned to do.
But on Monday, NASA announced that it aborted those plans.
“The USGCRP (the government agency that oversees and used to host the
report) met its statutory requirements by presenting its reports to
Congress. NASA has no legal obligations to host globalchange.gov’s
data," NASA Press Secretary Bethany Stevens said in an email. That means
no data from the assessment or the government science office that
coordinated the work will be on NASA, she said.
On July 3, NASA put out a statement that said, "All preexisting reports
will be hosted on the NASA website, ensuring continuity of reporting.”
“This document was written for the American people, paid for by the
taxpayers, and it contains vital information we need to keep ourselves
safe in a changing climate, as the disasters that continue to mount
demonstrate so tragically and clearly,” said Texas Tech climate
scientist Katharine Hayhoe. She is chief scientist at The Nature
Conservancy and co-author of several past national climate assessments.
Copies of past reports are still squirreled away in the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration's library and the latest report and its
interactive atlas can be seen here.
Former Obama White House science adviser and climate scientist John
Holdren accused the administration of outright lying and long intended
to censor or bury the reports.
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Workers on scaffolding repaint the NASA logo near the top of the
Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape
Canaveral, Fla., May 20, 2020. (AP Photo/John Raoux, File)
“The new stance is classic Trump administration misdirection,”
Holdren said. “In this instance, the administration offers a modest
consolation to quell initial outrage over the closure of the
globalchange.gov site and the disappearance of the National Climate
Assessments. Then, two weeks later, they snatch away the consolation
with no apology.”
“They simply don’t want the public to see the meticulously assembled
and scientifically validated information about what climate change
is already doing to our farms, forests, and fisheries, as well as to
storms, floods, wildfires, and coast property — and about how all
those damages will grow in the absence of concerted remedial
action,” Holdren said in an email.
That's why it's important that state and local governments and every
day people see these reports, Holdren said. He said they are written
in a way that is “useful to people who need to understand what
climate change is doing and will do to THEM, their loved ones, their
property and their environment."
“Trump doesn't want people to know,” Holdren wrote.
The most recent report, issued in 2023, found that climate change is
affecting people’s security, health and livelihoods in every corner
of the country in different ways, with minority communities,
particularly Native Americans, often disproportionately at risk.
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