Facing lawsuit, USDA says it will restore climate change-related
webpages
[May 14, 2025]
By MELINA WALLING
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has agreed to restore climate
change-related webpages to its websites after it was sued over the
deletions in February.
The lawsuit, brought on behalf of the Northeast Organic Farming
Association of New York, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the
Environmental Working Group, argued that the deletions violated rules
around citizens' access to government information.
The USDA's reversal comes ahead of a scheduled May 21 hearing on the
plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction against the agency's
actions in federal court in New York.
The department had removed resources on its websites related to
climate-smart farming, conservation practices, rural clean energy
projects and access to federal loans related to those areas after
President Donald Trump's Jan. 20 inauguration.
At the same time, the Trump administration was working to pause or
freeze other funding related to climate change and agriculture, some of
which was funded by the Biden-era 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
In a letter filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern
District of New York, the Justice Department said the USDA “will restore
the climate-change-related web content that was removed
post-inauguration” and that it “commits to complying with” federal laws
governing its future “posting decisions.”
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture building stands in Washington,
Dec. 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
 The lawsuit was filed by
Earthjustice and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia
University.
Earthjustice attorney Jeffrey Stein said Tuesday scrubbing the
websites of information relevant to programs it was undoing “made it
really difficult for farmers to fight for the funding that they’re
owed, for advocates to educate the public and members of Congress
about the specific impacts of freezing funding on ordinary Americans
in their districts.”
“I think that the funding freeze and the staff layoffs and the
purging of information, they all intertwined as a dangerous triple
whammy,” Stein said.
A USDA spokesperson referred The Associated Press to the Department
of Justice, which did not immediately reply to a request for comment
Tuesday.
Stein said USDA had committed to restoring most of the material
within about two weeks. He said he hoped the agency's reversal would
be a “positive sign” in other cases brought against the
administration over agencies purging information from websites.
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