The Trump administration shut down Climate.gov, the federal website where Americans went for official climate and weather information. Now 10 former scientists who worked for NOAA — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — have started their own website, Climate.us, to fill that gap.

Their move is one example of a larger pattern. The National Security Archive at George Washington University documented what it calls the administration's "denial by erasure" strategy — systematically restricting public access to climate data held by federal agencies.

What Data Is Disappearing

NOAA stopped updating one of its most widely used datasets in May 2025. The Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters tracker had counted how much money extreme weather — hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, wildfires — cost Americans each year since 1980. It recorded 403 major disasters in that time. NOAA will not add new events after 2024.

Insurance companies, state emergency managers, and members of Congress used this tracker to understand the financial impact of extreme weather. Without updates, they lose a consistent way to measure whether costs are rising.

At the same time, the National Weather Service began shutting down weather balloon operations at eight northern locations after budget cuts, according to the Associated Press. Those balloons carry instruments into the atmosphere and send back data that computer models use to forecast weather. Fewer balloons mean less accurate forecasts for the people who depend on them — farmers, pilots, and emergency responders.

What Climate.us Can and Cannot Do

The former NOAA workers behind Climate.us are not a government agency. They cannot launch weather balloons or order NOAA to keep updating its disaster tracker. What they can do is take scientific information and explain it clearly to the public.

But that has its limits. Climate.gov came with the weight of federal authority — it was the government's official source. Climate.us is a nonprofit starting from scratch. Many of the datasets and tools that lived on Climate.gov cannot simply be moved to a private website.

Once government data disappears, it is hard to get back. Private websites can save copies of information, but they cannot replicate the steady stream of new data that made federal websites the trusted authority.

Federal climate information works like a supply chain: weather stations collect raw measurements, scientists process them into datasets, agencies produce final reports, and websites explain everything to the public. Current cuts are affecting all four steps. Climate.us can help with step four — public explanation. But steps one through three — actual data collection and analysis — are only the government's job, and there is no private backup.

The key question for people who rely on this information is which tools have workable alternatives and which do not. Weather balloon data for forecasting has no replacement. The Billion Dollar Disasters dataset has some competitors in the insurance and academic worlds, but none match its consistency or go back as far. Climate.gov's public explanations are closest to what Climate.us can rebuild.

Whether the former NOAA staff can achieve the same level of trust and use as the government version had is something only time will show.