In July 2026, during a dangerous heatwave, the US Department of Energy removed roughly 6,000 web pages from its official website. These pages contained practical advice on saving water, choosing insulation, and other energy-saving tips. The deletions happened without any official announcement, according to The Verge.

Among the deleted pages was the Department's guidance on what temperature to set your air conditioner. The DOE had officially recommended keeping thermostats between 75 and 78 degrees. That same week, New York City's mayor gave residents the same advice—telling them to set air conditioning to 78 degrees to ease pressure on the electrical grid during extreme heat. Republican officials criticized his recommendation as extreme, even though it matched what the federal government had been saying.

Worth noting: Republican governors in Texas, including Greg Abbott and Rick Perry, have given the exact same 78-degree thermostat advice during past heat emergencies. The criticism as unusual or radical doesn't align with recent history.

The heat itself was serious. New York City reached temperatures above 95 degrees for four days straight, with two days exceeding 100 degrees. Extreme heat is a genuine public safety threat. According to health data from the CDC and NOAA, heat kills more Americans each year than floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes combined — yet it gets far less attention in the media.

These DOE deletions are not a one-time event. The National Security Archive at George Washington University documented that beginning in September 2025, the White House began removing climate-related information from federal websites. Earlier in 2026, the Trump administration announced plans to overturn the scientific findings that underpin US climate policy and repealed a major climate law. In June 2026, a federal judge in Boston ordered the administration to stop removing science and history materials from national parks.

A broader pattern is visible across these cases: information on government websites is being systematically removed — from federal agency sites, from national parks, from the foundation of climate science policy. Whether this is part of a larger plan or simply reactive decisions made case-by-case is not yet clear.

What does matter is the practical effect. When official information vanishes from energy.gov, it doesn't vanish from the internet entirely. The Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization, has saved copies of most deleted pages. But once that information is no longer on a government website, it's harder to find, it's no longer official guidance, and professionals like engineers and utility planners can't point to it as authoritative information. During a grid emergency, when thousands of people need to know how to safely reduce energy use, the difference between "official government advice" and "something I found in an online archive" matters.

This shift tells us something important about how federal information now works. The Internet Archive, a nonprofit library, has become the backup system for government knowledge that agencies are removing. Five years ago, this would have seemed like an unlikely scenario. Now it's routine.