When I was reporting on climate change, one of the most useful websites in my daily rotation was Climate.gov.
The website from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), launched during President Obama’s first term, provided constant updates on the agency’s climate research in plain English, alongside vivid charts and graphics. It lasted 15 years, until the Trump administration gutted the site in 2025; the entire staff was disbanded through layoffs or unrenewed contracts, and the URL now redirects to NOAA’s website instead. Text on the site, dated June 24, 2025, says the redirect was done to comply with an executive order and White House policies, and that “future research products previously housed under Climate.gov will be available at NOAA.gov/climate and its affiliate websites.”
Anyone who has been paying attention to the Trump administration’s second term will recognize the shuttering of Climate.gov as one part of a larger project to obfuscate reality, particularly around science and climate change. Cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service have created gaps in weather data. Over the summer, the Department of Energy deleted more than 1,600 pages about energy efficiency and utility bill savings amid brutal heatwaves that stressed power grids across the country — around the peak of a cyclospora outbreak that would have been caught sooner if not for cuts to the federal surveillance programs that usually track food-borne illnesses. If the federal government was once the sun around which most scientific research in this country orbited, it has now become a black hole.
There is, however, some light in the dark. In August 2025, a group of former Climate.gov staffers launched a crowdfunding campaign to bring back the Climate.gov archives and continue its work, under a new name: Climate.us. It was spearheaded by Rebecca Lindsey, the program manager and longtime editorial lead of Climate.gov, and raised $530,000 over six months through a combination of individual donors and grants from foundations. This year, Lindsey and her colleagues hope to raise an additional $300,000. The team incorporated as a nonprofit with fiscal sponsorship from Multiplier, a California-based nonprofit that focuses on environmental and social justice issues.
The new site, which launched in June, looks much like the old one, but with a few notable changes. The team is less than a third of its old size — three people rather than the 10 who ran the site at NOAA — and many of the links that used to redirect to other NOAA sites now redirect to resources hosted by Climate.us itself, likea copy of the Fifth National Climate assessment, which no longer exists at its original URL.
I spoke with Lindsey over Zoom about the origins of Climate.us, the challenges of picking up where the government left off, and her hopes for the future. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
It was a 15-year effort that the government had made in trying to understand what the public wants to know about climate change, and then figuring out the best way to provide it to them. And so when everything started happening after the new administration took over in early 2025, it became clear that we were not going to be able to continue with business as usual as we had more or less done during the first Trump administration. We began getting instructions from NOAA [political appointees] to scour the site and find content that might be perceived to be in conflict with the executive orders on [DEI] and the Gulf of Mexico, and so that happened almost immediately. That was late January or early February.
Then NOAA experienced the loss of about 600 to 800 probationary employees as part of the DOGE-led purge, and myself and several of my colleagues also were fired. The remainder of the Climate.gov team were contractors, so their contract was still in place. They continued to keep the site running through the spring, but in May [2025] they found out that the contract was not going to be renewed and they were going to be removed too, so that was the entire team at that point. When I was fired in February, it was not clear that there was any sort of climate targeting because hundreds of other NOAA employees from all over the agency were also fired. But with the decision about the contract, it was obvious Climate.gov was being targeted, and they were not going to let the program operate anymore. All of us were devastated by that.
