Ex-NOAA Workers Launch Climate.us After Gov Site Shuttered
Former employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have launched Climate.us, an independent, nonprofit website that restores public access to 15 years of climate data, reports, and educational resources that were effectively removed from public view when the Trump administration shut down Climate.gov in June 2025. The new site went live on June 23, 2026, filling a critical void for scientists, educators, farmers, and the general public.
A Void Left by Political Change
Climate.gov had operated for over 15 years as the federal government’s flagship portal for climate change information, drawing nearly 1 million monthly visitors and approximately 15 million page views in 2024. But in June 2025, following the layoff of its entire staff as part of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cutbacks, the site was effectively shuttered. Visitors to climate.gov were redirected to a different NOAA page with a notice citing Executive Order 14303, though most data remained technically accessible on government servers but became extremely difficult to find.
Rebecca Lindsey, former program director for Climate.gov who was fired in February 2025 and now serves as managing director of Climate.us, described the situation as the government having “renovated a store, and they had the front door open into a closet,” as NPR reported.
Building a Nonpartisan Alternative
Lindsey and two other former NOAA employees began recreating the site in August 2025. The project raised approximately $280,000 through crowdsourcing, supplemented by a one-time anonymous grant that will sustain operations until at least February 2027. Over 80 volunteer scientists now serve on the site’s science panel to fact-check and vet content.
“Trusted climate information should not disappear when politics change,” Lindsey told DW. “Climate.gov was never about — and Climate.us will never be about — telling Americans what to do about climate change. The site will continue to be nonpartisan but will be focusing on the science and explaining science and showing people what the data show.”
The new site features Climate.gov’s 15-year collection of climate news, expert blogs, visual status reports on key climate indicators, maps, data pathways, climate literacy resources, and classroom materials — including the Fifth National Climate Assessment. Its “climate dashboard” containing more than a dozen key climate graphs has been particularly well received.
A Symptom of Broader Brain Drain
The Climate.gov shutdown occurred within a much larger pattern of federal science agency cuts. The US federal workforce has shrunk by approximately 12% under Trump, with roughly 40% of those losses coming from science agencies. Between September 2024 and February 2026, approximately 118,000 employees left science agencies, while grant funding for environmental research fell by 79%. About 10,000 PhDs in STEM and health fields left government in 2025 alone, and a Nature poll found 75% of 1,600 US scientists surveyed were considering looking abroad for work.
Gretchen Gehrke, a science communicator at the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI), told NPR that “now we have a lot of expertise outside of the government because of so much brain drain from the government, and we can really stand up things. We can have powerful interventions, and [Climate.us], I think, is a success story of that.”
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, praised the effort, saying Climate.us is “really helping people connect what’s happening at the global scale to how it matters to their lives.”
Pushback and Political Context
The launch of Climate.us comes amid notable instances of resistance to the administration’s environmental policies. Federal lawmakers rejected deep funding cuts to science agencies earlier in 2026, and the White House was recently forced to backtrack on a plan to dismantle a network of ocean-monitoring buoys in the Pacific, as KUOW reported. A judge also deemed unlawful a Department of Energy report that downplayed climate dangers.
Brandon Lardy, data director at the Partnership for Public Service, warned that the damage to federal science infrastructure will be long-lasting. “It will take generations to fix a lot of the damage that’s been done,” he told DW, adding that it will be difficult to “convince young people that government is a viable and attractive option for them to build their careers.”
What Lies Ahead
Lindsey has received outreach from other countries expressing concern about the US retreat from climate science, highlighting the international dimension of the brain drain. Within Climate.us, there is ongoing debate about whether the site should eventually return to government stewardship under a future administration or remain permanently independent.
“The fact that they got rid of it so easily is proof that we shouldn’t make it vulnerable again,” Lindsey told NPR.
For now, Climate.us stands as both a vital resource for climate information and a testament to the resilience of scientific expertise outside of government — a model that may prove increasingly necessary as political control over federal data continues to tighten.