The costs of Trump's campaign to censor climate science

Datasets have been removed, federal websites scrubbed and thousands of NOAA staff purged. Experts warn disaster defences are at risk.

- Eva Xiao and Jana Tauschinski

At 73 years old, Dr Frank Marks might be the oldest “hurricane hunter” still flying for the US government.

Dr Marks has interrupted his retirement in part to help fill staff shortages across the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the federal agency that predicts the weather and collects atmospheric and climate data.

In August, the septuagenarian flew into Hurricane Erin, an enormous storm that flooded parts of the East Coast in the US. He’s not the only former employee volunteering either, says Dr Marks - another retiree contributes as an “unpaid intern”.

The agency team “can’t do all the things they were going to do”, says Dr Marks, who worked at NOAA for 45 years, including as director of the Hurricane Research Division. “They have to focus on what they can do and they’re struggling at that.”

The staff shortages and funding threats undermining Dr Marks’ team are part of a stark new reality under the Trump administration, where efforts to understand climate change have become taboo.

Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, hundreds of federal websites have scrubbed text related to climate change, while more than a hundred have been taken down entirely, according to the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), which tracks changes made to government websites.

Dozens of datasets, from earthquake intensity to billion-dollar climate disasters, have been decommissioned or removed. Weather balloon launches, which collect data for forecasting, have been pared back.

NOAA, the parent agency of the National Weather Service (NWS), has lost thousands of staff in 2025 after a purge by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, of probationary employees, as well as a hiring freeze, buyouts and a push for employees to retire early.