The U.S. Department of Agriculture has made a major push to scrub content related to climate change from its public websites.
According to internal emails obtained by ABC News, web managers were ordered by the agency’s Office of Communications to identify, archive, and unpublish materials mentioning climate change by the end of last week.
The effort comes as reporters around the nation have identified at least 8,000 U.S. government web pages that have been removed since President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20. Unlike with this latest move related to climate change data, the bulk of the federal pages that have been removed were related to diversity initiatives and “gender ideology,” according to The New York Times.
According to the spreadsheet provided to USDA website managers and obtained by ABC News, content is being categorized into three levels of urgency. Pages dedicated entirely to climate change are marked as “Tier 1,” while those where a significant portion of the content relates to climate change are labeled “Tier 2.” Pages where climate change is mentioned in passing but is not the main focus should be identified under “Tier 3.”
Although the vast majority of scientists accept that climate change — or climate disruption, as some prefer to call is — is happening, it has become a politically charged discussion and one that often pits rural and urban perspectives and priorities against each other.
The Environmental Protection Agency separates greenhouse gas emissions, the primary driver of climate change, into five main categories: transportation, electric power, industry, residential/commercial, and agriculture. Agriculture, according to EPA data, is the smallest GHG contributor of those sectors at just 10 percent.
Still, that hasn’t stopped people such as U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of the Bronx from taking aim at rural communities through the Green New Deal, or for cities such as Los Angeles, which has one of the largest carbon footprints in the world and has some of the nation’s worst traffic congestion, to push a measure blaming environmental issues on animal agriculture.

Factors such as these not only sow animosity about climate discussions and the sincerity of many political leaders to address the issue, but it has also has fueled skeptics about the need to look at climate issues in general.
Most experts agree that there could be significant impacts on agriculture due to climate disruptions, specifically as they relate to water availability, soil fertility loss, and pest infestations in crops. The frequency and intensity of Western wildfires and the massive impact from hurricanes fueled by warmer gulf waters have been attributed to climate change.
And as recently as 2023, the United States experienced 28 distinct weather or climate events that each resulted in at least $1 billion worth of damage.
The directive to remove mentions of climate change from websites like the USDA’s follows Trump’s other steps related to climate policy, including withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement and revoking Biden-era incentives on electric vehicles.
By Monday morning, some landing pages surprisingly remained active, such as for USDA Climate Hubs, a cross-agency effort to address and adapt to climate change. Others already appeared mothballed, like a page on USDA’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, which featured a program that worked with private food companies, nonprofits, and universities to research ways for farmers to reduce their carbon footprint, develop more resilient crops, and restore land..

