Trump Administration Removes or Modifies Several Federal Health, Chemical and Climate Datasets

The Trump administration has been altering and removing decades’ worth of datasets over the past year as of May 2026, The Guardian reported. Last April the administration took down the EPA Risk Management Program search tool that allowed users to type in a zip code to find nearby facilities storing hazardous chemicals.

Roughly 12,000 facilities store such cancer-causing chemicals used in manufacturing products like pesticides or medical devices.

One in three Americans live near hazardous chemicals. The only current way to access RMP information is to visit one of several dozen EPA reading rooms to examine paper records. Nalleli Hidalgo, community outreach and education liaison for Tejas, a Houston environmental justice advocacy group, said another layer of protection for environmental justice communities was taken down when the RMP tool was removed.

Much of Tejas’s organizing centers on the Houston Ship Channel, a roughly 50-mile waterway that is home to more than 600 petrochemical facilities. In 2021 about 100,000lbs of toxic acid was released during a chemical leak along the Houston Ship Channel that left two people dead and injured 30.

Maya Nye, federal policy director for Coming Clean, said residents have a right to know what is in their back yard.

U.S. continues to average one chemical accident every two days. Nye added that the nation has not figured out how to prevent chemical disasters even as people keep experiencing them.

Last spring 2025 the Trump administration dismissed most of the employees at the CDC’s division of reproductive health, including the entire full-time team working on Prams. Prams data is now completely inaccessible to the public because there is no federal staff to approve data requests.

Rita Hamad, an associate professor of social epidemiology and public policy at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, said the country does not really have another dataset like it.

Mississippi terminated its Prams data collection last fall 2025. The state has the highest infant mortality rate in the country. Hamad described the loss as mind-boggling given that babies continue to die while officials lose the ability to examine where they lived, what health behaviors their mothers engaged in and how to intervene.

The USDA terminated the CPS-FSS national survey of food insecurity that has been conducted annually since 1995. U.S. households is food insecure.

This occurred as the Trump administration is making what will probably be the largest cuts in history to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that serves 42 million Americans. A question about trans youth was removed from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey earlier in 2025.

According to the most recent YRBS results, trans youth reported making plans to attempt suicide at more than double the rate of non-trans youth and more than half of trans youth have considered suicide.

President Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office outlining targeting and erasure of trans, non-binary and intersex identities. Researchers from the Williams Institute at UCLA found at least 360 federal data collections in which questions about gender identity or sexual orientation have been removed.

After a successful lawsuit from Doctors for America, the YRBS was restored among hundreds of deleted CDC webpages earlier in 2025.

A banner was added to the top of the restored YRBS page noting any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate. NOAA announced in May 2025 that it would no longer be updating the Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database that has provided data since 1980. U.S.

Climate disasters has climbed to nearly $200bn per year. David Blades, an associate director at AM Best, said the immediate threat is not having on a going-forward basis some of the information that insurers have had for the last 30 years. Carly Fabian, director of insurance policy at Public Citizen, said that when insurance companies feel less confident they tend to hedge by raising prices in response to uncertainty and may stop providing coverage in some areas.

U.S. chief data scientist under the Biden administration and is now director of federal data policy at the Federation of American Scientists. Ross said federal data touch every corner of American lives.

She added that without the data we might not know or be able to connect the dots for why our lives are getting harder – but our lives will get harder.