Former U.S. Climate.gov Team Relaunches Federal Climate Archive at Climate.us After Trump Shutdown

A coalition of former U.S. government climate scientists and outside volunteers has restored a comprehensive archive of federal climate research at a new independent website, climate.us, after the Trump administration dismantled climate.gov and redirected its traffic to a stripped-down National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration page. The team announced this week that the project to recover all material lost when climate.gov went dark is now complete — a development that carries implications for every sector from agriculture to insurance that depends on publicly accessible climate data.

How Washington Pulled the Plug

The shutdown was formalized through a redirect citing Executive Order 14303, titled "Restoring Gold Standard Science," and a June 23, 2025 memorandum from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy titled "Agency Guidance for Implementing Gold Standard Science in the Conduct & Management of Scientific Activities." Users navigating to climate.gov are now met with a message invoking three federal statutes — 15 USC § 2904, 15 USC § 2934, and 33 USC § 893a — and pointed toward NOAA.gov/climate and its affiliate sites. The framing implied that climate.gov's content had failed to meet the administration's scientific standards, a characterization the people who built the site plainly reject.

The Preservation and Relaunch Effort

The key legal fact that made climate.us possible: the federal government is prohibited from holding copyright over its own publications, meaning the decades of research, datasets, and public explainers that climate.gov housed could be freely copied and redistributed. Dedicated volunteers moved quickly to preserve copies of the material before it disappeared, and former climate.gov administrators joined them to organize and relaunch the archive. The result is climate.us, which the team says now contains everything that was lost when the original site was shut down.

The Macro Signal for Data-Dependent Industries

For markets that treat publicly accessible government science as baseline infrastructure, the episode is a case study in policy-driven data risk. Climate datasets underpin risk modeling for the insurance industry, commodity price forecasting in agriculture, and an expanding universe of climate-related financial disclosures now required of public companies across major jurisdictions. When a primary federal source goes offline — even temporarily — the downstream effect is uncertainty in inputs that analysts and risk managers price off. The climate.us relaunch partially restores that baseline, but the fact that continuity now depends on a volunteer-led nonprofit rather than a federal agency introduces a new layer of institutional fragility that data-dependent industries will need to account for.

The episode also signals a broader tension between the current U.S. administration's posture on climate science and the international standard-setting bodies and foreign regulators that increasingly mandate climate risk disclosures. Firms operating across borders cannot simply mirror Washington's posture; they remain exposed to regulatory environments where access to the underlying science is assumed. The survival of climate.us does not resolve that tension, but it preserves the data layer on which any credible analysis must rest.