Robust environmental and public health protections depend on quality data.
No single organization has the federal government’s resources to assemble and maintain as much data from thousands of sources. For this reason, Congress has consistently required federal agencies to collect and publish nationwide data on a range of issues, including communities’ exposure to climate-related hazards, toxic air pollution, and opportunities to mitigate transit-related greenhouse gas emissions, to name a few.
This information, in turn, supports crucial governmental functions to protect the environment and public health. For example, federal laws demand that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) use the “best available science” when determining the amount of pollution that factories may emit or discharge into public waters. Regulators depend on those data to justify more protective standards. Communities and policymakers make pivotal funding, planning, and advocacy decisions based, in part, on federal data showing where people live and the climate and environmental harms to which they are exposed.
During the first Trump administration, Harvard Law School’s Environmental & Energy Law Program documented efforts across the federal government to undermine agencies’ scientific and expert capacities, including terminating the collection of essential environmental and public health data. After President Trump won reelection in November, we worked with our colleagues as part of a Salata Institute-funded interdisciplinary research cluster to identify and preserve key federal datasets monitoring environmental pollution, health, and climate change.