Trump admin made 1,400 changes to enviro websites — report

摘要

The Trump administration often removed key information from agency websites on major environmental regulations, a new report found. "That's a staggering finding. It means that under Trump, federal agencies with a vested interest in the outcome of a proceeding were undermining the public's ability to understand and get involved in them," Gretchen Gehrke, the report's lead author, said in a statement. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative report released yesterday found the prior administration made roughly 1,400 changes to federal environmental websites. Twenty percent of those website changes related to regulations and about half of those changes removed information, often fact sheets and guidance documents. The report said the vast majority — 80% — of the changes occurred just before or during regulatory proceedings. "Most dramatically, we uncovered a pattern of information being deleted or made less accessible just before or during a regulatory process — like a public comment period for the proposed repeal of critical environmental protections," said Gehrke, EDGI's web monitoring coordinator.