‘Canary in a Coal Mine’: Data Scientists Restore a Climate Justice Tool Taken Down by Trump

This piece was originally published by Inside Climate News.

One day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, a digital mapping tool used by federal and state agencies to identify environmentally disadvantaged communities was taken offline. Within 48 hours, a coalition of data scientists known as the Public Environmental Data Project had resurrected a functional but unofficial copy of the tool on an independent domain.

The Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST) is one of more than 200 federally maintained resources that the data scientists have flagged as both critical to environmental justice work and at risk of disappearing under the new Trump administration. The data’s removal so early in the administration has deepened their fears about disenfranchised communities suffering without publicly available environmental health information.

Developed in 2021 by the U.S. Digital Service and the Council on Environmental Quality, the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool was designed to uphold then-President Joe Biden’s early-term promise that 40 percent of federal investments in climate and clean energy initiatives would be directed toward underserved communities. 

The dashboard consolidates hundreds of data points to establish a community’s level of economic and environmental risk, taking into account metrics like income, asthma prevalence, flood hazards, air pollution exposure and proximity to wastewater. (The screening tool is distinct from the EPA’s Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping portal, known as EJScreen, a means for identifying communities disproportionately harmed by pollution.) 

As Trump makes a dizzying effort to rewrite the narratives of climate, justice and race in the United States, his administration may view the CEJST as a Biden-era holdover in need of weeding out. But eliminating the screening could have serious consequences for those who both administer and seek government funding nationwide, not to mention the Americans feeling the brunt of climate change and pollution, said Jessie Mahr, director of technology at the nonprofit Environmental Policy Innovation Center, based in College Park, Maryland. As a member of the Public Environmental Data Project, she led the efforts to archive and reinstate the CEJST.

“The point of this tool was to say, ‘Do we have an understanding of the challenges that Americans face?’ And to then effectively prioritize interventions and effectively use the hundreds of government programs and funding sources that are available to address those concerns,” said Mahr. 

Under the Justice40 clause of Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, use of the tool was mandatory for all federal agencies rolling out projects tied to clean energy, affordable housing, critical water infrastructure, transportation and pollution reduction or remediation. Over the last few years the tool has been wrapped into environmental review requirements and grant processes at the state and nonprofit level as well, with as many as 35 states employing CEJST as their primary environmental justice screening tool.

Within hours of taking office, Trump had eliminated the Justice40 initiative, the catalyst of CEJST’s creation, but countless funding pathways still rely on the tool. In fact, prior to its removal, the CEJST site was the second most visited website in the domains of the Executive Office of the President, with more than 33,000 views during the month of November.

Following Trump’s re-election, environmental data scientists and advocates began discussing in earnest what they should expect during a second presidency, said Cathy Richards, technologist at the nonprofit Open Environmental Data Project, a data stewardship organization founded in 2020 and one of the partners of the Public Environmental Data Project. 

In an initial call, the coalition that would become the PEDP considered the possibility of federal websites being scrubbed or edited as they had under the Trump administration eight years ago. At the time, Richards worried about overreacting. “Are we panicking too much?” she asked herself.

But the more the PEDP members discussed a potential data blackout, the more likely it seemed. An archiving plan took shape, said Richards. “People would reach out to their contacts to say, ‘Hey, what dataset, if you lost it, would affect you and would affect your work?’” 

According to Mahr, coalition members triaged federal environmental datasets using three metrics to identify those most worthy of archiving: The consequences of a dataset’s disappearance for the public, their confidence in their ability to replicate the tool and the ease and speed with which they could do so. In the end, they came up with a list of over 200 federally hosted data sources, and a shortlist of 57 “high priority databases,” said Matt Price, a University of Toronto historian. 

Over the last two months, PEDP partners made copies of 37 environmental datasets just in case a new Trump administration began taking them down. On January 21, CEJST became the first to go. 

That morning, Mahr alerted Price that the federal site had been scrubbed. Users could still search for CEJST, but they’d be hit with an error message. “Screeningtool.geoplatform.gov uses an unsupported protocol,” the official government site now reads. The White House’s Council for Environmental Quality, which created and managed the tool, told Inside Climate News it was unable to comment on the CEJST’s removal. 

Within 30 minutes of the tool’s disappearance, Price began work to reproduce the CEJST on an independent domain launched by the PEDP. The screening was back online in less than two days. Doing so was possible in large part because of open source software practices adopted by the tool’s developers within the government, Price said. 

“They managed their project as though it were a valuable public resource to which the people ought to have access,” said Price. “I can’t emphasize enough how central it was that they worked in the right way, in a way that a government agency should, in the open, with clear thinking about how this can be a public resource.”

Price worries about maintaining a rapid pace of data restoration. He, along with most members of the PEDP, works with the environmental datasets in his free time, squeezed between full-time employment, family and sleep. 

“The CEJST here is a bit of a canary in a coal mine, right?” Price said. “I know for sure there are gonna be dozens of tools like this that come down. And there may be hundreds and hundreds. And that becomes unwieldy.”