Several research institutes in Germany are joining a worldwide grassroots effort to save science data sets that researchers fear could be deleted or decommissioned on the orders of US President Donald Trump’s administration, Nature has learnt.
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An official with Pangaea, a massive environmental data repository run by the University of Bremen and the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, says that the organization is formally working with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to back up at-risk databases. Pangaea’s decision to join the cause followed distress calls from members of the science community and from staff members inside NOAA — an agency that monitors Earth’s atmosphere and climate and provides weather-forecasting services. The Trump administration has promised to slash government spending and has proposed gutting NOAA’s climate research programmes, which administration officials have said promote “exaggerated and implausible climate threats”.
Earlier this month, Bloomberg and other media outlets reported that access to various agency databases would end within days because the administration wanted to cancel contracts with Amazon Web Services, which hosts NOAA’s data online. The decision to cancel the contracts was postponed — but the news sent fear through the research community.
After Trump was elected last year, Eric Nost, a geographer at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, and other volunteers began backing up US data, worried about the information disappearing. Trump 2.0 has lived up to expectations, Nost says, by endangering various kinds of data. But Nost says the situation at NOAA represents the first major threat to core data sets that are crucial for all kinds of environmental research. One scientist who was recently fired from NOAA confirmed to Nature that the websites in question include data sets used in active weather-forecasting operations at NOAA. “If those were to go out, it would be really bad,” says the scientist, who was granted anonymity because he fears retaliation while seeking new employment.
NOAA officials did not respond to requests for comment regarding the agency’s work with Pangaea or other allegations in this article.
Rescue operation
Pangaea is part of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres , which is now joining the effort to save US data. The Helmholtz campaign has already expanded to include saving toxicology databases at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). “The idea is to bring five or six institutes together to create a data-rescue package,” says Frank Oliver Glöckner, a bioinformatician who leads Pangaea. “But we must do this officially: we don’t want to steal data. We want to save data.”
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An EPA spokesman declined to answer questions regarding efforts to safeguard its toxicology databases, but said that the agency is “actively listening to employees at all levels to gather ideas on how to better fulfill agency statutory obligations, increase efficiency, and ensure the EPA is as up-to-date and effective as ever”.
Whenever a new president takes office, webpages are altered and information moved around as government employees respond to the new administration’s priorities. Efforts to preserve old information have been going on for nearly two decades. However, fears of actually losing scientific data came to the fore during Trump’s first presidency, from 2017–2021, after agencies such as the EPA began taking down websites related to climate and other subjects.
Those fears have only escalated during the latest presidency, as Trump’s adviser, Elon Musk, and his US Department of Government Efficiency have sought to slash spending at an unprecedented pace and eliminate programmes on politically disfavoured topics such as climate change.
