This story will be updated as further government website modifications are observed.
The U.S. Forest Service’s “Sustainability and Climate” webpage is gone, as are the news sections for the homepages of Alaska’s National Forests and the Tongass National Forest. Likewise for a vast amount of federal government weather, disaster assistance, fisheries, health, education and other reports.
In some instances they can still be accessed through submenus or via virtual backdoors such as the exact URL for a specific report. In others the information has simply halted — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report was last updated Jan. 16 and the top of the website now displays a banner stating “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”
“More than 8,000 web pages across more than a dozen U.S. government websites have been taken down since Friday afternoon,” The New York Times reported Sunday morning. The mass removal is occurring “as federal agencies rush to heed President Trump’s orders targeting diversity initiatives and ‘gender ideology.’”
Other websites still online have been altered to remove references to diversity, gender, climate change and other information, the Washington Post reported Friday.
The U.S. Forest Service’s “Sustainability and Climate” webpage that was online before Jan. 20 (top) is now offline (bottom).
Both newspapers, as well as other media organizations, noted website changes are common when a new president takes office. However, the reports also note the magnitude and content singled out by the Trump administration is unprecedented.
While some Republican governors aligned with Trump have issued similar orders to remove content matching his guidelines from state websites, Alaska does not appear to be among them as of Sunday. A “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” page for the University of Alaska is still online, for instance, as are policy statements at the Alaska Department of Administration’s website referencing “pregnant workers” (such references are being changed to “pregnant women” at federal websites).
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, has ordered all websites to be taken down that document or reference climate change. An email sent Thursday by Peter Rhee, the department’s director of digital communications, stated staff must “identify and archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change” by Friday — although some such content remained online as of Sunday.
“OC will review the submitted materials and make determinations on next steps,” Rhee’s email states.
Many federal websites with content targeted by the Trump administration are still active. The Department of Interior’s website, for instance, appears largely intact — including a reference to “environmental justice” on its “about” page — although the word “diverse” has been deleted from the description of the department’s museum collections. Administration officials have also stated at least some pages may be restored once they are scrutinized for content that violates Trump’s orders.
Webpages altered or deleted since Trump was sworn in Jan. 20 are generally still viewable at the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (archive.org). The Empire’s review of websites with content specific to Juneau and Alaska is based on the most recent “snapshot” available before that date.
The Forest Service’s “Sustainability and Climate” website, for instance, now displays only the text “You are not authorized to access this page.” A Wayback Machine snapshot from Jan. 17 highlights items such as a “Forest Service Climate Adoption Plan” and “Vulnerability Assessments Across the Nation.”
Among the deleted items is a “National Climate Resilience Framework” assessment that states the priority for data collection “should be focused on enhancing information and services in geographies where climate data are sparse and climate-related vulnerabilities are high (e.g., Alaska, Hawaii, U.S. territories),” and that the government is “supporting relocation activities for 14 rural Alaskan villages and Tribes through the Natural Resource Conservation Service Watershed and Flood Prevention Operations Program.”
However, the removal of the website’s content isn’t complete. The Climate Adoption Plan, for instance, contains a direct link to a 2022 PDF report that is still online as of midday Sunday.
An announcement at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website Saturday notes it “is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”
Similarly, the Forest Service’s websites for Alaska and the Tongass, for instance, each had “Recent News” sections on their homepages leading up to Inauguration Day. Those sections are now gone.
The headlines of the most recently posted articles at the Tongass homepage were “Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center Fireside Lecture addresses the history of the Eldred Rock Lighthouse” (Jan. 13) and “Tongass Forest Plan Revision draft assessment report available, more comments sought.” (Jan. 10).
Those articles are still accessible via their URLs and the news subpage accessible via a submenu in the “About Us” tab of the current homepages.
Also vanishing from easy access — but potentially still available in submenus and other indirect means — are vast portions of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s websites. That department oversees agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (which includes weather, climate and fisheries agencies), Bureau of the Census, Minority Business Development Agency, and others.
The main website (https://www.commerce.gov) returned a “Service Unavailable” error early Sunday afternoon, a continuance of glitches observed when the Census Bureau’s website went down temporarily Friday night. Access to various subsections during the weekend, such as the “Fisheries and aquaculture” webpage was limited with all of the recently posted content missing. A set of three dropdown menus in theory allowed users to set search parameters for such content, but attempts to search for seemingly obvious matches (i.e. “Census Bureau,” “population statistics” and “personal income”) returned no results.
However, both the NOAA.gov and Climate.gov websites were operational while the Commerce Department site was down, each featuring plentiful content related to climate change including an article noting “2024 was the world’s warmest year on record.”
The Weather Service’s Suicide Basin monitoring webpage, which includes content about climate change being a factor in recent record flooding and likely future floods, appeared to be unaltered as of midday Sunday.
However, alterations have been made to the website of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which is providing aid to hundreds of Juneau households affected by last year’s flood that was declared a federal disaster. The “priorities” section has been removed from FEMA’s homepage, which on Jan. 19 included subsections about “equity” and “climate resilience.” The direct URL to FEMA’s strategic plan detailing its priorities now returns an “access denied” message.
Still intact are multilingual translations of FEMA’s web content, in contrast to the much-publicized deletion of the White House’s Spanish website that originally featured a “Go Home” button directing viewers to a page featuring a video montage of Trump in office and on the campaign trail (the button now reads “Go To Home Page”).
The U.S. Department of Education, which Trump has stated he wants to eliminate, has removed large portions of its website including a “White House Initiative American Indian and Alaska Native Education” section. An archived version of the site declares its purpose is “to support activities that will strengthen the Nation by expanding education opportunities and improving education outcomes for all American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) students.”
“It is committed to furthering tribal self-determination and ensuring AI/AN students, at all levels of education, have an opportunity to learn their Native languages and histories, receive complete and competitive educations, preparing them for college, careers, and productive and satisfying lives,” the archived content states.
A more general deletion from the Department of Education website was a resource page for LGBTQ+ students, matching one of the most widespread purges across federal sites involving gender and sexuality references — especially involving transgenderism. A U.S. State Department travel advisory site, for instance, now refers to “LGB Travelers” after removing the “TQ” from the previous version. A Census Bureau webpage providing sexual orientation and gender data now returns a “404: Page Not Found” message.
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
