NOAA’s Climate.gov was redirected in 2025, and Rebecca Lindsey helped bring climate information back online through Climate.us. Lindsey lost her Climate.gov job in February 2025 and now serves as managing director of the new site.
Climate.us first came online to house material from the old government site, which had drawn about 15 million page views in 2024. Lindsey said, “Trusted climate information should not disappear when politics change.”
Rebecca Lindsey and Climate.us
Former Climate.gov staff built Climate.us to restore access to accurate, accessible and scientifically rigorous climate information. Lindsey also said, “in the US do want unbiased, trustworthy information about climate. They're interested in it. They're concerned about it.”
The new site is being supported by thousands of small donations from the US and around the world. Scientists will work voluntarily to vet the content for accuracy, and Climate.us plans to add news, stories, expert blogs, data visualizations, reports on climate indicators and classroom resources.
NOAA and Trump cuts
The relaunch comes after former US federal workers revived a defunct climate website following terminations and funding cuts. Climate.gov was redirected to a different NOAA site controlled by political appointees after Donald Trump took office again on January 20, 2025, following his November 5, 2024 election win.
The broader backdrop is a shrinking federal science workforce. The Partnership for Public Service said the US federal workforce has fallen by around 12% under Trump, with about 40% of those losses coming from science agencies.
Partnership for Public Service data
Brandon Lardy, the Partnership for Public Service data director, said federal science agencies shed close to 118,000 employees in the 18 months between September 2024 and February 2026. He also said grant funding for environmental research and innovation fell by 79% in the same period.
The Trump administration is seeking to slash $1.6 billion from NOAA in the next federal budget. Climate.us is trying to keep the old Climate.gov material available while its volunteers add new reporting and tools outside the federal system.
NOAA forecast on El Niño 2026 sits alongside the same federal science cuts that pushed former staff to build Climate.us, but the unanswered piece is how much of the original Climate.gov archive and functionality the new site can fully replace.
It can preserve part of the record now, but not the federal site that once drew millions of page views and sat inside NOAA. Rebecca Lindsey has already answered the practical choice for readers who relied on it: follow Climate.us if they want the information to remain accessible.
