Facing lawsuit, USDA says it will restore climate change-related webpages

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has agreed to restore climate change-related webpages to its websites after it was sued over the deletions in February.

The lawsuit, brought on behalf of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group, argued that the deletions violated rules around citizens’ access to government information.

The USDA’s reversal comes ahead of a scheduled May 21 hearing on the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction against the agency’s actions in federal court in New York.

The department had removed resources on its websites related to climate-smart farming, conservation practices, rural clean energy projects and access to federal loans related to those areas after President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.

At the same time, the Trump administration was working to pause or freeze other funding related to climate change and agriculture, some of which was funded by the Biden-era 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

In a letter filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the Justice Department said the USDA “will restore the climate-change-related web content that was removed post-inauguration” and that it “commits to complying with” federal laws governing its future “posting decisions.”

The lawsuit was filed by Earthjustice and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

Earthjustice attorney Jeffrey Stein said Tuesday scrubbing the websites of information relevant to programs it was undoing “made it really difficult for farmers to fight for the funding that they’re owed, for advocates to educate the public and members of Congress about the specific impacts of freezing funding on ordinary Americans in their districts.”

“I think that the funding freeze and the staff layoffs and the purging of information, they all intertwined as a dangerous triple whammy,” Stein said.

A USDA spokesperson referred The Associated Press to the Department of Justice, which did not immediately reply to a request for comment Tuesday.

Stein said USDA had committed to restoring most of the material within about two weeks. He said he hoped the agency’s reversal would be a “positive sign” in other cases brought against the administration over agencies purging information from websites.

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