Former NOAA climate staff have brought a stripped-down version of Climate.gov back to life as Climate.us, opening a new home for climate information after the federal site was redirected and taken down in early 2025. Rebecca Lindsey, who lost her Climate.gov job in February 2025, is helping run the revival.
The move matters because the old site was not a niche archive. Climate.gov drew about 15 million page views in 2024 and was still growing before it was redirected to another NOAA site controlled by political appointees put in place by an administration hostile to climate action. Climate.us is meant to keep that information in reach for people looking for plain-language explanations of heat waves, storms, sea level rise and other climate signals.
Lindsey said trusted climate information should not vanish when politics changes, and the audience for it was already there. She said the old site’s popularity showed that people in the US do want unbiased, trustworthy climate information and are interested in it.
Climate.us first came online in 2025 to house material rescued from the old government site, and it is now set to add news, stories, expert blogs, data visualizations, reports on climate indicators and classroom resources. Scientists will volunteer to vet the content for accuracy, a cautious approach that reflects both the urgency of the work and the pressure surrounding it.
That pressure is not abstract. The Trump administration has proposed slashing $1.6 billion from NOAA in the next federal budget, while the broader federal science workforce has shrunk by around 12%, with about 40% of those losses coming from science agencies. Federal science agencies shed close to 118,000 employees in the 18 months between September 2024 and February 2026, and grant funding for environmental research and innovation fell by 79%. Brandon Lardy said the damage is showing up in canceled contracts and research spaces that shut down without warning.
The new site is being held together by thousands of small donations from the US and around the world, a fragile but telling sign that the appetite for public science has not disappeared even as federal backing has thinned. Jules Barbati-Dajches warned that the cuts risk the US losing hundreds of years of collective expertise and called them a threat to innovation.
For now, Climate.us is less a polished replacement than a working rescue mission. It has restored access to information that a large public audience clearly relied on, but its long-term future will depend on whether volunteer vetting and small donations can keep pace with the scale of what NOAA once maintained.
