Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

21. Department of Commerce · Minor

Present Commerce climate data without adjustments

Partially done

676 21. Department of Commerce

“Data collected by the department should be presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    Executive Order 14303, Restoring Gold Standard Science, directs every federal agency — Commerce among them — to produce and present scientific data in a way that is 'transparent', 'unbiased' and 'subject to unbiased peer review', and tells agency heads to correct or retract findings that do not meet the standard. It is a government-wide directive addressed to exactly the practice the Quote complains of. Note the order: the retirement notice is dated fifteen days *earlier*, so the one documented action on a Commerce climate-data presentation in the window was not taken under this order and NOAA has never linked the two.

  2. Partially done

    NOAA retired the Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters product — the single Commerce climate dataset most often reached for in the climate debate — and said so in a dated notice: "The NOAA Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters product will be retired, with no updates beyond calendar year 2024. All past reports, spanning 1980-2024, and their underlying data remain authoritative, archived, and available." The notice is a NESDIS Notice of Changes, the mechanism the NOAA Policy on Partnerships in the Provision of Environmental Information requires for a change to a significant environmental information product; it gives no reason and does not mention neutrality or the climate debate. The product page itself is still live and still serves the whole 1980–2024 series (403 events), now described in the past tense: "NCEI tracked and evaluated climate events in the U.S. and globally from 1980-2024". So this is the presentation ended, not the data withdrawn or restated.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Corrected 2026-09-06 (read-queue ticket 07). The 2026-08-31 pass recorded that https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/ “now returns a 13 KB stub with a citation block and no dataset, where it previously carried the full time series”. That observation is an artifact of the tool, not a fact about the product. The page is a jQuery single-page app: /access/billions/ and every path under it — /faq, /time-series, /summary-stats, and paths that do not exist — return the same 13,445-byte shell, and the content is fetched afterwards from /access/billions/section/<name>. Those section endpoints are alive and serve the complete 1980–2024 series. This is round 3’s trap 5 (a 200 with real content that is still not an answer) in its purest form, and it would have supported a confident false finding that NOAA had pulled the data down.

What NOAA actually did is narrower and is properly documented. The dated notice the earlier pass looked for exists; it is not on ncei.noaa.gov at all. NESDIS publishes product retirements as “Notice of Changes” items at nesdis.noaa.gov/about/documents-reports/notice-of-changes, a paginated feed running to fifteen pages, and the Billion-Dollar Disasters item sits under the 2025 year page. ncei.noaa.gov/news, ncei.noaa.gov/news.xml and noaa.gov/topic-tags/billion-dollar-disasters all carry nothing: the topic tag’s most recent item is 2025-01-10, ten days before the window opens, which is its own small confirmation that the product stopped.

Negative search: a jq pass over the NOAA slice of the Corpus for climate + data rulemakings; Federal Register full text since 2025-01-20 for "climate data" restricted to the Commerce Department slug; presidential-actions.ndjson for climate; the NESDIS Notice of Changes feed read back eight pages (roughly two years of items) for any other Commerce climate-data product change — the retirements there are satellite, ocean and geophysical datasets (GOES-R rainfall rate, HDGM, Suomi NPP, World Ocean Circulation Experiment, Global Ocean Currents Database), not climate presentations; and the /access/billions/section/* endpoints and text/faq.html grepped for retire, no longer, discontinu and archiv (nothing — the product carries no notice of its own retirement).

Action
other
Object
Department of Commerce climate data presentation
ID
1871