Episode 91: Saving federal data with Jonathan Gilmour

Molly Wood Voice-Over: 

Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood. 

This week something a little different we’re digging down to the foundational layer of what makes a lot of climate solutions POSSIBLE. It’s the thing that lets us adapt and evolve into a warming world literally forecasts what is coming in terms of extreme weather that’s exacerbated by climate change and helps us respond to the increasingly dangerous public health impacts of climate change from heat exposure to disease to asthma to pollution. 

And that thing is data. Specifically federal data. 

As we tape this the federal government here in the US is dismantling much of the infrastructure built to deal with tracking climate change, understanding its impacts on various populations, responding to disasters, and even in some cases forecasting the actual weather. 

Leaving aside the fact that none of this will actually make climate change go away the thing is that researchers, scientists, nonprofits, city and state governments and yes entrepreneurs!! RELY on this data to set policy and allocate money and build infrastructure and create new companies. 

Like imagine if Uber the prototype of the startup that every current investor wishes they could invest in had to build Uber WITHOUT taxpayer funded satellites and the GPS technology that was invented by the federal government? No data no Uber. 

And if you’re in the climate tech world, that’s what’s happening now. But forewarned is forearmed and groups of people who saw these moves coming have mobilized to save the data. Here’s one of them.  

Jonathan Gilmour 

My name is Jonathan Gilmour. I'm a data scientist at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. I work in a lab that does research on climate and environmental impacts to health, to human health. And I'm also one of the coordinators of the Public Environmental Data Partners, which is a group that we stood up in November, December, 2024 to safeguard data and tools that the federal government has created with taxpayer money to benefit all of us that were at risk following the election of Donald Trump.

Molly Wood

Talk about identifying this threat. You you said we stood this organization up in November, December, right after the election because we knew we would have to safeguard this federal data. So there's a bunch of components there. Maybe let's start with which data is at risk.

Jonathan Gilmour 

Yeah, absolutely. So initially we knew from the first Trump administration that climate and environmental data would be at risk. We saw threats to climate and environmental data and research and communication to the public back from 2017 to 2021. And so we knew that it was coming. Project 2025 was pretty explicit in how climate and environment work might be treated under a Trump administration. There are questions about how close was Project 2025 to the Trump campaign, but we see now that the campaign, regardless of distancing itself to the project, the administration has instituted a whole bunch of the aims of the project.

especially around climate and environment.

Molly Wood

What were those, if you wouldn't mind backing up? mean, Project 2025 was very explicit on these topics in a way that I think people don't necessarily realize.

Jonathan Gilmour 

Absolutely. I mean, it was a roadmap for dismantling our climate and environmental protections. In addition to this, it was this absolutely giant plan for completely reformulating the way that our government works and dismantling lots of the protections for Americans.

not just in terms of climate and environment, but also health protections. It represented a thesis for how government should work that was a huge departure from the way that the government had worked for Americans up through January of this year.

Molly Wood

Right. So as part of that, certainly there was, you you talk about the dismantling of environmental protections and agencies, and we've seen huge cuts, of course, to NOAA and reshaping of the EPA. But what is it about the data specifically? Did it also call for, you know, what can you tell us in terms of the plans for the information? It's sort of like...

Jonathan Gilmour 

Yeah. Yeah.

Molly Wood 

So then it was like, delete it all or rewrite it, which we did see during the first Trump administration.

Jonathan Gilmour

Yeah, so there were some calls to privatize certain functions of government. an effort to privatize the work of the National Weather Service. This has been sort of a rallying cry in far right libertarian circles for a while.

Molly Wood 

that the federal government should not pay for weather forecasting.

Jonathan Gilmour 

Yeah, and that the functions of the National Weather Service at NOAA should be privatized. And this is sort of absurd. I every weather forecast in the states relies on government data, on federal data. And it's one of the most common ways that Americans interact with federal data. There was a really interesting poll.

that came out a couple of weeks ago that showed that 90 % of Americans use federal data on a weekly basis, but only 10 % are concerned that removals of scientific data and weather data and food safety data, employment data, that that might impact them. And I'm really curious about how those questions were formulated. I don't think that each function was enumerated, but...

that's a huge, huge discrepancy and points to the fact that a lot of this data is sort of silent, invisible infrastructure that we rely on that our society is built on, that, you know, no one's running ads, for, for this data. it, it has sold itself because it's so good and, because it's largely free and it benefits us all. but there's.

I think there's a risk to the fact that it has been chronically, well, it's been underfunded. Our data infrastructure has had cracks for a long time, just like our physical infrastructure. And what we've seen in the past couple of months under this administration is just dynamiting that infrastructure.

Molly Wood 

So, and all right, so then let's get more specific about dynamiting. Like, I mean, it is my understanding that the work you're doing is, will preserve data that would otherwise just be gone? Like, deleted? Data that researchers rely on, you know, like, walk us through the importance of this information and what might happen to it if not for the work that you and others are doing.

Jonathan Gilmour

Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Gilmour 

Yeah, absolutely. So we at the public environmental data partners are trying to safeguard data that falls under the umbrella of environment. So we're using a pretty big umbrella there. There's a lot that we are counting as environmental data, data that affects our health and the spaces around us. And we have identified what data is important to the broader community, to researchers.

to folks who have deep knowledge about where these data sets were created and how at risk they might be, how politically vulnerable they might be. And we've identified a priority list and based on those interactions and that feedback, and we've gone after all the data sets that were identified. So that list...

started out at about 300 after a bunch of input from folks who have deep expertise with the data. so 300 data sets in that environmental umbrella. And so far we've safeguarded almost half of that. And we have about 170 data sets in the repository that were

Molly Wood

300 data sets specific. Mm-hmm. Okay.

Jonathan Gilmour

saving things too. we have a whole bunch that are in progress and we have, about a hundred that are really gnarly and need some, some coding or they're just giant, or in some cases they've already been removed. And so to your question, there's this really interesting and difficult dynamic where we're saving things because they are critical for the research and for our understanding of the world. But.

We don't actually know for sure if anything in this list, when things were identified, we don't know. We're using that as an estimate that this is something that is important. It's important and it's useful to someone. And so we're going to go after it. But this administration is so mercurial. There's so much happening all the time. We've seen cases where data sets go down and then

because of suits, they come back up. We have safeguarded things that remain up to this day. There are things that were not on that list that have been taken down. So it's really mixed bag and it's a really chaotic, difficult landscape to be working in. But at the end of the day, our goal is to ensure that what is identified to us as important remains

freely accessible to the public and to researchers. And it's important, I say free there, that we've seen some folks who are saving this data and then paywalling it. But this data was developed with taxpayer money for the benefit of all of us, and we think that it should remain freely accessible.

Molly Wood 

Yeah.

Molly Wood 

Hmm.

Molly Wood 

Right, you're like in the internet archive business effectively, except that, which is not a business. Yeah, exactly. It is an academic nonprofit undertaking for the most part. Is it all volunteer? Like, how is it, you know, who's all working on this?

Jonathan Gilmour 

Absolutely, which is not much of a business.

Jonathan Gilmour 

We have some grant funding. We've received a huge outpouring of support. We launched a Get Involved Forum, and in a couple of weeks, we'd had 600 responses, folks offering to help out with every aspect of our work and offering to donate money in addition to time. we've really been floored by the groundswell of support for this work.

Molly Wood 

Give us a sense if you would, because I think to your point, this is invisible infrastructure and people don't necessarily understand the value of this. Give us a sense of like, what might happen if this data goes away, if it has disappeared, if it is unavailable to the various services and researchers that rely on it.

Jonathan Gilmour 

Yeah, so I want to take a minute to talk about the main pillars of our work at the Public Environmental Data Partners, which I think will help with this. So one of the pillars that we've talked about is the data sets themselves. we've saved about 170 of those. Then another critical pillar is rebuilding tools. And there were nine federal environmental justice screening tools. We have done our best to rebuild some of the screening tools that have been, so these tools were some of the first on the chopping block when the administration came in. There was the White House Council on Environmental Qualities, Climate and Economic Justice screening tool. was EPA's EJScreen, those were the two most popular. They served,

Molly Wood 

What did they do? Yeah.

Jonathan Gilmour 

about 100,000 users together on a monthly basis and helped them make informed decisions and helped them identify areas that had faced environmental injustices and helped users make investment decisions and identify areas that need extra protection, extra resources. So these were used by local governments and nonprofits and concerned citizens.

to identify areas of the country that had overlapping risks, like where there are lots of lead pipes, where is there high unemployment, where is there a high air pollution or other pollution from industrial activities, and where can we invest to improve public health and address these environmental injustices? And so.

Molly Wood 

Right, and this is where we should, I'm gonna interject and say, none of this was philosophical. Like we know that power plants and freeways have historically been built in poor areas. We know that Cancer Alley exists. We know that Flint, Michigan, I believe still does not have clean water. it isn't, know, none of these were philosophical. It was about saying, it was about identifying real risk and harm and trying to mitigate real risk and harm to humans.

Jonathan Gilmour 

Right, absolutely. To humans in America. And so there's this overlapping quality of these resources. And to protect Americans, you need a few things. First, you need policies like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and EPA's National Ambient Air Quality Standards, which by the way, in my lab at Harvard,

Molly Wood 

in America.

Jonathan Gilmour 

provided a lot of the research that was the basis of the most recent revision of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards to better protect Americans from air pollution, which kills more people annually than car crashes. Then after the policies, you need the data. So you need air quality sensors and you need to test for and identify where there are lead pipes and you need data about unemployment in the federal workforce and the civilian workforce. then on top of the data, you

You have tools that help people make sense of the data. A data set with no interpretation is really difficult to obtain conclusions from. But when you have a tool that allows someone to explore that data, it can be actionable. And that helps us figure out where to invest to protect Americans and where cities should design, where they should add trees to address urban heat island effects or where folks need clean water.

And then that can help direct the grants and investments and additional attention. And we're seeing attacks from the government on all four of those pillars, policy, data, tools, and investments and grants.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: 

Time for a quick break. When we come back, more on the pushback against the deletion of these data sets and we’ll talk about the impact that all of this could have on the next generation of climate entrepreneurs who rely on federal data, tools, and information to build the companies that could save us from the climate crisis. 

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Jonathan Gilmour, a data scientist at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. Before we continue our conversation about climate data, I do want to say that Gilmour has done this kind of thing before he was a key contributor to the Atlantic’s Covid Tracking Project during the COVID-19 pandemic when the CDC under the first Trump administration at first wouldn’t release any public information about the spread of the virus then released data that was wrong or incomplete. Ok back to our interview. 

Molly Wood 

So, and so you're preserving the data, rebuilding the tools, it sounds like. Those are the two primary pillars of your work. Do you touch investment and policy at all? I don't know why you would, but.

Jonathan Gilmour 

We aren't touching investment. We are advocating for policy. So advocacy is another pillar, say the third pillar probably of our work. So we've written op-eds about the importance of our federal digital infrastructure and how critical this data is, how critical these tools are. And there are...

hundreds of organizations and cities and local governments that use these tools that in some cases exist now only in the copies that we've stood up. And so we are in a perverse way, what the government is doing is also bringing a little bit more attention to some of these things, these resources, the data sets and the tools, which is important because they so they are the way that we make sense of the world and where people.

need additional help. And so while we're not going to see progressive policy or any of that help coming from the federal government, most likely, this is an opportunity for private money and foundations to step up and for local governments to step up to protect those who are most vulnerable amongst us.

Molly Wood 

Yeah, is, in no way is this a comfort exactly, but I am a big believer in the Newtonian principle of an equal and opposite reaction. And it has been somewhat heartening to see.

Jonathan Gilmour 

Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood 

people rally to this cause. Like I have seen a lot more concern than I would have expected about repositories of data and preserving data sets. But it is sort of like, it's just sort of wild to think that we would have compiled all of this.

life-saving information and that someone would just come along and either disappear it for political reasons or worse, alter it, right? Like, I think like this feels like a good time to talk about how some, if the tools are a way to interpret the data, what is the follow-on concern about corruption of the data?

Jonathan Gilmour 

There's huge concern. We haven't seen.

many instances of corruption of the data or, I mean, there have been some changes to some data sets. One of the big nonprofits that are one of the nonprofit partners in that form the public environmental data partners is the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. And they were started during the first Trump term to safeguard environmental data and track changes to environmental data and policy. And they,

They have a data set tracker and, stat also, ran, a piece looking at changes to federal data sets. We've seen some things like changing gender to sex in, public health data sets. I'm not aware of any big, you know, concerted efforts to manipulate data and sort of silently change things in federal data sets.

The biggest thing we're addressing is just complete wholesale deletion of the data sets. But what you raise is really important. there is, I think, a huge...

loss of trust in data and science that comes out of the federal government. There's incredibly talented public servants doing excellent science and trying to keep their heads down amidst the reductions in force and firings and reorganizations and doge cuts. But I think given the sheer amount of political pressure that is so evident coming from the top, you

Jonathan Gilmour

climate change isn't real, it's the green news scam, IRA, environmental justice grants and EPA's grants, they're handouts to these communities that are grifting. All of these things that are coming out of the administration are definitely.

changing the public perception of everything that will come out of government, whether it's politically tainted or not. And I think that's a huge concern. We deal with some of the provenance issues with the data sets that we're saving. there's a loss of trust when you take something from one place to another. And so when we're saving these data sets and when we're reproducing these tools, we try to provide really rich information and metadata about

where it came from, how we got it, who made it, how did they make it? Try to grab any data dictionaries, any context on the web pages. But it's really difficult to assuage any concerns that a potential visitor might have when you are taking something from one location and putting it in another.

Molly Wood 

Yeah, I mean, as much as we briefly talked about the equal and opposite reaction and the idea that state and local governments could step in here and institutions could step in, the fact is that for decades, we have relied on federal data backed by the full faith and credit of the United States, if you will. It's sort of like, this is the gold standard of information. You can trust it for your weather forecasts. You can trust it for your food safety.

You can trust it for understanding the safest place to put new infrastructure. And there's just no question with that, that without that kind of stamp.

it doesn't have the same impact.

Jonathan Gilmour 

Absolutely. I think about the carbon dioxide concentration data that comes out of the Mauna Loa Observatory. That's been the gold standard for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for decades and is at risk of going down completely.

self-sabotage we're seeing in terms of US science and the entire scientific establishment, we haven't even talked about the attacks on academia, is stunningly short-sighted and really horrific to see. It's gonna result in less, fewer advances, fewer biomedical advances, fewer cancer treatments, fewer...

solutions that address the problems that we're talking about the air pollution, the lead pipes and what it's going to affect the entire way we live our lives. And it's going to be a very slow process to understand just how bad things will get. Even if we stopped the bleeding, if you will now, there's been such an impact on the entirety of the establishment.

CUT TO

Molly Wood 

This is, that is a good place to put a slightly, know, normally on the show, I am talking to startups about startups with investors. We're talking about public data, but I think it's an important thing to point out that this is also the data that plenty of startups have been built upon. And you know, I mean, and that, and that, has always kind of been the history, right? Like Uber couldn't exist without the taxpayer funded GPS satellites that provide the mapping data that allow for a multi-billion dollar startup to exist. So I think it like it's a, if nothing motivates us, let it be money. Like put a fine point on the fact that this data is also the data you might want to use to build your climate startup or some other kind of startup.

Jonathan Gilmour

Absolutely. So that's a great point. Thank you for raising it. I keep waiting for private industry to step in and say, hey, hey, hey, this is madness. Let's not destroy our federal data infrastructure because we rely on it. think especially of insurance companies that rely on climate risk data and environment and weather data from the federal government to build their models and price insurance. A topic that fascinates me and that I haven't had enough time to dig into lately is climate risks to insurance. And this industry is facing existential risks and the data that we're talking about informs their understanding of the world and their business direction. And so I keep waiting for these insurance giants that have quite a bit of sway.

to step in and do something. And I haven't really seen that. And there might be some back-channeling going on. I imagine there probably is. I also imagine that a lot of these companies probably have their own in-house data preservation efforts. I think that it's lamentable that those will probably never see the light of day for the public because, again, this data was, we paid for this data. We deserve to have it and to benefit from it.

But I think that we may, I keep hoping that we may see some pushback from private industry because this data does form the backbone of a lot of the models that we're building, the ways that we understand the world.

Molly Wood 

Yeah. Yeah. mean, it's true. Maybe like scoot over to the economics department and sort of be like, all right, let's put out a report on the... I mean, I would imagine that an attempt to quantify the economic value of the data that we're talking about would be fascinating because I have to imagine that those are numbers in the hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars globally. When you add up health data, climate data,

Jonathan Gilmour

That's it.

Molly Wood 

Like the data that underpins so many solutions. I don't know. I try not to be like a mercenary VC about stuff, but honestly, all we talk about is tariffs when we are all about to die in 75 different ways. Whether it's measles, ticks, a fucking asteroid. Okay, now I'm just, now I have to bleep my own show. Anyway. Right, right.

Jonathan Gilmour

Dengue fever, so many of these risks that are coming down the pipe, novel pandemic.

Molly Wood 

and literally not knowing what the weather is. Like you guys, we are literally talking about blinding ourselves to the weather because the word climate exists somewhere in the description of what these organizations do.

Jonathan Gilmour

Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood 

Anyway, I like this, I like this quantify the economic value thing. Maybe we should team up on this.

Jonathan Gilmour 

I'd love to do that. Yeah, think that's fascinating. I don't know where to start, but let's start it. Okay. Okay.

Molly Wood 

Yeah, because it's, it's, know some people, I know some economist types. Yeah. Couple of, I know a couple of economics journalists like we can make this a business story. This is some Wall Street Journal stuff right here. All right. We're slightly off topic now, but more importantly, Jonathan, where can, where can people contribute, find out more and hopefully help.

Jonathan Gilmour 

Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Gilmour 

Yeah, so I'll send you our website. It's [screening-tools.com](http://screening-tools.com/), as you'll see if you visit the website. We've been focused on preserving data and not making a beautiful website. So we've got all the content there. It's up there, but it's pretty bare bones. We also have links to a form to identify data that you think is at risk. If you have information or domain expertise.

We especially love to hear from you and we also have our get involved form there We have a donation link there we haven't prioritized sort of a go fund me public funding drive we think that The government should pay for this this work. It's not So we're talking with with philanthropy We we think that you know

We're hoping that we can mobilize some large scale support for this. But there's a link to donate if you so choose. And we have a bunch of stories linked on the site about who we are and what we've done and what motivates us.

Molly Wood 

Amazing. Jonathan Gilmour, thank you so much for the good work. We appreciate you.

Jonathan Gilmour

Thanks for having me.

That’s it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. A couple things I do want to mention before we end first, people and organizations are fighting back against the deletion of federal data with some success this month farmers won a lawsuit against the USDA over deleted climate data because climate REALLY matters to farmers and they won and several data sets and tools were reinstated including the US Forest Service’s Climate Risk Viewer. This is happening with some health data also. 

And Jonathan also pointed out that some of this data collection was actually mandated by Congress and again we taxpayers paid for it so arguably this wholesale deletion is not within the executive branch’s power at all. 

Also as I believe I’ve reminded you many times on this show and others you can’t manage what you don’t measure. 

Email me your thoughts and suggestions to in at everybody in the pool dot com and find all the latest episodes and more at everybody in the pool dot com, the website. And if you want to become a subscriber and get an ad free version of the show, hit the link in the description in your podcast app of choice.

Together, we can get this done. 

See you next week.