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Earthjustice goes to court for our planet.
We’re here because the earth needs a good lawyer.

We Just Won Our First Victory Against This Trump Administration

What happened: Earthjustice has sued the Trump administration several times for its unlawful attacks on regulations that protect our planet, our health, and our democracy. We are already seeing results from our legal work. Thanks to one of our first lawsuits, the Department of Agriculture has agreed to restore critical information about climate change that it purged from its websites, a move we challenged on behalf of farmers who depend on this data.

Why it matters: This win is proof that the power of the law is essential in the fight against the Trump administration’s climate denial agenda.

For our clients, the win is a major relief. Farmers rely on these pages to adapt to increasingly extreme weather and learn what funding is available for adaptation projects. Limiting their access to information on emerging markets and federal funding opportunities directly threatens their financial stability.

Our lawsuit was part of a longstanding push for climate-smart agriculture and reducing industrial agriculture’s climate impact. We are not backing down now.

How was the Trump administration censoring climate information?

  • Pulling down websites: In late January, the USDA began removing all landing pages focused on climate change, which include critical resources on climate-smart farming, sites to access billions of dollars for conservation practices, and climate adaptation strategies.
  • USDA subagencies such as the U.S. Forest Service, Natural Resources Conservation Service, and the Farm Service Agency also removed entire climate change sections from their websites.

How did Trump’s actions threaten farmers and food resiliency?

  • Greater financial instability. Agriculture is already one of the industries most affected by climate change, with excessive heat and wildfires causing over $16.5 billion in crop losses in 2023 alone. Without access to USDA adaptation programs that provide billions of dollars in grant funding that help mitigate or manage the impacts of climate change, farmers would be left empty-handed in adapting to the extreme weather, shifting growing seasons, and how best to enter climate-smart markets.
  • More crop failures and higher consumer costs. Removing the USDA’s climate-smart conservation guidance and funding reduced farmers’ access to best practices for soil health and water management. These practices are particularly critical as worsening droughts and other extreme weather affect the overall quantity and quality of U.S. crops, which could weaken American food security and increase costs for consumers.

How did Earthjustice fight back?

  • Going to court: On behalf of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Environmental Working Group, Earthjustice sought a court order to force the USDA to restore access to key webpages and prevent further removal of vital climate-related information. USDA then reversed course, committing to restore the pages in response to our lawsuit.
  • Working in community: Earthjustice is also connecting with entities like Harvard and Yale Law Schools and End of Term Archive to protect critical government data from deletion.
  • The bigger picture: We have filed a string of lawsuits against the Trump administration to protect environmental progress by defending our oceans from oil and gas drilling, challenging an illegal power grab that would make air pollution worse in New York City, and fighting to unfreeze funding for programs that are bringing clean energy to everyone.

We won’t back down.

A man wearing a long sleeve Minnesota Vikings shirt stands in a corn field holding a pole and bag with a dirt sample inside.
Jude Addo-Chidie, a Ph.D. student in agronomy at Purdue University, takes a soil sample from a corn field, Wednesday, July 12, 2023, at the Southeast-Purdue Agricultural Center in Butlerville, Ind. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been removing important climate-related data from its websites that farmers rely on to adapt to extreme weather. (Joshua A. Bickel / AP)

Originally published on February 24, 2025. Updated with news of Earthjustice's victory.