Jenny Bratburd Publishes in The CAP TIMES About the Consequences of Eliminating Environmental Data for Human Health

There will be a deadly price for erasing environmental data

By Jenny Bratburd | guest column

May 30, 2025 | Link to Original Article

Since the presidential inauguration, the Trump administration has removed datasets, tools, funding and staff that were helping to solve environmental problems and protect our health. These changes will benefit no one.

Worse, this hurts everyone’s health and well-being, all while costing U.S. taxpayers more in the long run. It’s time for our leaders to wake up to these facts and fight to protect our health and environment.

Take, for example, the global air quality monitoring program that the Department of State has been running for 15 years at U.S. embassies and consulates across the world. This program not only helped to protect U.S. service people abroad by providing accurate, real-time information on air quality, it was sometimes the only available air quality information in that region. Notably, it spurred other countries to take action to improve their air, and is credited with preventing about 300 million premature deaths from air pollution.

Now it’s gone, by order of the Trump administration. It’s not the only one, either. The Trump administration has also removed some of the Environmental Protection Agency’s tools, including a tool for tracking disparities in environmental hazards and a dataset of high-risk chemical facilities, and threatens to cut thousands of workers at the agency while rolling back many regulations.

At the CDC, whole divisions on environmental health have been abruptly cut, leaving states and schools in the lurch. Meanwhile some NASA programs and datasets focused on Earth are being discontinued, and at NOAA the administration is ending a database tracking the costs of climate and extreme weather damages, removing a valuable resource for local policymakers used to plan for risks.

These changes have many, harmful real-world implications, including here in Wisconsin. A recent lead crisis in Milwaukee schools prompted Milwaukee health officials to contact the CDC for aid. But their requests were denied because all of the staff on the lead poisoning prevention branch had been cut in the mass layoffs. Now the city and schools must continue their work without this team of experts.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk claim these changes are meant to cut costs at the federal government. But the benefits of environmental monitoring far outweigh the costs. An analysis of the Clean Air Act found that every $1 invested into improving air quality results in $30 of economic benefits. That’s in part because air pollution causes many health harms, including cardiovascular and respiratory damage, exacerbates asthma and is linked to lung cancer. These health harms are expensive to treat, limit people’s ability to work and lead to shorter life spans.

Scientists are trying to continue their work, even under attack. Some are preserving the purged datasets in other repositories, and many organizations have sued to preserve and protect health and environmental datasets.

When we fail to measure pollution, we fail to protect against the health harm. And if we can’t make measurements of the pollutants directly, then we will end up measuring the health impacts in our own bodies and the bodies of our loved ones — from worsening asthma attacks in children, to more heart attacks in older adults. This damage is preventable and it is far more cost-effective to prevent harm than to try to fix it later.

To do that, we need to stop the censorship and the cuts to environmental and health research, monitoring and regulation. Scientists need to continue their work and protect valuable data that has taken so much effort to collect and organize. Research institutions, and every organization that benefits from these data need to speak out publicly or seek legal action against the destruction of taxpayer funded resources.

Congress needs to reassert control over the budget and prioritize health. We all need to remember that a better, cleaner, safer, healthier world is possible.

Jenny Bratburd is a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies environmental impacts on health.