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Trump and his goons want to keep you in the dark [1]
['Daily Kos Staff']
Date: 2025-05-14
The most recent victim of the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn attack on the federal government is the shuttering of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters program. No longer will Americans suffer the tyranny of knowing how much extreme weather is costing them, because climate is woke. And it’s not just the effects of climate change that the administration is trying to memory-hole. Think of it as part of an overall plan to starve the public of knowledge so that they can’t find out just how much things are going sideways under President Donald Trump.
From 1980 to 2024, the program tracked all extreme weather events and climate disasters where the overall cost was at least $1 billion. Across that timespan, the U.S. had 403 events that blew through the $1 billion mark, leading to over $2.9 trillion in total costs.
Of course, since the Trump administration doesn’t believe in climate change, they don’t want to track the costs of climate change. The best way to prove there’s no climate change is to pretend there’s no climate change. It goes hand in hand with pausing weather balloon releases and planning to eliminate NOAA’s research division. As severe weather season looms, weather reports are expected to be both less accurate and less obtainable, which is definitely what people voted for when they pulled the lever for Trump.
A car is upturned in a Kroger parking lot after severe storm swept through Little Rock, Arkansas, in March 2023.
This same impulse is why agencies are now barred from considering the economic effects of climate change when drafting regulations. The rule, which had been around for over two decades, had required agencies to set a cost for each ton of carbon dioxide and assess the overall costs to the economy from climate change, including through things like wildfires and droughts. The Biden administration had set the cost at $190 per ton, but the Trump administration has deemed that this rule, too, is woke and set the cost at zero, which means there’s no need to track it.
Yes, the way to stop climate change from ravaging the environment and bankrupting the government is just to ignore it, according to Republicans.
The Trump administration is also eager to hide the costs of its anti-public-health stance, which is why it’s killed over a dozen health-tracking programs. Who needs to know about pregnancy risks or childhood lead poisoning or cancer clusters? Nobody, apparently, because the administration is committed to pretending there is no downside to their deregulation spree. That stance is undermined, of course, if they collect data showing the risks.
Are you worried about intimate partner violence? You shouldn’t be, because now you won’t know anything about it. The Trump administration also shuttered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey. Are you worried about police misconduct? Rest easy, because you won’t know anything about that, either. The Department of Justice didn’t just stop updating the database that tracked federal law enforcement misconduct nationwide—they also made it disappear.
No doubt both intimate partner violence and police violence are now magically fixed.
State Republicans have been implementing this sort of thing for a while now, mostly when it comes to maternal mortality. Following the demise of Roe v. Wade, a lot of red states that were previously very eager to talk about how great pregnancy is have quietly tried to hide the fact that pregnancy is actually risky.
After investigative reporters figured out that Georgia’s six-week abortion ban could be linked to two deaths, Georgia solved that by dismissing their entire maternal-mortality review committee. In Texas, where sepsis has gone buck-wild after abortion was banned, and multiple people died when doctors didn’t treat them properly when miscarrying, the state simply decided it wouldn’t review any maternal deaths from 2022 or 2023. And Idaho briefly disbanded its maternal health group after it had the gall to say that extending post-partum Medicaid coverage would make pregnancy safer.
If Republicans refuse to track the bad effects of their bad policies, they can obscure the harms their policies create.
Genius move for them, but bad news for everyone else.
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