America's digital infrastructure belongs to you

When was the last time you thought about the fiber optic cables and satellites that keep you connected to the internet — making it possible to stream shows, book doctor’s appointments, send emails or read this article? Or the network of monitors throughout reservoirs, aqueducts, pipes and treatment facilities that enable us to drink and wash in clean water? When many people hear the word “infrastructure,” larger projects like bridges, roads and dams might come to mind. But unlike hard infrastructure, digital infrastructure is often invisible to even its most frequent users. That lack of visibility is often a function of infrastructure’s elegance and effectiveness; it is invisible because it is working. 

This digital infrastructure tends to enter the wider public consciousness only when it breaks. Which highlights the urgent challenge of convincing policymakers, who control how taxpayer dollars are invested, and the public, whose hard-earned money funds this infrastructure, of the critical need to prioritize upkeep before these systems fail or lose essential functionality.

Since January 20, we’ve seen unprecedented attacks on our nation’s federal digital infrastructure — from inside the federal government itself. Agency websites have gone offline and come back online missing important information. Critical datasets and tools have been removed or restricted. And many staff that collect, manage and create insights from this data are operating on significantly reduced budgets while others are losing their jobs altogether. This not only impacts agencies’ abilities to protect public health and the environment, but also our farmers, elders, educators and community members that rely on this information daily.  Because the Department of Energy’s Low-Income Energy Affordability Data tool and website were taken offline, communities can no longer plan projects that will lower energy costs. When the government removes access to tools like the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool and the Council on Environmental Quality’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, communities who experience environmental injustice no longer have federally-backed evidence that they experience high shares of multiple environmental, climate, health and socioeconomic stressors.

These tools and datasets belong to you. American tax dollars funded the data collection, the tool development and the work of the agency staff who used their skills and experience to develop the policies and programs that tools delivered. The broad accessibility of these tools has helped inform governance decisions at federal, state and local levels. We use this data to make sense of the land we live on, the air we breathe, the water we drink. We use weather information to plan our daily commutes and weekend plans and climate data to predict storms, floods and wildfires. For the government to remove this information is to steal from us. And not just the data itself, but every choice we could have made with it.

In response to these losses and the need to re-imagine how we re-build, our organizations have joined others in a new coalition called Public Environmental Data Partners. Since November, we’ve been in conversation with agency staff who maintain federal tools and datasets, and the environmental organizations who rely on those tools and data. We’ve identified those at risk of being removed, archived what we can and stood up unofficial versions of tools on our website. 

But while we can provide a critical backstop as these tools are removed, they currently only provide a snapshot from January 2025. Like it or not, the federal government is an essential player in funding, coordinating and supporting national information on environment and public health. We need to restore this role. We need to keep the experienced and dedicated workforce at agencies who are vital and necessary partners to this work. Whether sending emails from headquarters, or monitoring a river from a field office, or cleaning water at treatment plants, these staff maintain and update the data we need — and are now archiving. They hold an immense amount of institutional knowledge; if that knowledge is lost, so is the decades-long work to build relationships with communities, deepen agencies’ understanding of people’s lived experiences and support place-based advocacy. People are infrastructure, too!

We also need to cooperatively build a system of shared data resources that will provide real insights and understanding when conditions change in the places we live, work and worship. It will take a collective effort across local, state and federal agencies, the private sector, academia and community members across the U.S. to re-build our digital infrastructure — to make it more useful, more meaningful and ultimately to improve the lives of Americans.

Every new summer is the hottest on record. Wildfire is wiping out suburban and rural neighborhoods alike. Hurricanes drive farther and farther inland. We need to improve our data infrastructure in order to build resilience, provide support and respond. This means advocating for modernizing our infrastructure and prioritizing open source development and interoperability to support future iteration on infrastructure’s design.

This crisis is an opportunity to make the structure and value of the data and tools in the U.S. more resilient and responsive than it has ever been.