Story thread · 2 reports / 1 sources

Federal disaster reports under the Trump administration leave journalists to source climate explanations elsewhere

mediamatters.org · 14h · first reportShare

On September 9, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the contiguous United States had experienced its hottest summer in 132 years of records. Its public summary provided readers, including journalists, with detailed information about record temperatures and expanding drought, but it did not explain how human-caused warming contributed to the conditions it described. The same pattern appears in NASA’s report on July’s western heat wave and NOAA’s analysis of the July 2025 Texas floods. Across these examples, federal agencies continued to provide detailed information about the meteorology, broken records, damage, and in some cases worsening long-term trends without explaining how climate change had increased those risks. These omissions are not isolated. The Trump administration has also disrupted other federal sources of information the public relies on to understand climate risk. In April 2025, it terminated the contract supporting the coordinating office