US federal environmental agency websites, 2016–2020

This dataset contains 40,000 URLs of US federal environmental agency websites, along with links to captures in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine for 2016 and 2020 when present. It also contains the prevalence of 56 environmental terms and phrases and how the presence of those terms on the webpages changed from 2016 to 2020.

During the Trump administration, website changes indicative of climate denial prompted civil society organizations to develop tools for tracking online government information sources. We examine a large sample of websites of US federal environmental agencies and show that between 2016 and 2020: 1) the use of the term “climate change” decreased by an estimated 38%; 2) access to as much as 20% of the Environmental Protection Agency’s website was removed; 3) changes were made more to Cabinet agencies’ websites and to highly visible pages.

This dataset can be used to examine webpage change over time with the assistance of web archives.