On Friday, the Trump administration removed all of the EPA's climate information from the agency's website. In its place was this announcement: "We are currently updating our website to reflect EPA's priorities under the leadership of President Trump and Administrator Pruitt."

The official EPA announcement of the changes says they're needed to "reflect the agency’s new direction under President Donald Trump and Administrator Scott Pruitt." Removing them, according to the EPA spokesman, was needed to "prevent confusion."

That confusion would be caused by the promotion of outdated policies that were put in place by the previous administration. Chief among those policies is the Clean Power Plan, the Obama Administration's response to climate change (the EPA announcement refers to it as "the so-called Clean Power Plan").

It's perfectly appropriate for an agency website to be revised to reflect the current administration's policy. If you examine a cached version of the EPA's climate pages (helpfully linked at their former location), however, you'd find that there's almost no policy on them. Instead, they're largely filled with basic information about climate change, providing a valuable resource for anyone with basic questions about the science. For example, the "Featured News" section simply has links to announcements about 2016's record warmth. The main set of stories include two discussions of climate change and public health, a link to emissions data, and a discussion of the climate change impacts that we are currently experiencing (there's a map below to let people search for regional impacts as well). Two other collections of links focus on how and why the climate is changing.

All of this is basic, factual information, without obvious policy content. For an example of the sort of the material that's no longer available, you can check out this page on the causes of climate change.

The only section of the page that is clearly policy-focused is one entitled "What can we do about this change?" And here, only one of the links ("What EPA is doing") is clearly focused on specific policy solutions.

Thus, in its haste to make sure the EPA website reflected current policy, the Trump administration has eliminated that public's access to lots of accessible information about basic science. This comes despite the fact that a relatively minor edit to the page could have accomplish the EPA's stated goal of having its content better reflect current policy.

The true test of the current EPA's commitment to science, however, will come when the agency decides to publish something to replace the information it removed.