A group of scientists, 3 of them working for the US Geological Survey published a paper on Thursday. The paper highlighted the link between sea level rise and global climate change, claiming that previous studies have undermined the risk imposed on coastal communities due to flooding.

Three of the authors are now claiming that a line that discussed the role climate change played on raising Earth’s oceans has been deleted from the news release. Not only that, they are claiming that the Department of Interior, under which USGS is housed has something to do with it.

“While we were approving the news release, they had an issue with one or two of the lines,” said Sean Vitousek, a research assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “It had to do with climate change and sea-level rise.” “We did end up removing a line,” he added.

According to the authors, the deleted line read: “Global climate change drives sea-level rise, increasing the frequency of coastal flooding.”

But instead of that, the USGS news release has left the cause completely unmentioned. It begins: “The frequency and severity of coastal flooding throughout the world will increase rapidly and eventually double in frequency over the coming decades even with only moderate amounts of sea level rise.”

Neil Frazer, a geophysics professor at University of Hawaii at Manoa and one of the study’s co-authors, called the removal of the line a “crime against the American people”. He said, “Because scientists have known for at least 50 years that anthropogenic climate change is a reality. The suppression of this information is a scandal.”

Ever since Trump adminstration took over, the federal government has curtailed some of its communication on climate change to the public. Federal agencies even halted scientists from publishing news releases and doing other communication with the public, which has been facing criticism till today.

But Mr. Trump doesn’t seem very concerned about it, as he said himself that he’s ” not a big believer in man-made climate change”.