If you wanted to save some money by learning how to check your home for air leaks, poor insulation, and power-hungry lightbulbs, the Department of Energy’s website was ready to help. And if you needed an expert, the site guided you to another page for help lining up a professional energy assessment, a well-established first step to cut utility bills and curb pollution at the same time.
That is, until this summer, when both of those resources vanished from the agency’s site, each now redirecting to “Page not found.” They were taken down by July 3, around the same time that the Department of Energy deleted more than 1,600 pages from the Energy Saver section of its site, gutting a resource for people looking to conserve energy and lower bills.
“I can’t remember another time that, with DOE specifically, we’ve seen an entire domain go down the way that [it] has been reported on now,” said Izzy Pacenza, who monitors government websites for the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. Over a ... Read more
