The impact of Trump administration policies on climate research funding

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5 days ago

The Trump Administration has cut federal funding for research into Climate Change
Image: Doctor Ngcobo / Independent Media
A $15 million federal grant was supposed to help scientists better understand how the warming climate is harming plants and animals, setting many on paths toward extinction. But the Trump administration shelved it earlier this year, miring the research in a holding pattern.
Jacquelyn Gill isn't sure there's a way out. The professor of paleoecology and plant ecology at the University of Maine spent hundreds of hours readying the grant proposal, and 13 years before that gathering knowledge about how past changes to Earth's climate echoed through ecosystems. But without federal funding, she finds herself at a loss for how to keep building on that work as more species disappear.
More scientists are beginning to feel that crunch.
A budget document the Trump administration recently submitted to Congress calls for zeroing out climate research funding for 2026, something officials had hinted at in previous proposals but is now in lawmakers' hands. But even just the specter of President Donald Trump's budget proposals has prompted scientists to limit research activities in advance of further cuts.
Trump's efforts to freeze climate research spending and slash the government's scientific workforce have for months prompted warnings of rippling consequences in years ahead. For many climate scientists, the consequences are already here. With so much uncertainty across scientific agencies and academic research centers, even prominent scientists are hitting dead ends.
'There are no safety nets,' Gill said. 'Private foundations cannot begin to pick up the slack.'
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More recent administration actions have limited or even wiped access to existing climate science. The government this week canceled a contract with the journal publisher Nature, though health officials said its studies remain accessible to researchers. A week earlier, it took down Climate.gov, where scientists posted updates about trends in U.S. and global temperatures and explainers about climate phenomena such as El Niño. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it would continue to post those materials on a different webpage.
'We're getting a message loud and clear from this administration: Climate and environmental research are not welcome in this country,' Gill said, 'I have a job, but I don't know if I have a career. I don't know how I'm supposed to do this.'
The administration on Monday took down the website of an organization known as the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which housed detailed and congressionally mandated reports about the ways climate change is reshaping American life, as well as webinars, still available on YouTube, about aspects of the National Climate Assessment including sea-level rise adaptation and wildfire risks.
But it's not just the website. The organization essentially no longer exists.
Until the Trump administration canceled its contract this spring, the program was helping to launch the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report surveying climate impacts around the world and projecting the changes to come. Now, it's unclear how large a role some U.S.-based scientists will be able to play in the report, even if they are leaders in their field.
The panel is expected to name leaders of its next report this month, and Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist and professor at Imperial College London who served as an author on a previous report, said that without U.S. participation, the project will suffer.
'It's an extremely complex and challenging process to prepare these reports,' he said. 'Not being able to draw on the world's most prominent experts, or any reduction in the kind of people you can draw on, will have knock-on effects on how challenging it will be for the remaining authors to pull this together.'
On a recent visit to Britain for a conference known as London Climate Week, Martin Wolf, who was an affiliate with the Global Change Research Program until this spring, said he was struck by a contrast: As U.S. climate scientists face impossible hurdles, their counterparts in Europe are speeding ahead. In China, investments in solar and wind energy are mounting, just as Republicans in Washington are pulling them back, he added.
Scientists said the disappearance of websites and reports just underscore how in several months' time, the administration's actions have started to set climate science back, while also making it harder for the public to learn about it.
'People who are already aware of the reports, they know how to find them,' Wolf said. 'What this really impacts is the curious public.'
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said the administration is acting to correct decades of federal actions prioritizing climate over 'clean American energy,' and in the process, 'jeopardizing our economic and national security.'
'Restoring our energy dominance is far more important than obsessing over vague climate change goals to the 77 million Americans who voted for President Trump,' Rogers said in a statement. 'Future generations should not be expected to forfeit the American Dream to foot the bill of ambiguous climate threats.'
Arlyn Andrews spent her 21-year career at NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory tracking what scientists describe as a clear threat: the levels of carbon dioxide that have been documented as steadily rising since the 1960s.
The lab's sensors have tracked those trends - including last year, when average global temperatures surged to a record high and atmospheric carbon levels took the largest single-year jump ever recorded. Those gases trigger the greenhouse effect, trapping the sun's heat like a blanket and warming the planet.
But the monitoring has already suffered as the Trump administration revealed plans to drastically cut federal research efforts, and it could end if Congress approves those plans.
Faced with the prospect the administration could claw back money from NOAA's current budget, Andrews said she and colleagues made the decision to halve the number of flights taken each month to gather data on greenhouse gas concentrations close to Earth's surface. Such flights from about a dozen sites show, for example, how much carbon dioxide Midwest cornfields absorb as crops grow, or how much carbon is being emitted around major cities.
But the funding uncertainty made it impossible to ensure those kinds of observations would continue uninterrupted.
'When a site is terminated, that's the end of a long-term record,' Andrews said.
That is especially true of an observation site at the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa, where both NOAA and the University of California at San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography have been monitoring carbon dioxide levels for decades. Scripps' data feeds what is known as the Keeling Curve, a graph created by scientist Charles David Keeling that formed some of the earliest understanding of the greenhouse effect and climate change.
Now, even the Keeling Curve is at risk, said Keeling's son Ralph Keeling, who is director of Scripps' carbon dioxide monitoring program.
Keeling, too, has been trying to plan for a future in which his lab will no longer receive federal funding. He's not sure it's possible. He said he has been talking with foundations and other sources of potential funding.
'We're concerned about the viability going forward,' he said. 'I don't have revenue streams that add up to the need at this point.'
For Andrews, the uncertainty became so daunting, she joined hundreds of NOAA colleagues in taking a voluntary buyout at the end of April.
'It was not an easy decision,' she said, concluding that she 'could be more impactful from a different position.' She hopes to do research on a freelance basis, and to help other former federal scientists do the same.
Young scientists, however, face fewer options.
Gill, 44, would normally be preparing to welcome several new graduate students to Maine in the fall, but this year, there won't be any. The University of Maine was an early target of Trump's efforts to strip diversity, equity and inclusion programs from higher education, and his administration's threats of withholding massive amounts of government funding - which it ultimately backed away from - meant that Gill could only afford to secure funding for researchers who were already at work in her lab.
Now, without the $15 million National Science Foundation grant she sought to develop models of biodiversity losses informed by DNA found trapped in ice and caves, she isn't sure what's next. To continue her research, NSF staff advised her 'to look elsewhere' for research funding.
She hoped to be answering questions about what might happen when plants unable to migrate to cooler climates begin to die off, or how the extinction of Earth's largest creatures will have domino effects on the smallest.
But 'there is nowhere else to look for this kind of funding,' she said. Now, she only has questions about the future of research - and no answers.
The Washington Post