How Trump's assault on science is blinding America to climate change

E&E News

6 hours ago

President Donald Trump long ago decided climate change was a 'hoax.' Now his administration is trying to silence government research that proves him wrong.
Since Trump returned to the White House in January, his administration has fired or let go hundreds of climate and weather scientists — and cut ties to hundreds more who work in academia or the private sector.
His team has eliminated major climate programs, frozen or cut grants for climate research and moved to shutter EPA's greenhouse gas reporting program. The Trump administration has slow-walked climate-related contracts — including one for the upkeep of two polar weather satellites. And it's begun to wall off the United States from international climate cooperation.
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That's not all.
Trump's blitzkrieg on federal climate work is only a start — as his budget strategy calls for even deeper cuts in the months and years ahead. That includes billions of dollars in cuts to climate and weather research at NOAA and NASA, widely considered two of the world's top science agencies.
All told, it's an unprecedented assault on humanity's understanding of how global warming is transforming the planet, scientists say. And they warn that Trump's actions will blind the United States and the world to the ways people are rapidly heating the planet by burning fossil fuels.
'They certainly are trying to create lasting damage,' said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University.
The White House has framed the moves as cost-cutting measures designed to shrink the size of government. Trump officials have said too that a retreat from climate science is necessary, as the research underpins regulations that could hinder U.S. production of fossil fuels — a top goal of the administration.
'Climate alarmism has had a terrible impact on human lives and freedom,' Energy Secretary Chris Wright wrote Thursday on the social media site X. 'It belongs in the ash heap of history.'
Wright, who led a fracking services company before joining the administration, added, 'Hydrocarbons are and will continue to be essential to improving the wealth, health, and lives of all human beings.'
The White House echoed that sentiment in response to questions that POLITICO's E&E News sent to NOAA, NASA and the Office of Management and Budget.
'The last Administration wasted billions on 'research' and fake science in Green New Scam and culturally Marxist programs,' OMB spokesperson Rachel Cauley said.
'Under President Trump, our science agencies are actually doing science again,' she added.
But scientists say the Trump team is doing just the opposite by jettisoning climate scientists and abandoning respected climate programs. Among the actions taken so far by administration:
Dismissing hundreds of scientists who were working on the next version of the National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report that is used to prepare U.S. communities for extreme weather and sea-level rise.
Dismantling the U.S. Global Change Research Program, a 35-year-old effort to track global climate change that was established by Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush.
Eliminating the State Department's Office of Global Change, which oversees climate negotiations.
For U.S. climate science, each week of the Trump administration seems to bring new losses, by design.
The National Science Foundation's funding for climate research at universities has now evaporated after severe Trump administration cuts.
Spacecraft in orbit that have cost billions of dollars to launch — and a fraction of the cost to maintain — will be mothballed if they monitor climate change, under Trump's budget proposal.
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, one of the world's leading space and climate research labs, was kicked out of its longtime building. The scientists who work there now face an uncertain future under a proposed NASA budget that cuts science research nearly in half.
'It's humiliating and it debilitates our standing in the world community,' said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and director of its Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media.
Climate science at EPA, the CDC, and the Interior, Agriculture and Energy departments has been proposed for elimination. That includes research that monitors human harms from pollution, climatic conditions that can devastate farmers' crops and the health risks of intense heat waves.
Yet Russ Vought — who leads the White House OMB — wants more.
Vought is attempting to strip away Congress' budget authority and its ability to block some of the proposed cuts to climate science.
Agencies such as NOAA and NASA have been ordered by the White House to freeze billions of dollars in funding — including money that goes toward climate research — before Congress has a chance to act.
And that's just a small sample of the first wave of Trump climate attacks.
'Despite the claims to the contrary, this isn't being done to cut costs,' Mann said. 'It's being done because climate science — and simply measuring our climate — has proven inconvenient to certain special interests who hold sway today in Washington.'
'There will be a lot to rebuild'
Climate denialists, including conservative politicians, foundations and think tanks that oppose regulations, long have pined for a day when the U.S. government stops providing clear evidence that global warming poses a threat to America's economy, national security and way of life.
With Trump, their wishes are on the way to being granted. It's the culmination of decades of funding from the oil, gas and coal industry to tear down climate science.
Weakening scientific research and creating long-term damage is the goal, said Steve Milloy, who was part of Trump's EPA transition team in his first term and has spent decades trying to shatter federal climate science and regulations.
'If Democrats ever get back in power, there will be a lot to rebuild,' he said.
That reconstruction likely will include pillars of the nation's climate research infrastructure.
Take, for example, the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Last month, it measured the highest level of atmospheric carbon dioxide recorded in modern human history, at 430.2 parts per million.
For scientists, it's a troubling benchmark. For the Trump administration, it may identify the observatory as another target for cuts — the facility is being considered for closure, and its lease may be canceled.
Other data streams are in danger too. More than a dozen spacecraft or space-based instruments that capture climate data are proposed to be shut down in the White House spending plan.
The Trump administration justifies cost-cutting measures such as these by saying they're intended to stop waste, fraud and abuse.
But eliminating the functions of satellites already in orbit — which represent decades of work and billions of dollars in sunk-cost spending — makes neither financial nor scientific sense, said Rick Spinrad, who served as NOAA chief during the Biden administration.
'So many of the observations that are made in support of understanding climate are also being made to support the more immediate weather and ocean applications,' he said. 'To say 'there's the word climate, shut that down' means the same satellite isn't available to give you an improved four to five day forecast on hurricane landfall.'
And it's not just that valuable data would be lost — whatever federal research remains will be sidelined and blocked from informing government policy and procedure.
Last month, Trump issued an executive order on a new 'gold standard' for scientific research that effectively blocks much of the science on greenhouse gas emissions, human health harms from pollution and environmental degradation from being used by federal agencies.
As part of that process, political appointees would effectively determine which scientific research can be used by the federal government.
In effect, the moves would blind the country to the consequences of the administration's actions to cut pollution regulations and increase the country's reliance on fossil fuels while making it harder to build out clean energy, Texas A&M's Dessler said.
'They hate science because it leads to regulation, so they want to do everything they can to stop science from being used to regulate,' he said.
The plan to eradicate climate science throughout the government is reminiscent of the way Trump and his officials attacked Covid data collection, which clearly showed cases and death rates rising in his first term, said Spinrad, the former NOAA administrator.
'The Trump administration said we can reduce the number of cases by not testing anymore,' Spinrad said. 'That's what is going on here. 'We can reduce the impact of climate change by not monitoring anymore.' That's what they're saying, which is just totally incomprehensible.'