Excerpt:
In its first 100 days, the Trump administration has slashed federal agencies, canceled national reports, and yanked funding from universities. The shockwaves will be felt worldwide.
Across seven decades and a dozen presidencies, America’s scientific prowess was arguably unmatched. At universities and federal agencies alike, researchers in the United States revolutionized weather forecasting, cured deadly diseases, and began monitoring greenhouse gas emissions. As far back as 1990, Congress directed this scientific might toward understanding climate change, after finding that human-induced global warming posed a threat to “human health, and global economic and social well-being.”
Donald Trump and his new administration evidently disagree. In the first 100 days of his second stint in the White House, the president has released a slew of orders that destabilize this apparatus. Earlier this month, the administration effectively scrapped the government’s comprehensive National Climate Assessment — a quadrennial report that provides scientifically-backed guidance for how towns, cities, and regions can prepare for a hotter climate — when it canceled a contract for the firm that facilitates the research. Recently leaked memos, reviewed by Grist, show the White House hopes to slash scientific research at NASA and eliminate all research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, which is responsible for a host of climate, weather, and conservation science. And two weeks ago, the administration froze over $2 billion of research funding to Harvard — the latest in a series of punishments targeting the nation’s top schools that the president claims have become overrun by “woke” ideology.
Experts fear this siege against science could jeopardize the United States’ status as a global leader in climate research. Since Trump took office in January, the federal government has frozen billions of dollars in climate funding and grants for universities. At the same time, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has decimated the federal workforce, firing thousands of scientists, in a purported attempt to cut a trillion dollars in “waste and fraud” from the federal budget. This month, Musk’s team began canceling hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of scientific grants distributed by the National Science Foundation. And last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio shuttered the Office of Global Change, which oversees international climate negotiations.
“One of the things that has made America great and will keep America great is our scientific excellence and world leadership in climate science,” said Max Holmes, who leads the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts. “Gutting those things will send our country in a different direction.” While other countries may fill the void, he said, the loss of American research and expertise will affect the entire world.
One way of measuring a country’s scientific heft is by looking at the number of papers its researchers publish. For the last quarter century, American scientists have churned out some 400,000 studies each year — an unrivaled pace that has remained consistent throughout presidential administrations until China’s scientists surpassed it in 2016. This is largely thanks to the federal government, which has been the country’s largest overall funder of science and research since World War II.
Until now, no former president — including Trump — has tried to dismantle this legacy. For example, the fourth edition of the National Climate Assessment, a recurring report mandated by Congress under the auspices of the U.S. Global Change Research Program in 1990, was nearly complete the first time Trump took office in 2016. Although his administration limited the report’s publicity when it was released, they did not alter the contents of the report, according to federal scientists who worked on it.
But this go-round is different: On April 9, the Trump administration ended the contract with the consulting firm responsible for running the U.S. Global Change Research Program — a likely fatal blow for the sixth National Climate Assessment, which was due to be published in the next few years.
“For hundreds and even thousands of years, we humans have been making decisions based on conditions of the past,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a leading author of the last four assessments and a climate scientist at Texas Tech University. “It’s like driving down the road looking in the rearview mirror. But now, thanks entirely to human actions, we are facing a curve in the road greater than we humans have ever confronted…”
