Agencies and programs supporting science would be particularly hard hit. In the proposed budget:

• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would be reduced by 28%, and its research lab and cooperative institutes would be eliminated;
• More than 50 NASA science missions would be cancelled, including most of the agency’s atmospheric sciences and space weather research, and its science budget reduced by 42%;
• The National Science Foundation’s science and research are reduced by 53%;
•  The Environmental Protection Agency’s overall budget is cut by 52%;
• The National Institute of Standards and Technology is cut by 54%;
• The US Geological Survey’s by 37%;
• The Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy would be eliminated;
• The HHS agency supporting transformative biomedical and health research would be cut by 37%; and
• The US Department of Agriculture’s institute for agriculture-related science is facing a reduction of 38%.

The proposed cuts, and the administration’s ongoing assault on science, have ramifications far beyond harming federal programs and their workforce. Last year, nearly $30B in grants from the NIH, NSF, and EPA alone were delayed or terminated. Combined with other threats to universities for “woke programs,” mass student visa revocations, and a misinformation campaign over pressing research topics such as climate, infectious diseases, and gender health, higher education is seeing lower student enrollment, a brain drain of scientists, and the shutdown of vital research studies. And this sudden cancelling of research grants has disproportionately affected women, minorities, and early-career investigators.

The administration’s weak justification that their proposed cuts in discretionary programs are critical to managing the nation’s debt is a non-starter; the proposed savings from federal research and development ($33.7B of $73B for all domestic discretionary cuts) pales in comparison to the $445B increase for the Department of Defense.

The federal budget calendar

The federal fiscal year starts October 1 and ends September 30 the following year. But well before this, agencies begin assembling their desired budgets. They include funds to maintain daily operations and maintenance, research, and staffing, as well as selective initiatives for new programs. In addition, agencies request resources for large capital expenses such as research vessels, satellites, and laboratories. A significant portion of the budgets for federal science agencies are dispersed to universities, states and communities, and private businesses for R&D or projects to improve public health, safety, prosperity, and well-being. For example, over 80% of the NIH budget is awarded in grants for external institutions.

These budgets are submitted in the previous calendar year to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), who uses them to prepare a budget proposal based on the administration’s policies and priorities that the President submits to Congress, typically early in the calendar year. The FY27 version was released in April.

As the US Constitution gives it the “power of the purse,” Congress has the exclusive authority to authorize spending. It holds hearings to review and subsequently “markup” or amend the President’s budget, aggregating the appropriations into 12 spending bills. This is what is currently happening in Congress.

They must budget for mandatory spending required by law, such as Social Security, Medicare, and veterans’ benefits; interest on the national debt; and discretionary spending. This last category is where the greatest contention arises about balancing the budget versus growing the debt, taxes versus expenditures, defense versus non-defense spending, and funding “kitchen table” issues. Individual members insert “earmarks” that direct federal funds to special projects or localities. Importantly, this is the step where Congress decided not to implement many of the administration’s proposed cuts to science and research in FY26.

During this budget resolution process, the House and Senate ultimately agree upon and pass the joint spending bills, which are sent to the President for signature or veto. Once funding is enacted, OMB allocates funds to agencies for their budget execution. All this is to be done under the review and audit of the Government Accountability Office and independent agency Inspectors General (although notably the Trump administration has illegally fired many of them). Although the law sets a specific calendar for each step in the budget process, including its passage before October 1, Congress often misses these deadlines, requiring a continuing resolution or CR to keep the government operating. Failure to do so may result in a partial or total government shutdown.

The FY27 budget hearings

The first round of hearings on the President’s FY27 budget request with the House (4/15/26) and Senate (4/16/26) Budget Committees included testimony from OMB Director Russell Vought. Not coincidentally, much of his language was lifted directly from Project 2025. There was no effort to inform Congress or address their questions or concerns. Instead, Vought hyped the greatness of the administration; avoided transparency; claimed they are rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse; deflected, denied, and misled; became combative when pressed for details; and blamed previous President Joe Biden. As though that weren’t enough, Vought avoided specifics and refused to answer questions about ongoing expenses, supplementals, and deficit projections. When challenged about delaying, impounding, or repurposing FY26 funds already appropriated, he denied the administration did it, claimed that what they did was within the law, or noted that they wrote a memo stating that the law was unconstitutional. Other Trump officials appearing at subsequent department and agency budget hearings took the same evasive, pugnacious, and mendacious approach.

Science was not a dominant theme of the hearings, although specific programs that protect public safety, human health, the economy, and the environment received bipartisan support. Congress justified investments in R&D as a means to maintain “America’s competitive edge” and “support everyday Americans”. Members are acutely aware of the importance of the science agencies, programs, and staff in their communities, and often cited issues or programs impacting their own state or district. Many also recognize the importance of maintaining the US as a world leader in basic research and innovation. In their questioning, senators and representatives on both sides of the aisle pressed administration officials about the effects of budget cuts on a variety of science-based topics, including preventing and treating disease; wildfire fighting and severe weather warnings; environmental monitoring and offshore wind development; and AI. Here are some key takeaways from the April budget hearings and the initial House appropriation bills.

The administration’s playbook is Project 2025

Much of the text in the FY27 budget is lifted directly from the Project 2025 mandate. Both refer repeatedly to “failed leadership of the Biden administration”, ending the Green New Deal, eliminating “wasteful and ineffective spending”, and “fraud, waste, and abuse in foreign assistance funding”. They attack science for its so-called “radical climate agenda” and “woke activities.” And the recommended actions and cuts in President Trump’s budget mirror those suggested in Project 2025. Independent science advisory boards must be reset; green subsidies for infrastructure and energy-efficient appliances ended. Climate science funding is eliminated. Data collection and observing systems, the task of agencies like NOAA and the EPA, should be moved to the private sector. Federal functions and coordination should be transitioned to states, and research to universities, without additional capacity, and administrative offices and research labs dispersed from Washington, DC.

Specifically, Project 2025 directs the government to dismantle NOAA, reorganize and streamline EPA, consolidate NSF, and eliminate DOI and DOE energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. It calls for the “management” of national forests through increased timber harvests and consolidating and streamlining the regulatory oversight of the Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act. All of these are included in the FY27 budget narrative or have been accomplished in recent months through OMB-directed shifts and freezes in funding. But this goes far beyond appropriations and budget cuts. From these hearings, it is clear this administration desires to implement Project 2025 with minimal Congressional approval or oversight.

Watch what they do, not what they say

In both its FY26 and FY27 proposed budgets the Trump administration has shown it is willing to run through constitutional and congressionally mandated guardrails, and to ignore or misinterpret the law. It has impounded or dragged its feet in executing appropriated funds. For example, through the end of March, NOAA has executed only 718 grant actions, compared to 2696 for the same time last year. The administration attempted to dismantle NCAR, in part because it “informs regulations on emissions that the administration does not support.” And it abruptly fired the entire NSF National Science Board without cause in April. Many of their destructive actions have been reversed, but only after they were challenged in court. We can expect this behavior to continue in future budget cycles.

The power of the purse abides

Congress takes their constitutional authority over government spending seriously. There is true bipartisan pushback in the budget review and markup process. Initial House markups for most science agencies are similar to their FY26 funding levels, and the Senate is generally even more charitable toward R&D budgets.

The May House markup restores a little over half of the proposed cut to NSF. NASA exploration gets a $1.1B increase compared with 2026, but its science funding would still be cut by $1.25B (vs the $3.3B President’s request). Congress also is protecting several science missions proposed for cancellation and is reining in attempts to shift crewed deep space exploration to commercial providers. Over 90% of NOAA research funds have been restored in their markup.

Resistance is NOT futile: you have a role

Because of the science that our federal agencies conduct and support, lives are saved, property is protected, businesses are vibrant, communities are safer, and ecosystems are healthier. But the proposed cuts to the federal budget threaten these benefits, and the consequences are long-term. The loss of skilled researchers and their programs and institutional knowledge will be lasting.

While Republicans were not as vocal or critical in the budget hearings as their minority counterparts, both parties understand the significance of federal science to our nation and will—as in 2025—defend it against White House attacks. They have staved off much of the proposed degradation to science, but there’s hardly a science-forward atmosphere on the Hill, and we can fully expect the administration will try to slash science again for as long as they are in power. There is still much to be done to repair the DOGE damage to our nation’s science capacity, and to sustain and accelerate funding for critical existing and new R&D programs. Here are some things you can do.

Contact your elected officials

Call or message your representatives and remind them about how you and your community rely on federal science agencies and the work they do and fund. Ask them to fight for the necessary funding for research and to support legislation like the Scientific Integrity Act that protects science independence. Don’t forget to talk to your state, county, and municipal officials as well; their actions have an impact, and trickle up to the federal level.

Engage locally

Contact your local news media; ask them to report on how this administration’s actions harm science and how it will impact your community. Share your story as a scientist or how their work benefits you through LTEs and commentaries, and on social media. Attend local council and board meetings to voice your support for local research labs, offices, and universities, and the federal resources they depend upon.

Support scientific organizations

Many professional organizations and science advocacy groups, such as UCS, are speaking out and urging Congress to reject the administration’s harmful cuts and actions against science. Sign their letters and petitions.

Stay informed about the budget

Follow Congressional budget deliberations and actions, and make sure your representatives act to support and adequately fund science. You can track the status of federal science budgets. Here are the schedules for upcoming House markups  and Senate appropriations.

Think long-term

Project 2025 set the stage for this administration’s remaking of our government. Our nation needs a new vision, one prepared with and backed by thought and logic, to repair the damage it has caused. We must start thinking about an alternative to Project 2025 that will advise the next administration, including how it will restore science to its proper critical place in society. How will those engaged in and benefiting from science inform future executive and legislative branches? What will your role be in designing and creating the future of science? Now is the time to begin these conversations with your colleagues and science supporters. It will be up to us to work collectively and thoughtfully to not only rebuild but build back better a federal science enterprise that benefits our health, safety, security, and well-being.

After an initial outcry from experts tracking this rule closely, major institutions and prominent figures across science world issued statements in response, thousands have tuned in to learn how to respond, and scientists and science supporters are geared up to submit public comments opposing this proposal. Coalitions in the scientific community and beyond are also working to extend the comment period. All told, OMB is poised to be inundated with tens of thousands of unique and powerful public comments on their dangerous and ill-conceived draft rule.

We need this unity beyond the OMB rule

It’s energizing to see this broad and clear response from the scientific community to a proposal that stands to disrupt the federal science research apparatus—an enterprise that is responsible for decades of significant scientific progress, economic development, and global science leadership for the nation.

The OMB proposal is far from the first attack on science and scientists we’ve seen under the second Trump term. It matters if the administration dismantles the US scientific research apparatus. It also matters how that research is used (or dismissed) to make government decisions that affect communities across the globe. It matters if key subject matter experts are fired from government service. It matters if federal investments designed to address longstanding inequities in underserved communities are clawed back. And it matters if the administration takes a sledgehammer to the safeguards that protect science and scientists from political interference.

The strong and loud response to the proposed OMB rule has demonstrated the broad unity and collective response that’s possible when we all work together. The scientific community would do well to apply this same level of activation to the larger assaults on science and democracy that are harming communities across the country.

Signs of bravery in a culture of fear

In a moment when we are still seeing significant fear and hesitancy to criticize the administration from pockets of the scientific community, this kind of solidarity is desperately needed.

Last week, at the American Diabetes Association’s annual meeting in New Orleans, police officers expelled five scientists from the conference for distributing an editorial criticizing the Trump administration’s politicization of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), ahead of a planned keynote from NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya. These researchers were simply sharing information about how the NIH is not living up to its promises and harming the communities they serve, including people living with diabetes. The editorial in question is free to read and available to all online. And yet, this peaceful and evidence-based criticism was met with expulsion by armed officers.

This display of censorship sends a chilling effect through the scientific community for anyone willing to speak up about the harms happening. And unfortunately, this event is not an isolated incident, but it instead is among many instances in which the science community has chosen to be silent or capitulate when faced with an opportunity to speak up about the Trump administration’s actions. We need scientific leaders and institutions to step up, not silence those showing us that bravery.  

Now is the time for courage

So let’s step up. Let’s be brave. There are many issues that can now use our sustained and collective attention. You can join the Science Rising Action Corps, and hold members of Congress accountable to protect science and democracy. You can urge your elected officials to fund FEMA now to protect our communities from disasters, to pass the Scientific Integrity Act that will allow federal scientists to do their jobs free from political interference, to save one of the most important climate research centers, to preserve the US Forest Service, and to close dangerous loopholes in nuclear weapons regulations.

You can rally your community to turn out and protest Trump administration policies. You can join the UCS Science Network and learn the most effective ways to engage with elected officials. You can learn about creating and supporting alternative, independent structures for scientific decisionmaking. You can speak up in your own social and professional circles, show up for your neighbors, and make your values clear.

This week shows what we are capable of. Let’s keep going.

Primarily, this visit was about setting the tone for a year in which the two leaders may meet up to four times, as well as for the rest of the Trump administration. With this in mind, the most important outcome was an agreement on how the bilateral relationship should be framed: government readouts from both sides mentioned that the two leaders agreed on building a US-China relationship shaped by “constructive strategic stability.”

I’ll get to what that means exactly in a second, but the bottom line is that this is a positive first step toward resetting what has become an increasingly fraught relationship over the past decade. It could also lay the foundation for increased cooperation on nuclear weapons.

What is strategic stability?

Traditionally, the term refers to a stasis between two nuclear-armed states where neither side has the incentive to strike the other first, as both sides are assured of their (and their opponent’s) ability to retaliate with devastating effect. The constructive strategic stability that Trump and Xi agreed to in Beijing, however, is a broader and more abstract concept. Per Xi’s comments from the official Chinese readout, it refers to a stable relationship characterized by cooperation, benign competition, peace, and manageable differences. Essentially, a balanced equilibrium that acknowledges differences while making space for cooperation.

Xi stating that managed, healthy competition should be the goal is actually a change to China’s position. Over the past decade, comments from Chinese leadership have repeatedly insisted that competition is a fundamentally unhealthy framing of the relationship. When Xi met Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Beijing in 2023, he said that “great power competition does not accord with the times and cannot solve the United States’ problems.”

While China’s approach to its relations with the United States mostly remains unchanged from 2023, the pivot to “managed competition” is notable. It reflects acceptance that at the end of the day, the two global leaders are naturally going to compete for influence and leadership in a number of sectors, and that it is important to clarify exactly what harmful competition would look like and what both sides’ red lines are. It is a tentative agreement between two parties that there is mutual interest in avoiding tension and direct confrontation, while also maximizing cooperation in areas where interests align.

This is not an especially high bar, but it is a good start. “Stability” is about avoiding bad outcomes, but the “constructive” part suggests working together and not simply accepting the conditions of the relationship as they currently exist.

Will it stick?

China will be watching whether a Trump administration prone to wild swings in rhetoric and policy actually sticks to this framework. Beijing’s issue with the United States has typically been what it sees as a tendency to call for guardrails and stability-creating measures, only to turn around and provoke confrontation or crisis through its China policy. China wants to focus on crisis prevention over crisis management. Meanwhile, the United States criticizes China for abandoning or ignoring crisis management measures to protest US actions in other parts of the relationship; Washington wants guardrails that are “siloed” from other bilateral developments.

The Trump administration, especially Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, has emphasized the need for more robust military communication between the two countries. The apparent US willingness to talk with and listen to China is positive, but Beijing will still be waiting to see if actions spoil these words. The second Trump administration features fewer establishment figures with a negative view of China. Whoever is currently influencing China policy in the White House, it is not John Bolton or Mike Pompeo from the first Trump administration, who were dead set against any constructive relationship with Beijing.

Thus, while we shouldn’t overreact to constructive strategic stability just yet, the simple fact that both sides agreed to it is notable and promising. Speaking on the Shēng Dōng Jī Xī podcast, Da Wei, director of the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University, made the point that the United States agreeing to a concept for the bilateral relationship posed by China is a first. Its inclusion in the White House’s readout as something Xi and Trump agreed to, he argued, is a positive indication that the United States is willing to take Chinese concerns seriously and work on a mutually acceptable framework.

Similar to the question of crisis management versus crisis prevention, the United States has preferred to jump straight to resolving specific issues without addressing bilateral ties more broadly, which is the opposite of China’s approach. To Da Wei, agreeing on constructive strategic stability may be the first step toward resolving this bottleneck.

The nuclear side

Constructive strategic stability may also lay the groundwork for strategic stability in the more traditional context of nuclear weapons.

Chinese arms control experts have already laid out how the most likely type of arms control between China and the United States is risk reduction, as opposed to treaties like New START that restricted the deployed number of US and Russian warheads and launchers. China’s smaller, asymmetric nuclear force has led it to keep its exact warhead numbers and launcher locations secret while engaging on multilateral treaties—but showing limited interest in bilateral agreements.

Chinese experts increasingly worry that the United States is unconcerned with nuclear strategic stability, especially after the announcement of Golden Dome, a missile defense system designed to defend against not only small nuclear threats but also nuclear powers like Russia and China.

While China’s nuclear arsenal has grown in recent years, in large part due to worries about US advances in missile defense and conventional military capabilities, it maintains its policy of “no first use” and continues to insist that it keeps its arsenal at the minimum level necessary for national security. Still, greater confidence in the ability of its arsenal to survive a first strike removes one barrier to China engaging more on nuclear risk-reduction measures. If the United States demonstrates a commitment to building constructive strategic stability across all parts of the relationship, the likelihood of progress on nuclear dialogue will increase.

However, such progress will require some accommodations from the Trump administration. Specifically, China has long wanted the United States to accept a state of mutual vulnerability between the two sides. This means accepting that neither side can fully prevent the other from launching a retaliatory strike, a key underlying factor for strategic stability.

A year ago, it would have been hard to imagine this administration considering that for even half a second. Then again, few would have predicted a meeting in Beijing where Trump agreed that the two sides should pursue constructive strategic stability. To get this relationship on the right path, we need to agree on where we want to go. Constructive strategic stability may be a vague destination, but it’s a start.

The world is virtually certain to overshoot 1.5°C of warming and climate impacts are rapidly worsening everywhere. Meanwhile, the world’s largest historical emitter, the United States, under the reckless authoritarian Trump administration, has launched an all-out assault on US and global climate policies. Geopolitical tensions are running high, with the illegal war against Iran, tariff fights, and multiple humanitarian crises unfolding alongside a crushing economic toll from the fossil energy crisis ensuing from the war.

The need for a safer, more just world is more desperately clear than ever. Despite the cruel impulses of many governments and the boundless greed of the fossil fuel industry, tendrils of climate progress continue to sprout, and renewable energy expansion is now unstoppable.

Here are six major themes on my mind as I head to the upcoming UN climate meeting in Bonn, Germany which will be held June 8-18:

1: The durability of global multilateral climate action

In January, President Trump exited the Paris Agreement for a second time, this time sinking to a new low by also ditching the bedrock UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. But the rest of the world is staying the course and continuing to engage in the UN climate talks. Progress is not easy or as rapid as needed—as we saw at COP30 in Brazil last year—but no other country has followed the U.S. for now.

In some ways, the mundane back-and-forth of climate negotiations, the preparations for COP31—billed as the ‘COP of the Future’—are an antidote to harmful pyrotechnics of the Trump administration. But we can’t let the low bar of complacency and business-as-usual serve as “good enough,” given the deepening climate crisis. Durability is crucial but the international climate system must also deliver robust results. At Bonn and in the lead-up to COP31 in Türkiye later this year, political leaders need to show genuine commitment to working through disagreements and standing up to the malign influence of fossil fuel interests to secure necessarily ambitious outcomes.

2: The rapid and dangerous acceleration in climate impacts

Climate change is unfolding around the world in terrifying ways. The recent extended heatwave in India and Pakistan caused numerous deaths and exposed millions of people to dangerous conditions, and is just one recent example of the perilous world created by political inaction and continued burning of polluting fossil fuels. Europe also experienced record-breaking deadly extreme heat in May. Super typhoon Sinlaku—a rare early season Cat 5-equivalent storm—exerted a deadly and costly toll in the Micronesian region of the Pacific in April.  

We are living in an era of climate-fueled drought, floods, extreme heat, intensifying storms, threats to water supplies—and all of this is happening in the context of an ongoing global hunger crisis, threatening to make it far worse. With a potentially strong El Niño predicted later this year, we could see record-breaking temperatures in 2027, changes to rainfall patterns, and further stresses on global food supplies.

Here in the U.S., the UCS team is tracking Danger Season, that time of year when climate impacts peak for people across the country. So far, we’ve already seen intense early season heatwaves, an early start to an active wildfire season, record low snowpack, and drought.

3: The unstoppable ascendance of renewable energy

Despite the Trump administration’s attacks on renewable energy in the U.S., and its attempts to undercut progress by boosting fossil fuels, data show that globally clean energy continues to expand rapidly—and is even beginning to displace fossil fuels.

Recent reports from Ember, IRENA and the IEA show the spectacular global surge in solar power in particular—and that trend is also evident in the United States. Steep cost declines in solar and battery storage are quickly making these the new electricity resources of choice, outcompeting fossil fuels, to meet demand in many places. Encouragingly, according to the Global Clean Energy Monitor, 2025 data show that in China and India renewable energy met most of new demand and helped turn down coal generation. Solar power was also a huge contributor to meeting peak electricity demand during India’s recent heatwave.

And while the fossil energy crisis unleashed by the US-Israel war against Iran is causing some countries to make short-sighted—or, in some cases, being forced to make short-term, existential—moves toward fossil fuels, it is also reinforcing that the only smart strategy ultimately is to chart as rapid a course as possible away from the economic risks of fossil energy price volatility. Those risks are playing out in particularly crushing ways for lower income countries and those who have historically relied on liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports from currently disrupted supply chains, where people are struggling to pay for basic necessities, including food and energy. But the energy affordability challenges are global—and in the U.S. being actively worsened by additional Trump administration actions. High fertilizer prices, triggered by the war’s upheaval of the fossil energy-related supply chain, are also exacting a steep toll on farmers and contributing to higher food prices.

4: The resurgence in demands for a transition away from fossil fuels

A recent bright spot has been the resurgence in explicit demands for a global transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy—evident at the April Santa Marta conference, and high on the agenda at the upcoming UNFCCC meeting in Bonn. Fenceline communities who bear the burden of pollution from fossil fuels and fossil fuel infrastructure, and climate advocates, have long called for a fast, fair, funded fossil fuel phaseout. After securing a win by getting language on a transition away from fossil fuels into the final agreement at COP 28, it had since seemed as if policymakers were once again falling into the thrall of the fossil fuel industry and resisting any real action.

That all changed at COP30 in Brazil last November, where this issue quickly rose to the top of the agenda. Although the overall final outcome was disappointing, civil society pressure did succeed in securing a just transition mechanism. And the frustrations that boiled over in Belém have led to a renewed focus on practical ways countries can turn down fossil fuels, turn up renewables and ensure the economic and public health benefits of that transition accrue to all communities including those that have been historically marginalized.

There are continued deliberations within the UNFCCC through a process initiated by COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago to create a Roadmap for Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in a Just, Orderly and Equitable Manner. At Bonn, we expect to hear more insights from a process to solicit input from all parties on this and potential options for an agreement at COP31. And countries at the Santa Marta conference have announced a second conference in Tuvalu (jointly hosted by Tuvalu and Ireland) next year.

A new report from IRENA also points out the infrastructure and technology shifts that will be needed for such a transition: Rapid electrification and renewable deployment will require major expansion of grids, storage and system flexibility, alongside stronger system integration and strategic planning for the phase-out of fossil fuel infrastructure.

5: The undermining, and defense, of climate science

The authoritarian anti-science Trump administration continues to double down on its attacks on federally funded climate science, scientific agencies, staffing, data and resources—including attacks on NOAA and NCAR.

UCS is fighting back hard against the Trump administration’s attacks on science, alongside many others in the scientific community.

The administration is also steadily defunding investments in scientific research at universities and other research institutions. A recent proposal from the administration would put political appointees in charge of making all decisions on federally funded scientific research, completely undermining scientific integrity. The Trump administration has also abandoned the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and is trying to prevent US federal scientists from collaborating with their international peers. Across the administration, spewing lies and propaganda about science is now the norm. Their climate science disinformation echoes talking points and tactics that the fossil fuel industry has long propagated.

These actions are chilling for US-based scientists and they’re having a real impact on the US climate science enterprise, long considered the crown jewel of the global ecosystem. Scientists around the world are alarmed at this rapid erosion of US climate science. Agencies like the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and others are continuing to step up and meet the needs of the hour but it’s not easy—or even possible—to fill the gap completely.

This dire situation is also underscoring that a truly resilient global scientific enterprise that serves the needs of people all over the world requires collaborative, distributed, well-funded science without borders.

A recent WMO bulletin on the El Niño is just one illustrative example. The credits say: The WMO El Niño/La Niña Update is prepared through a collaborative effort between the WMO and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), USA, and is based on contributions from experts worldwide, inter alia, of the following institutions: Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), Centro Internacional para la Investigación del Fenómeno El Niño (CIIFEN), China Meteorological Administration (CMA), Climate Prediction Centre (CPC) and Pacific ENSO Applications Climate (PEAC) Services of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the United States of America (USA), European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), Météo-France, India Meteorological Department (IMD), Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), International Monsoons Project Office (IMPO), Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA), Met Office of the United Kingdom, Meteorological Service Singapore (MSS), WMO Global Producing Centres of Seasonal Prediction (GPCs-SP) including the Lead Centre for Seasonal Prediction Multi-Model Ensemble (LC-SPMME).

Isn’t that a beautiful exemplar of what global scientific collaboration should look like?

6: The urgent need for climate finance

To make the transition to a climate-resilient world powered by clean energy, we’ll need to redirect trillions of dollars away from fossil energy to clean energy. And as climate impacts accelerate, there’s an urgent need for climate adaptation funding, which has been sorely neglected for too long. Lower income nations—where billions of people are on the frontlines of acute loss and damage from climate impacts and millions still do not have access to modern forms of energy—cannot make the transition to clean energy and climate resilience without funding from richer nations most responsible for climate change. This is not charity, it is justice. And it is the only practical way to advance rapid progress globally.

Richer nations have long fallen short on their climate finance obligations. And now, unfortunately, the Trump administration’s gutting of USAID and other internationally focused programs and budgets has led to deep cuts in investments in global development and health across the board, including investments to advance climate resilience and clean energy. Other countries too, including the UK and some European nations, are reneging on their climate finance commitments. This couldn’t be happening at a worse time for lower income countries punished by high energy prices and worsening climate impacts.

Climate finance must be a key metric for how international climate action is evaluated. And for climate advocates in the Global North, it’s crucial to elevate this priority domestically and put pressure on their policymakers to deliver robust finance, alongside demands for reductions in heat-trapping emissions and a transition away from fossil fuels.

Clearing a path through turbulence

The Trump administration’s hostile upending of global norms is intersecting with long-term economic and political trends to create a turbulent geopolitical reality now—AND it is also accelerating the emergence of a multipolar world order, with new risks and opportunities.

Regardless of what happens under future U.S. administrations, the world has learned (repeatedly) that the United States can be an unreliable partner. That loss of credibility is sobering, especially since the U.S. is the largest historical contributor to heat-trapping emissions and the world’s richest nation. But it also leaves room for progress to emerge from new spaces, with new alliances and different imperatives to embrace climate action.

At the forthcoming climate negotiations in Bonn, countries must lay the groundwork for real progress at COP31—grounded in the latest climate science and climate justice—including on cutting emissions, transitioning away from fossil fuels, advancing climate resilience, and unlocking climate finance.

Today’s dark realities, while undeniable, cannot obscure real progress that is still happening against all odds. And they cannot make us lose sight of that better, brighter world that people and the planet need.

Almost as shocking as the scale of these changes are the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the very scientific instruments that enable us to understand them. We’ll get there. But first, a little immersion into our water planet to better understand what it means to overheat it and force the ocean to compensate.

Earth, despite the name, is a water planet

A quick refresher on Earth’s ocean. I mean, where did it even come from, all this water?

After Earth’s molten formation 4.6 billion years ago, the planet gradually cooled below the boiling point of water and, fueled by steam released from volcanoes, it rained for thousands of years, filling the low-lying surface of the planet. An era of bombardment by icy asteroids provided a huge additional volume of water. And voila, a water planet was born, almost entirely covered by one massive ocean. Tectonic activity eventually produced large land masses and, over time, both plate movement and global temperature fluctuations have greatly changed the shape of the ocean–and the land, our default perspective–e.g., tying more or less water up in ice. But with the exception of a couple of global ice ages, the liquid ocean has always dominated Earth’s surface. We’ve almost always been a “blue planet,” and always a water planet.

Water manages heat—and thus life—on Earth

This water was the birthplace of life on Earth. Indeed, water is considered the birthplace of carbon-based life anywhere, which is why scientists search for it in other solar systems. It took at least 500 million years for the first life to form in the ocean (~4.1 billion years ago), and once it did, life remained simple and aquatic for the vast majority of Earth’s history. It took fungi, plants, and especially animals big evolutionary leaps to venture out of the ocean (and much of it did not; today, nearly 80% of Earth’s animal life, measured in biomass, lives in the oceans), first to the tidal zone, then the coasts, and even today, with terrestrial life spanning most dry land, the ocean continues to exert tremendous influence on that life. It does this through a range of mechanisms. Chief among them, our ocean plays the dominant role in managing the Earth’s heat and making large regions of the planet habitable.

A core way the ocean does this is by absorbing solar radiation at tropical latitudes and distributing that heat via vast ocean currents to cooler parts of the world. These currents then distribute water that has cooled at the poles back toward the equator. Without this mechanism, the heat that makes life possible even in the otherwise frigid latitudes would remain concentrated around an intolerably hot equator. In this sense, the oceans are a great regulator of the global climate, tamping down extremes and supporting Goldilocks-style just-right regional climates around the world.

The oceans are also the primary source of moisture and precipitation–basically, weather–to land. As the sun heats ocean surface water, it evaporates, creating humid air that is transported by forces like winds and the Earth’s rotation, delivering precipitation, the water that makes terrestrial life possible.

So, if the role of the ocean in managing Earth’s temperature is fundamental to life on Earth, what happens when we overheat it?  

The ocean: an unfathomably huge heat buffer

The ocean is estimated to have absorbed 91% of the excess heat, caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels, that has been trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere. This heat storage is possible because of the ocean’s specific heat capacity – i.e., water takes a lot more energy to warm than land or air. Direct absorption of sunlight, the main way the ocean absorbs heat, depends on the level of albedo present, where darker surfaces, like the ocean surface, absorb more of the sun’s energy than light surfaces, like polar ice caps, which reflect it back to space. But other mechanisms, like heat exchange with the atmosphere warm the ocean, too.

Without that excess-heat absorption and storage in recent decades, life on land would have been thrown into chaos (at best) by skyrocketing temperatures by now. According to one study, the heat taken up by the upper layer of the ocean between 1955 and 2010 was enough to warm the atmosphere by a jaw-dropping 36 degrees C. This massive, climate-mediating role of the ocean puts our thus-far unsuccessful human efforts to keep warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees C in sharp relief. That is, the ocean has spared us land-dwellers from the true, ~36 degrees C consequences of our fossil-fuel burning actions. And we can’t tackle 1.5 degrees?

The buffer is getting thin

The vastness of the ocean means it requires tremendous inputs to respond. But the excess heat that carbon emissions have trapped since the start of the Industrial Revolution is one such tremendous input. Major recent research captures the scale in this way, according to one of a new study’s 50 authors, John Abraham: the heat absorbed by the ocean in 2025 alone is “like 12 Hiroshima bombs being detonated each second, for every minute, hour, and day for the entire year.”

The absorption of that heat means that the average temperature of the oceans has been steadily rising, and now those temperatures are reaching levels that fuel impacts, including on land, that we will be unable to ignore.

Overall, the ocean has broken average temperature records every year for the past nine years. Temperatures have increased most at the surface, where sea surface temperatures have warmed roughly 0.8C between 1901 and 2020, and recently broke new monthly high records for thirteen consecutive months, starting in mid-2023. But deeper layers are warming, too. The chart below shows ocean heat content at different depths. And while slow ocean circulation constrains the movement of heat to great depths, ~20% of total warming is occurring below 700 meters.

So, where are we today?

The NOAA sea surface temperature (SST) data in the chart below shows 2026 SSTs rising to rival the record-breaking levels of 2024. This is influenced by the formation of a Super El Niño. Outlooks point toward new record high ocean temperatures this year, potentially creating the new hottest year on record for Earth in 2027.

Climate change is the clear driver here. Thanks to tools like Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index (CSI), we can now see the role of climate change in daily sea surface temperatures, and thus in marine heat waves and other anomalies. According to the CSI, this week, both the notable heat in the Indian Ocean and that in the Equatorial Pacific (where the El Niño is forming) are made substantially more likely due to climate change.

Symptoms of the ocean’s fever

These temperatures are now manifesting in impacts around the world and pointing toward accelerating change. In follow up blogs, we will unpack these symptoms in some detail, but to name significant ones:

Warmer water hastens the melting of “ocean-terminating” ice sheets (i.e., land-based ice connected to the ocean), contributing to sea level rise; creates a warming feedback loop by shrinking sea ice and increasing the ocean-warming albedo affect; enhances ocean stratification, where warmer surface and cooler deep waters fail to mix and redistribute heat; this in turn can drive hypoxic conditions, starving deeper waters of oxygen; can slow major ocean currents (thermohaline circulation), which are driven by changes in density, in turn driven by water temperature and salinity; and can super-charge storm systems, from tropical cyclones to Nor’easters, causing stronger and more rapidly-accelerating storms.

Then there is the acute heat that manifests in marine heat waves, a condition that is now chronic and widespread in oceans around the world. In 2023, an estimated 96% of the ocean by area experienced a marine heatwave. The most significant heat waves (all recent) have disrupted marine food webs and caused major ecological harm, resulting in widespread, prolonged coral reef bleaching, large-scale wildlife deaths, and damaged commercial fisheries.

Given the ocean’s significant role in driving or influencing vastly-consequential terrestrial climate patterns, like the Asian Monsoon, ocean overheating has implications for the human systems that are attuned to those patterns, from water supply, to agriculture and food security, energy production, and more. We’ll be tracking ocean temperatures, reporting on developments, and digging into these implications in subsequent blogs.

An age of consequence for warming a water planet

The tremendous capacity of the ocean to store away heat meant that the consequences of warming our planet were slower to be made visible. It now means that an enormous amount of excess heat energy now exists in the oceans, to be gradually released to other Earth systems in forms like direct heat to the atmosphere (as we see in El Nino years), melting of ice, and the supply of sea-surface heat that fuels tropical cyclones, to name a few.

It also means that releasing of that heat, slowing ocean warming, and eventually cooling the ocean cannot be accomplished on practical human timescales, but rather in hundreds to thousands of years. We have created an era of ocean heat consequences and now we must figure out how to live in it, even as we work to correct it.

Our need to understand our changing planet meets the Trump administration

An essential requirement for meeting the era of ocean heat is better understanding how our oceans and climate are changing, and for this, we have global ocean and climate monitoring infrastructure. Here in the US, the Trump administration is attempting—through staff cuts, budget cuts, eliminating data and information (e.g., datasets and websites taken down), and dismantling our monitoring infrastructure—to make ocean, land and atmospheric change harder to see.

Most recently, the administration ordered the “descoping” of the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observing Infrastructure Project, a system of sensing and data gathering infrastructure distributed in the North Atlantic and Pacific. Information is still sparse about this dismantling; the process is not transparent. What’s clear is that, at a time when ocean heat, the slowing of the Gulf Stream, and other major changes are sending shock waves through scientific and decision-making circles, we need greater understanding of what we’re facing, not self-imposed blind spots. Sending taxpayer-funded ships on taxpayer-funded missions to essentially unplug functional taxpayer-funded ocean monitoring systems is baffling. Given the fossil fuel industry’s influence on the Trump agenda, it could look like a massive attempted cover up, except that the crime—warming the planet—is ongoing, and there’s really no covering up the changing climate, because we live here.

The ocean has become easy for the wealthier people of the world to ignore: a place to extract resources and dump waste. But this titan is now rumbling into a new kind of activation, more central character than backdrop. It’s hard to think of a more monumental failure than overheating an ocean planet and handing it off to younger generations. History won’t look kindly on the leaders of this time who ignore the science and the obvious signals. May it reflect that they were forced by their people, in time frames that made a difference, to phase out fossil fuels and invest in a safe and just climate future for all on this rare water planet.

Under the rule proposed by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), political appointees would have far more power over who gets billions of dollars of federal funding for research. And the rule explicitly conditions this funding not on scientific merit but primarily on whether the grant project and the applicant conform to “the President’s policy priorities” —allowing them to suspend or terminate “grantees out of alignment.”

Traditionally, scientific experts serve on peer review panels and their recommendations drive research grant award decisions. As part of that process, reviewers must be free of conflicts of interest. While peer review may not be perfect, bringing experts together to evaluate and debate the merits of a funding proposal typically ensures that the proposals of the highest quality and potential impact for the public good rise to the top. But this new rule would allow individual political appointees—with no scientific background or expertise—to judge the merit of research proposals, override decisions by subject matter experts, and interfere with federal funding that doesn’t conform to presidential priorities.

This proposed rule would govern the grant-making process for the entire federal government, including (but not limited to) the approximately $200 billion spent annually in research and development, as well as discretionary funding that comes through agencies like FEMA. This rule is an escalation of the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on science and evidence-based policymaking in every policy domain. The Trump administration dubiously claims that their proposed changes will improve transparency, accountability, and oversight to prevent wasteful spending and mismanagement of federal funds. Yet over the last year, this same administration fired 55% of inspectors general across federal agencies—opening the door for waste, fraud, and abuse throughout government by kneecapping their ability to conduct investigations in federal agencies. This same administration also proposed a $1.8 billion slush fund to funnel taxpayer dollars to Trump allies.

This proposed rule is about one thing: the Trump administration’s hunger to exert control over the federal scientific enterprise and re-direct it toward their own political agenda. It’s an attack on scientific integrity and scientific independence that will come at the public’s expense. Read on for why this matters—and what you can do.

An authoritarian move to centralize power

By replacing scientific merit with a political loyalty test, the proposed rule is another strategy straight out of the authoritarian playbook to concentrate power, control information, and suppress politically inconvenient truths. The rule proposes that “agencies may consider an applicant’s history of questionable practices based on publicly available and verifiable information.” In other words: it’s a litmus test for any public statements by a researcher that the administration might find objectionable, a dire attack on the First Amendment rights of every scientist. Over the last year, we’ve watched the administration attack higher education and try to bend institutions across civil society to its will. If enacted, this proposed rule will allow the administration to further weaponize government and our taxpayer dollars—dangling money or threatening its withdrawal to coerce publicly-funded universities and federally-funded researchers into supporting its ideological agenda.

Undermining scientific integrity and independence

You may be familiar with scientific integrity as it relates to the adherence to professional practices and ethical behavior in research. But when a political appointee disregards the principles of honesty and objectivity when managing, using the results of, and communicating about science and scientific activities, that also violates scientific integrity. Those violations could include censorship, altering findings or data, or firing scientists over the results of their research. Hallmarks of scientific integrity include transparency, inclusivity, accuracy, and protection of research and scientific findings from suppression, manipulation, and inappropriate influence. Scientific integrity in grantmaking is also a driver of innovation and economic advancement. The proposed rule states explicitly that political appointees, regardless of experience or qualification, would have the last word on funding decisions. The record of the Trump administration so far gives all of us reason to worry about how they’ll make these decisions—especially since this rule came from OMB, led by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought.

A policy change that sacrifices the public good

US federal research funding makes scientific and medical breakthroughs possible and tangibly improves our lives. NIH-funded research has paved the way for treatments that have helped make diseases like cancer less deadly and reduced children’s exposure to pesticides. NSF-funded research grants led to the development of the internet and the technology in our cell phones, including touchscreens and lithium-ion batteries. NASA-funded space research enabled GPS through satellite infrastructure and helped map the eye to diagnose conditions and improve vision-correction surgery. USDA-funded research protects our lives, property, and health by mitigating risks in high-wildfire prone areas, informing evacuation decisions, and preparing us for future climate threats. And NOAA relies on research and data to track weather patterns to help manage and predict droughts that impact farmlands, forests, and grazing lands, also impacting the food and water supply. None of that work can happen if the Trump administration gets a political veto over what researchers are allowed to study.

What we can do now to fight back

Do not let the administration get away with these attacks on science. Here are three actions you can take to fight back:

1. Submit a public comment by July 13^th. This is one of the most high impact ways that you can let the administration know how this proposal will devastate the scientific enterprise—including halting vital research that you lead or depend on—even more than their reckless funding cuts to scientific agencies, institutions, and the workforce. Check out our resources for getting involved and submit your comments opposing this proposed rule.
2. Sign this petition to demonstrate your support for the Scientific Integrity Act. This bill was recently re-introduced in the US Senate and would establish stronger safeguards to protect federal scientists from political interference, require agencies to maintain scientific integrity policies and ensure government decisions are informed by evidence rather than political agendas. At a moment when independent science is under immense and increasing pressure, Congress must move swiftly to advance this bill and strengthen available guardrails. Studies are already being halted by political appointees who want to suppress the data. The OMB’s proposed rule frames research on topics like equity and public health as “wasteful spending.” It serves as an example of how political agendas get ingrained into science funding at a systemic level. The Scientific Integrity Act gives watchdogs, courts, and the public the tools to fight back. Congress must pass it now.
3. Spread the word and share this blog post with your network. We need overwhelming pushback to make the administration reconsider this proposed change to gut independent science.

In March 2025, the agency announced that it planned to eliminate its Office of Research and Development (ORD)—the EPA’s hub of independent scientific research. As I highlighted last year, ORD’s closure constitutes a huge loss for independent science at EPA. ORD was intentionally created as a standalone office outside of EPA’s policy offices (like the Office of Air and Radiation and the Office of Water, among others), so that scientific research could be conducted without undue influence from political appointees who might have conflicts of interest. Several of the major environmental laws that EPA is tasked with enforcing, like the Clean Air Act and Toxic Substances Control Act, explicitly require the agency to rely on scientific evidence in decisionmaking. ORD exists for exactly that reason—so that EPA decisions are informed by the best available scientific evidence, not by ideology or the demands of politically-powerful interests.

EPA replaced the independent ORD with a new Office of Applied Science and Environmental Solutions (OASES), which sits within the EPA’s Office of the Administrator.  That puts science under direct control of political appointees: a recent memo sent to OASES employees outlines the new project approval process, emphasizing that political appointees must approve new research projects.

After a year of continuously chipping away at EPA’s capacity to regulate pollution, enforce regulations, conduct rigorous scientific research, and protect public health, the Trump administration is undeniably increasing the risks Americans face from toxic chemicals.

IRIS, the small ORD program that saved lives

EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS, was a program that sat within ORD’s Center for Public Health and Environmental Assessment. For decades, the scientists in IRIS worked to understand and explain the health risks associated with exposure to chemicals. This research informs pollution regulations at the federal, state, and local level. As the EPA’s own website states, “The placement of the IRIS Program in ORD is intentional. It ensures that IRIS can develop impartial toxicity information independent of its use by EPA’s program and regional offices to set national standards and clean up hazardous sites.” IRIS’ toxicological assessments are considered best practice, undergoing a rigorous review process to evaluate the degree to which chemicals like formaldehyde or ethylene oxide are associated with certain health effects, including cancer.

This effort to target IRIS didn’t just emerge—the Trump administration is implementing a long-running plan. The chemical industry sought to kill the IRIS program for years, propping up misleading and false excuses to undermine a program whose work might challenge their interests. Project 2025, the right-wing policy roadmap that has guided the second Trump administration, advocates for ending the IRIS program, and members of Congress have introduced legislation that would ban EPA from relying on the 500+ assessments completed by IRIS in agency rulemaking.

Until President Trump came into office, EPA vehemently defended its IRIS assessments, and even the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) have affirmed the use of IRIS values. Now, with President Trump’s appointee Lee Zeldin in charge, the EPA has completely changed course.

A recent internal memo obtained by ProPublica shows David Fotouhi, President Trump’s deputy administrator of the EPA, directing all agency offices to review any IRIS assessments used in past agency decisionmaking and discouraging their use in future regulation.

Ethylene oxide, the cancer-causing gas EPA can’t seem to quit

In the memo, Fotouhi specifically calls out ethylene oxide, an invisible gas used for medical sterilization and produced in chemical manufacturing that IRIS determined was a carcinogen in 2016. Under the Biden administration, EPA undertook long overdue actions to strengthen regulations for several types of industrial facilities that emit ethylene oxide, including medical sterilizers. These actions would have significantly reduced cancer risks for the millions of people in the U.S. and Puerto Rico living or working near ethylene oxide-emitting facilities. But when President Trump once again took office, the agency reversed course and has rolled back many of the regulations limiting emissions of toxic air pollutants like ethylene oxide.

IRIS’ 2016 assessment found that long-term inhalation of ethylene oxide can cause white blood cell and breast cancers, and that the risks are especially pronounced for children. EPA was able to significantly strengthen controls for ethylene oxide-emitting facilities because of IRIS’ scientific conclusions (an assessment that took a decade to complete and included rigorous independent review). Now Fotouhi—who previously represented a medical sterilization company and other polluters as an attorney—is sowing doubt in the IRIS ethylene oxide assessment, echoing unsubstantiated claims made by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and American Chemistry Council for years. Their claims are also counter to conclusions by a NASEM independent committee in 2025, which supported EPA’s methodology for developing IRIS assessments. The agency even went so far as removing information about the health risks of ethylene oxide from its website, depriving the public of crucial information about the harms of exposure. We are witnessing in real-time EPA cutting the science out of decisionmaking to further a profit-motivated deregulatory agenda.

In EPA’s recent proposed rollback of ethylene oxide emissions standards for medical sterilizers—which will expose tens of thousands of people to “unacceptable” cancer risk levels—the agency states that, “it would not be appropriate to rely on the 2016 EtO IRIS value in setting standards,” urging the public to submit “alternative values […] that would be more appropriate…” In the proposal, EPA claims that two new studies introduce uncertainty into the 2016 IRIS value, but if you read the studies, they do not address health endpoints that can be compared to the IRIS assessment. In fact, one of the studies supports the 2016 value. Furthermore, a recent draft cancer risk assessment published by California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment includes a literature review from the last decade, arriving at the same conclusions as the 2016 IRIS assessment. You can read more about EPA’s unsupported claims about the 2016 ethylene oxide IRIS assessment in a comment I contributed to and led by our partners at Earthjustice, and our broader comments on the rule here. The science is clear—the Trump administration just doesn’t want to hear it.

Where does that leave us? EPA is giving polluters a free pass, unlawfully eliminating regulations, abandoning the scientific findings that enabled regulation of global warming emissions, no longer considering the benefits of human lives saved by regulation, and now ripping out the scientific foundation that keeps these rules effective. Ultimately, these actions betray the basic job of the EPA. In the Trump administration, EPA leaders are allowing corporations and polluters to evade rules based on science, and secure policies that are convenient for their own profits, at the expense of our health. And in the end, the harm will be foisted upon the American public.

On top of that, the Trump administration’s actions have set off an affordability crisis that further shrinks people’s ability to prepare for, cope with, and recover from disasters. With the North Atlantic hurricane season starting today (June 1 through November 30), we should all be demanding our policymakers do better to protect people and the economy.

2026: the “Triple Danger” of the unchecked Trump administration

Danger Season is the time of year between May and October when extreme weather in North America becomes most intense and frequent, with heat, flooding, wildfires, drought, and hurricanes posing the highest risks. 2026 is feeling different from the past. This year, we’re experiencing the triple crises of climate change, the reckless authoritarian Trump administration, and economic insecurity becoming overwhelming. My colleague Erika Spanger speaks to how these crises begin to collide in her recent post, noting that as the Trump administration delays and attempts to cancel critical programs like FEMA’s preparedness grants, it weakens the ability of local communities to prepare for, cope with and recover from climate impacts—the same communities that are feeling stress from higher gas and food prices and need support the most. The people who will experience Danger Season most acutely are those who can least afford to cope.

And while NOAA predicts a below normal 2026 Atlantic hurricane season, the forecast is for between 8 to 14 named storms, three to six hurricanes and the potential for one to three major hurricanes. On top of the considerable cost of air conditioning in deadly heat, many people lack the wherewithal to prepare for and recover from even one major hurricane.

The current state of FEMA

It’s been an emotional and turbulent whirlwind for FEMA staff under President Trump’s second term, which has reverberated throughout the nation’s communities.

In October of 2025 I wrote about the state of FEMA and its lack of readiness to respond to disasters. There have been changes since then, but the main goal of President Trump’s actions remains the same: to weaken the agency. This is evident as the administration fires experienced staff indiscriminately, politicizes disaster aid, and pushes the burden of disaster response and recovery onto state, local, Tribal and territorial governments.

The new DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has reversed some of the dismantling conducted during the disastrous term of prior Secretary Kristi Noem, no doubt due to pressure from Congress but also under federal court orders. Secretary Mullin may just be convincing the administration that we need the trainings, grants, and people that they ended, cancelled, and fired. Here are some of the recent reversals to FEMA-related attacks under Trump’s administration.

• DHS Secretary Mullin told members of Congress during his confirmation hearing that he’d do away with former DHS Secretary Noem’s $100,000 expenditure review requirement and that he’d speed up disaster assistance; he’s done the first and made steps in the right direction on the second.
• After two Federal court orders, FEMA finally issued a notice of funding for $1 billion for the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program. But this is still far below the $4.6 billion  appropriated by Congress via the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and from FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund (DRF) set-aside.
• On May 13, 2026, FEMA released $600 million in Flood Mitigation Assistance (FMA) grant funding after it had retracted it on February 14, 2025. This grant notice makes funds available for capability and capacity building, individual flood risk reduction projects and individual flood mitigation projects available for communities participating in the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP).
• On April 30, 2026, FEMA rehired 14 staff that Secretary Noem fired for signing the Katrina Declaration. The declaration warned Congress of the Trump administration’s dismantling cuts and devastating attacks on FEMA’s programs and missions and urged them to act.
• On April 30, 2026, the Washington Post reported that FEMA would be rehiring 100 of its 300 Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery (CORE) employees that FEMA had not rehired in January as part of Secretary Noem’s plan to cut FEMA’s workforce by 50%. However, the actual number is questionable as some CORE employees declined reinstatement and some had retired so were not eligible for reinstatement. FEMA’s CORE employees are hired for two-to-four-year contracts and deployed to disaster sites where they work within one of the 23 “cadres”—operational or programmatic groups. They make up the largest part of FEMA’s workforce at 39% (8,802) employees, followed by surge capacity who come from other agencies at 35%, permanent employees at 22% and other at 5%.

While these reversals are good news, quadruple stressors at the agency are going to challenge FEMA’s ability to respond to simultaneous disasters and include: 1) unqualified leadership; 2) brain drain—that is, the departure of longtime staff with institutional knowledge—and other staffing losses; 3) grant delays and uncertainty; and 4) radical policy shifts.

Unqualified leadership

Given the very low bar that Secretary Noem set, Secretary Mullin is a step up. But as I wrote in my March blog, he is unqualified to lead DHS, as he is a climate denier, backed extreme immigration policies, spread misinformation about FEMA, and voted against certifying the 2020 elections, among other issues. Former DHS official Miles Taylor, in an NPR interview, recently spoke to how the DHS secretary position is “the hardest job in Washington, I mean, hands down, this is absolutely the hardest job in Washington. And what you don’t want is someone going into that job who doesn’t ask questions, someone who doesn’t speak truth to power.”

After a year and a half in office and three unqualified acting FEMA administrators (Cameron Hamilton, David Richardson, and Karen Evans) President Trump nominated Cameron Hamilton on May 11 (yes, the same man he fired for testifying that FEMA should exist) to lead FEMA. Hamilton admitted to sharing misinformation about the agency on social media, lacks the required qualifications and the 5 years of experience required under law (the Post Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act (PKEMRA) of 2006), and should not be confirmed by the Senate (but he most likely will be).

Roughly half of FEMA’s leadership, 18 out of 38 of top-level positions have yet to be filled as of today, at the start of the Atlantic hurricane season. Empty positions include: FEMA Deputy Administrator, Chief of Staff, Deputy Chief of Staff, Associate Administrator for National Continuity Programs, both positions for Policy and Program Analysis, Deputy Associate Administrator for Mission Support, both positions for Resilience, Deputy Administrator for US Fire Administration and nine Regional Administrators.

Let’s hope Cameron Hamilton fills these essential leadership roles and other critical staff as soon as possible. But the reality is that it can take six months to a year to recruit and onboard a senior executive and a year to hire full-time staff, according to former FEMA chief of staff Michael Coen. Additionally, the Trump administration still has a hiring freeze in place, and FEMA has only been authorized to hire 300 high-priority staff.

And then there’s Gregg Phillips, the Associate Administrator of the Office of Response and Recovery, arguably the second or third most important role at FEMA. He’s also uniquely unqualified for the role. He’s a conspiracy theorist, known for violent rhetoric and has become infamous for his claims of having teleported to Waffle House.

Brain drain and staffing losses

FEMA has lost roughly one-third of its workforce since the beginning of the second Trump administration due to terminations, buyouts, and early retirements. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that last year FEMA started the hurricane season with just 12% of its incident management workforce available. These numbers are staggering when we think back to the 2023 GAO report that noted FEMA already had a 35% staffing gap at that time. Members of Congress were also alarmed and passed a resolution entitled: “Condemning Federal workforce reductions that undermine preparedness, response, and recovery, and expressing concern regarding proposed future staffing cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”

But it’s not just the numbers, it’s about the talent that was behind them. Many people who have left had extensive experience in their fields and will be very hard to replace. There are two major lawsuits against the Trump administration involving unfair employment termination. A group of unions as well as local governments and nonprofits brought a lawsuit against a group of US government defendants including President Trump, DOGE, DHS and FEMA for firing CORE employees without the approval of Congress as required under law (you can read the fascinating lawsuit). A second class action lawsuit was filed in federal court on behalf of federal workers claiming the Trump administration unlawfully fired them for working on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

Grant delays and uncertainty

The Trump administration’s attacks on FEMA grant programs have been so broad, state and local governments and their partners have been pushed to using the a tool President Trump knows a lot about: litigation. There are roughly five state and local government lawsuits against FEMA/DHS for placing restrictions on, reallocating, withholding, freezing or terminating preparedness and disaster assistance grant funding.

The Executive Director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers Chad Berginnis provided testimony to Congress on the need for FEMA to be “adequately funded and operationally functional.” Berginnis underscored how local and state partners have “experienced significant operational and funding disruptions,” which can only make it more difficult for them to prepare for hurricane season and be ready to take on more response and recovery when a major disaster does hit.

Thankfully, as mentioned above, many of the grant cancellations or restrictions on funding have recently been reversed. However, President Trump continues to play politics with disaster assistance, delaying and denying disaster declarations especially for blue states. Currently 27 disaster declaration requests remain open. The first of these is from Arizona for storm and flood damage and is dated October 24, 2025. The president has also been denying Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP) funding to states since March 18, 2025, the first President to do so in 27 years. Typically, Presidents award HMGP along with public and individual assistance once they’ve declared a disaster.  

Radical policy shift

On January 24, the same day President Trump visited parts of North Carolina destroyed by Hurricane Helene, he signed an executive order establishing the FEMA Review Council. The President’s FEMA Review Council held their last meeting on May 7, when the council members discussed and voted to approve the final report that largely aligns with Project 2025. Most of the policy changes proposed require Congressional actions or new regulations (see table on page 15 at the link), and others would need to be implemented in a phased approach over two to three years. If implemented, the ten major recommendations would: force state, local, Tribal and territorial governments to continue to take on more and more of the burden of disaster response and recovery; push to privatize the National Flood Insurance Program; completely ignore pre-disaster mitigation, leaving communities less prepared for climate-fueled disasters; and reform individual assistance in a way that would leave many people behind and less safe after a disaster, among other reckless policies. Comments are due June 8, 2026, and UCS will be weighing in.

Which FEMA will show up this Atlantic hurricane season?

FEMA has been at the crosshairs of the Trump administration since day one. And as the threats and risks mount this Atlantic hurricane season, with the added risks of extreme weather turbocharged by climate change, we all have to wonder, which FEMA will show up? Will it be the same FEMA as last year that implemented DHS Secretary Noem’s draconian funding rule, causing extreme dysfunction in its response to the tragic Texas flash flooding—when acting FEMA administrator David Richardson was unreachable for over 24 hours, phone calls went unanswered, and funding requests went unpaid? Or could it be a degraded but more stabilized FEMA under the new DHS Secretary Mullin and the nominated FEMA administrator Cameron Hamilton?

My hope is that it’ll be the latter. The current FEMA acting administrator is FEMA Region IX administrator Bob Fenton: his third time in this role, he comes to the position with decades of experience at FEMA. However, on May 14, 2026, Representatives Bennie Thompson and Timothy Kennedy sent a sharply worded letter to Secretary Mullin and acting administrator Fenton to express their “serious and growing alarm over FEMA’s deteriorating readiness to protect the American people.”

Whichever FEMA shows up, we all need to prepare for the 2026 hurricane season

With the incredible destructive force of hurricanes, it only takes one to cause total devastation for a region. As NOAA says, “early preparation is essential to staying safe all season.” Here are some practical ideas to get ready for hurricane season that go beyond the usual important of advice of 1) make sure you have an evacuation plan; 2) have an emergency kit (Build a Kit); and 3) listen to local officials. Thinking ahead and taking small affordable but sensible steps to be prepared and able to cope in a crisis is something we all need to do— especially under an administration that seems to care little for the safety and wellbeing of everyday people. The veteran-led Team Rubicon does care and has this “7 No-Cost and Low-Cost Ways to Prepare for a Hurricane” checklist—check it out!

Call on Congress to demand FEMA readiness and oversight

We need to keep the pressure on the Trump administration to fill FEMA leadership positions with qualified staff, continue to release funding in a timely way, and ensure communities get the help they need to get back on their feet after disasters. This means we also need to keep up the pressure on members of Congress to ensure FEMA is properly funded and to provide accountability and oversight. Please: Tell Congress: Stop Trump’s Dismantling of FEMA and Disaster Relief.

On April 27, the 191 nations who are parties to the NPT sent representatives to the Headquarters of the United Nations in New York to confer for almost a month. I took three trips to Midtown Manhattan to interview NPT participants at the beginning, in the middle and near the end of their discussions. All expressed a pessimism that was justified by the outcome. The nuclear weapons states thwarted every effort to hold them accountable. I was happy the non-nuclear weapons states refused to agree to a final document that would have made this injustice appear acceptable.

Iran and Ukraine

The wars in Iran and Ukraine significantly influenced the discussions. Both are non-nuclear nations that were attacked by nuclear-armed aggressors. Both were given assurances by the five NPT nuclear weapons states that they would never threaten to attack a non-nuclear member state with nuclear weapons. No fair interpretation of the public statements and media discourse of the aggressors could claim those assurances were honored. The lesson for the rest of the non-nuclear world seems clear. Binding legal commitments from nuclear weapons states mean the least when they matter the most. 

And yet, the nuclear taboo held. Not because of the NPT, or international diplomacy, but because there is something intangible about nuclear weapons that, since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, prevented them from being used again. Moreover, the non-nuclear states are, for the moment, defeating their nuclear-armed aggressors on the battlefield. If they prevail when the fighting stops, and the wars officially end, these outcomes may contribute more to nuclear nonproliferation than the treaty their nuclear aggressors failed to honor. Small and medium-sized states with limited defense budgets may be better off investing in cheap drones than in expensive empty threats.

The umbrella states

The most disappointing group of nations attending the conference was the small collection of non-nuclear armed US allies who imagine they enjoy some sort of benefit from the US nuclear arsenal. Shortly after his inauguration in 1969, President Richard Nixon famously told his national security council that the idea there was a nuclear umbrella that covered these allies was “a lot of crap.” Whether any US president would be willing to risk a retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States to aid an allied nation has always been an open and unanswerable question, which may be why there is no explicit nuclear use commitment included in any US mutual defense agreement.

In exchange for this imaginary protection these “umbrella states” consistently work with the nuclear weapons states to thwart efforts by the rest of the non-nuclear world to make the NPT a more effective legal instrument. The most disappointing of all may be the government of Japan, which leverages the remembered suffering of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to burnish its disarmament credentials while secretly lobbying the United States to redeploy tactical nuclear weapons in East Asia.

China

The only other country approaching this level of nuclear hypocrisy may be China, which offered the conference a scathing condemnation of several Japanese behaviors that are not all that different than their own.  It claimed Japan is reprocessing spent nuclear fuel from its nuclear energy program and stockpiling the separated plutonium for military purposes. At the same time Chinese officials refuse to address US claims China is using its civilian nuclear energy program to manufacture the plutonium it will need to fill hundreds of new silos with nuclear-armed missiles. China accused the Japanese government of “ramping up its military spending for 14 consecutive years” while it has been doing the same for twice as long. It called upon the international community to insist on “open, transparent and effective measures” to monitor Japan’s nuclear energy program, while at the same time refusing to comment on why it stopped reporting the amount of civilian plutonium China is producing to the IAEA.

China associates itself with an emerging “global majority” of developing nations who seek to rebalance long-standing inequities in the international order. As China’s economic and political influence continues to grow, many nations, including other members of this “global majority,” justifiably wonder what kind of partner China will become. The Chinese government claims it will never seek hegemony, but it’s attitude towards nuclear weapons undercuts that claim. How can there be economic and political equity between a nuclear have and nuclear have nots? What is China saying to the world when it condemns the nuclear energy program of a non-nuclear weapons state – a nuclear energy program exactly like its own – while simultaneously increasing the size and capabilities of its nuclear arsenal?

The nongovernmental

Alongside the official deliberations, concerned civic organizations from all over the world hold events and activities they hope will contribute to a constructive outcome. These often take the form of stern reminders to member states of their treaty obligations, dire warnings of the potential consequences of failing to meet those obligations, and advice on how to succeed. While well-intended, it is difficult to argue, after so many decades, that these reminders, warnings and advice have had any impact. 

What may be more important is that these nongovernmental organizations observe and record what happens with a great deal more objectivity and honesty than the participating member states.  Decades from now, looking back, those reports may reveal that 2026 was the year the non-nuclear weapons states finally decided they’ve waited for nuclear justice long enough.

Early in my career, I got first-hand experience with these systems when my own environmental engineering research was used to inform science-based air quality standards to protect public health for the entire nation. My research fed into a government process that ensured robust science policy decisions were made (even when corporate or political actors opposed it). The system was not flawless, but the transparency of the process and the commitment of the scientific community helped keep us pointed towards progress, and held people accountable when we weren’t. I became a full believer in the power of science to make our lives better through the systems we built to support it. A grounding in science, data, and evidence, provides a solid basis for better policy decisions, and in the US, our country recognizes that.

Science and democracy under threat

But now, that power of science is under threat, as the Trump administration’s assault on science and democracy escalates. My career has been focused on how science is used and misused, but the current attacks threaten the US science enterprise—across government, academia, and the private sector—beyond anything we’ve seen in previous administrations. The administration is gutting federal research investments, devastating federal scientific integrity infrastructure, firing federal scientists, and otherwise undermining the systems of federal science that have been sustained for decades, those very systems I long believed in.  

These attacks on science are happening at the same time as, and indeed are a part of, a rise of authoritarianism under the current administration. We’re living through a disregard of the rule of law and the disempowering of checks and balances across our government—the very same checks and balances that have been critical for ensuring science helps shape decisions, from scientific integrity infrastructure, to the role of Inspectors General, to the federal science advisory committee system, to civil rights protections and federal equity initiatives, with reverberations across sectors. My faith in the system is now shaken.

The power of the scientific community

What should the scientific community do when those systems are disrupted? When long-standing rules and norms are broken? When those reliable science processes and investments are gone? When our trust in the system is undermined?

We must reconnect with what made those systems function in the first place. The power of science was never solely in the system itself. It worked because of us. Because people everywhere insisted on a world where decisions are informed by evidence and experts are trusted. Because the public demanded it. Because scientists everywhere contributed. These systems were never perfect, but we stayed committed to the project, to the pursuit of knowledge, to a system with checks and balances that can guide us down a path to advance the public good. And we can do that again.

Although the speed, scope, and severity of the Trump administration’s attacks on science and democracy are great, we have a playbook. In other countries and contexts, we know what it takes to successfully challenge authoritarians and restore democratic principles—and scientists have played a key role as prominent leaders and dissidents in these movements.

Scientists have power. We have expertise. We have social standing. We can keep the score. We can call out disinformation. We can speak truth to power. We can hold decision makers accountable. This is the power and potential of scientists in this moment. 

Introducing Science Rising

If ever there was a time for scientists to step into our power, it’s now. That’s why the Union of Concerned Scientists is launching Science Rising, an effort that recognizes the gravity of the threats to science and democracy in this moment and harnesses the power of scientists and science supporters to fight back.

Through Science Rising, we’ll band together. We will refuse to live in a world where science is ignored and democracy is decimated. We will demand a world where science is used for public good. We will hold decisionmakers accountable. We will build independent scientific institutions that counter the disinformation and disintegration of scientific infrastructure. We will reimagine what science should look like in this country.

Most importantly, we will not back down. And I hope you will join us. Join our Action Corps and stay connected with this movement in the months to come.

I still believe in the power of science that left me awestruck as an early career scientist. We know at our core that science and scientists make the world better, safer, healthier, and fairer, and that we all deserve that. Let’s rise together, the only way we know how.

Unfortunately, there’s not a link in this chain the Trump administration, and particularly the Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, hasn’t weakened by cutting funding, firing scientists, refusing oversight, evading accountability, and spreading outright disinformation. When climate change impacts collide with an anti-science administration whose policies are hurting us economically, Danger Season is triply dangerous.

What is the “safety chain?”

The “safety chain” is the term I use for the series of links that protect us during Danger Season and climate change-worsened disasters. It’s made up of accurate data that give us clear, easy to understand weather forecasts that, when delivered by trusted communicators, increase public understanding so that individuals and communities prepare effectively and—if needed— respond and recover well.

Who’s breaking the safety chain?

The Trump administration has stopped gathering data and supporting research crucial to understanding our climate system. This assault on federal climate research in turn undermines weather forecasting. And that is further compounded by an administration that is actively spreading disinformation about climate science, echoing long-standing talking points of the fossil fuel industry.

President Trump himself in his previous administration refused to correct an error he made in a hurricane forecast and forced his administration to cover for him during “SharpieGate.” Lying about the path of a hurricane weakens the ability of science communicators, including meteorologists, to inform the public.

Meanwhile, it’s been a 15 month long roller-coaster ride for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) under the Trump administration. The agency has undergone loss of qualified leadership which was replaced by unqualified leadership, leading to a brain drain and raising questions about the agency’s readiness.

President Trump has delayed and denied disaster assistance for blue states and attempted to cancel initiatives within FEMA that would support local preparation, such as the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities or BRIC program. But after two federal court orders, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) finally issued a notice of funding for $1billion of the $4.6 billion available appropriated by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and from FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund (DRF) set-aside.

FEMA’s disaster response funds were dangerously low even before Danger Season had begun and got a sorely needed boost once Congress ended the DHS shutdown. Even with a slightly milder than average Atlantic hurricane season expected, the DRF will most likely need Congress to provide supplemental appropriations mid-season.

Meanwhile, former acting FEMA administrator Cameron Hamilton, who lacks the qualifications required under law and has admitted to sharing misinformation about the agency on social media, is now back as a nominee to lead the critical agency. 

Given Trump administration actions that have depleted federal emergency management with thousands of job cuts, unstable leadership, and resource reductions, FEMA is less prepared to confront more frequent and intense extreme weather and climate change-fueled disasters. 

How does disinformation break the safety chain?

During climate change-worsened weather disasters, fossil fuel companies, aligned political actors, and affiliated media and advocacy networks have repeatedly spread or amplified disinformation that undermines public understanding, trust in institutions, and support for climate and disaster-response measures. These disinforming claims tend to fall into five main categories:

1. Cause distortion. A social media post that falsely attributes wildfire to arson, for example, breaks the links between accurate data, forecasting, and understanding. People may under- or over-react to risk.
2. Blame distortion. When we don’t see the role climate change plays in worsening weather disasters, we don’t hold the principle corporate drivers of climate change, such as the fossil fuel industry, accountable. We blame the wrong actors and don’t adequately address the root causes of the problem.
3. Trust attacks. Claims that government agencies or officials “don’t know what they’re talking about” or “don’t care about us” break the communication that builds trust and leads to effective preparation. People may ignore warnings or delay action, for example by refusing to evacuate ahead of a hurricane. At the same time, the Trump administration is making it harder to know what government actions or motivations are likely to be.
4. False safety signals, on the other hand, break the chain between understanding, preparation, and response. People may delay evacuation or miss the opportunity to take other needed precautions because they’re getting signals, either from authorities or media, that there is no emergency. It’s important to note that this doesn’t have to be disinformation or other propaganda. For example, showing pictures of people enjoying beach time can send a false safety signal during a dangerous heat wave.
5. Narrative hijacking happens when bad actors deliberately entangle disaster warnings, preparedness, or response with harmful messaging on hot-button issues such as elections or immigration. Targeted people may avoid shelters, services, or official channels of communication.

What can you do?

First, borrow from the Hippocratic Oath, and do no harm. Check your sources, especially before you share something on social media. A host of tools are available to help you conduct a search, check timestamps, and generally trace information to its source. The Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) coalition releases briefs and data monitors showing trends in climate and weather disinformation campaigns.

Secondly, keep good information sources like the National Weather Service and local emergency response agencies on hand. For understanding science-based connections between climate change and extreme weather, keep an eye on UCS’s Danger Season content and on the great work of our partner organization Climate Central. Share good sources when you can; when good information is absent, disinformation will fill the void.

Third, pay attention to the intersection of extreme weather, disasters, and hot-button issues. Watch out if you see distortions and attacks come into play. If you do, use UCS’s host of resources on how to counter disinformation effectively.

Finally, work with us as we demand that Congress fund and oversee the restoration of crucial links in the safety chain, from appropriate oversight to funding for federal climate science and disaster preparedness and response.

The second Trump administration has set about dismantling the institutions of American science.

Over the past 16 months, the administration has eliminated thousands of federal scientific positions, imposed sweeping funding cuts at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF), dismantled the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) vaccine advisory committee, and worked systematically to manufacture political justification for abandoning the evidence that underlies public health and environmental policy.

These attacks are not random. They are interconnected parts of a nationwide strategy to erode shared truth, manufacture doubt, and teach the public to distrust what it once took for granted.

Science has been a testing ground. If you can make people doubt peer-reviewed research, vaccines, and climate data, you can make them doubt anything. An electorate that doubts everything is an electorate that can be told anything.

So as the 2026 elections approach and the administration escalates its efforts to deceive voters and deepen that distrust, it would be fair to assume the scientific community might stay quiet based on its initial response in 2025. When the first attacks came, the impact was profound. Many scientists were paralyzed by fear of losing funding, fear of political retaliation, fear that speaking out would cost them everything they had spent their careers building. Some self-censored, avoided controversy, and waited for the storm to pass.

But something has started to shift. Scientists are fighting back. A resistance that began as individual acts of courage is now taking collective shape, and what has emerged over the past several months is beginning to look like the early architecture of a movement.

Inside out and outside in

Inside federal agencies, scientists and career workers have faced these pressures most directly. The Federal Workers Alliance for Democracy (FWAD) has built a growing coalition of workers and allies mobilizing the federal workforce to refuse compliance with dangerous and illegal orders, building networks across every federal agency in every state. Aisha Coffey, FWAD’s communications director, explains:

“The thing about messing with career civil servants is that those are the same people this administration will rely on to carry out dangerous, illegal orders. If federal workers refuse to comply, we take an extraordinary amount of power away from a government that’s trying to do us harm.”

It’s a powerful strategy. And to add to it, the resistance isn’t only coming from inside. Scientists are also building power from the outside.

In June 2025, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (the body that has guided U.S. vaccine policy since 1964) and replaced them with a group that included vaccine skeptics and anti-vaccine advocates, some lacking relevant expertise.

The dismissed scientists did not simply step aside. They formed the Immunization Scientific Advisory Collaborative (ISAC) and published independent, evidence-based evaluations of the reconstituted committee’s proceedings. When the committee voted to end the decades-old recommendation that every newborn receive a hepatitis B vaccine at birth (despite no new safety data and no new evidence that the shots don’t work), ISAC documented what that process looked like. Together, they created a public record of what evidence-based vaccine policy requires and clearly told the public what had been abandoned.

Young scientists are adding their voices to the chorus

While many of these examples involve established scientists and career workers, early-career researchers have stepped up too. Without tenure, established reputations, or institutional protection, they have the most to lose by speaking out, but this isn’t stopping them. Graduate students turned hallway conversations into the Scientist Network for Advancing Policy (SNAP), now a nationwide coalition of more than 150 active members across 30 organizations.

SNAP’s McClintock Letters initiative coordinated more than 600 scientists to write op-eds for their hometown newspapers (not elite national outlets, but local papers) in the communities they grew up in. They have already published more than 200 pieces across 45 states. As JP Flores, speaking on behalf of SNAP, explains:

“We wanted to get back in touch with the people we grew up with, the communities that shaped us, and the people who, in many cases, we became scientists for in the first place. We hoped our peers would join us and were amazed by how many did. If scientists want to continue to earn the support and the funding we’ve received from the American public, we have to not only communicate with them but also recognize their vital role as partners and stakeholders in our work.”

The scientific community has been criticized, often fairly, for operating at a remove from the public. These early-career scientists are working to close that gap at precisely the moment it matters most.

Healthcare workers were crucial to resistance in Minnesota

Nowhere has that urgency been clearer than in health care. When the Trump administration designated hospitals as fair game for immigration enforcement, the Minnesota Nurses Association doubled down on their efforts to educate members about patient rights, what to say to federal agents, and how to protect immigrant patients, including Minnesota’s large Somali and Hmong communities. They developed badge buddies for nurses (printed cards with instructions and a QR code for resources) and built partnerships with immigrant rights groups, faith organizations, and legal aid groups.

Then, on January 24, 2026, federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA. He was off duty, observing protests against Operation Metro Surge. That day, he stepped between a federal agent and a woman who had been pushed to the ground. Alex had spent years helping care for patients in the ICU and was doing the same for a neighbor. Federal officials said he had brandished a weapon. The video tells a different story.

Pretti’s death galvanized nurses nationwide. National Nurses United declared that “ICE messed with the wrong profession” and organized a nationwide week of action: candlelight vigils at hospitals and VA facilities from Minnesota to California to New York, with explicit demands that Congress defund ICE or face electoral consequences.

Year after year, Gallup finds Americans rank nurses the most trusted profession in the country. When a profession like that organizes, it brings the power of everyone it has spent decades caring for.

Where to plug in

These examples are far from comprehensive. Organizations like HealthBegins have been training frontline clinicians to treat pro-democracy work as an extension of their professional identity, not a betrayal of it. Stand Up for Science returned to the streets in March 2026 with rallies in 46 locations nationwide. New cross-sector coalitions are forming in states across the country. Momentum is building as scientists get in formation ahead of November 2026.

One example of this growing momentum: On June 3, the Union of Concerned Scientists is launching Science Rising, an initiative aimed at mobilizing the science community for sustained engagement, building the political infrastructure to defend science and democratic accountability through the 2026 elections and beyond. As Gretchen Goldman, president and CEO of the Union of Concerned Scientists, says:

If ever there was a time for scientists to step into our power, it is now. Science Rising recognizes the gravity of the threats to science and democracy at this moment and harnesses the power of scientists and science supporters to fight back.

The launch webinar on June 3 (3-4 p.m. ET) will feature three concrete actions: signing up for SMS alerts for rapid mobilization, raising awareness in your own networks, and joining the Science Rising Action Corps for tools and opportunities focused on congressional accountability throughout the summer and fall.

If you are a scientist (or just someone who believes science should serve the public good) RSVP for the launch here. If you work in science or technical fields specifically, there is a scientist-specific form here.

Over a year ago, the fear was felt at the individual level. A scientist’s grant withdrawn, or their name added to a list; a career built carefully over years at risk of being lost overnight. The administration bet that the fear of thousands of scientists, isolated, weighing the costs of speaking up, would add up to compliance. But the math has changed as the scientific community is proving them wrong by remembering it is one.

They were always trying to figure out how to save money. Not as a preference or a lifestyle, but as a necessity. Because at that time, saving even a small amount could mean the difference between stability and struggle.

That same kind of decision-making shapes daily life for many households. But today it’s unfolding under a different set of conditions—where rising costs, financial pressures, and extreme weather increasingly intersect.

As summers grow hotter and energy costs continue to rise, the question of what people can afford (often referred to as energy affordability) is becoming increasingly connected to how they experience heat—and, in some cases, whether they can stay safe through it.

These aren’t just questions about comfort. They’re questions about navigating extreme weather, which can have serious implications not just for comfort but for cost, health, and well-being.

And now Danger Season is upon us. Danger Season—the period between May and October when North America is hit hardest by extreme weather, like heat, drought, wildfire, and hurricanes—brings severe implications for households across the country. There are a few things worth keeping in mind about the connections between extreme heat, energy affordability, and the ability to stay cool safely.

1. As temperatures rise, so does energy use—and so do energy bills.

During the summer months, air conditioning can account for a significant share of household electricity use, especially during periods of extreme heat. For many households, staying cool means using more electricity at the exact moment energy demand and costs are rising.

And while most households in the United States have some form of air conditioning, access doesn’t always mean affordability. The ability to cool a home safely and consistently is shaped by cost. For many, the decisions start to look familiar: Do I turn on the air conditioning, or try to get by with a fan? Do I keep it running through the night, or turn it off to save money?

2. Energy affordability shapes how people experience heat

For many households, the challenge doesn’t begin with extreme temperatures. It begins with the bill.

Electricity costs are already rising across much of the country—and for many households, they’ve been rising quickly. These rising costs aren’t random, they’re shaped by growing electricity demand, aging infrastructure, fossil fuel price spikes, and the increasing strain of extreme weather on the grid. For households already managing tight budgets, that changes how people experience the summer months. In some parts of the country, high summer cooling costs also arrive directly after months of expensive winter heating bills, leaving many households entering the summer without much financial recovery

For a growing share of households, cooling isn’t something they turn on without thinking, it’s something they must seriously weigh against other essentials. People start making decisions early: running the AC less, delaying turning it on, closing off some spaces to avoid having to cool them, bracing for what the bill might bring. By the time the first heatwave arrives, many households are already carrying the stress of what it will cost to stay safe.

3. Cooling access shapes heat risk

We often talk about air conditioning like it’s optional. But during periods of extreme heat, it becomes a safeguard. Extreme heat is one of the deadliest weather-related risks in the United States. Access to reliable, affordable cooling is one of the most effective ways to reduce that risk.

But that protection only works if people feel able to use it. When cost becomes a barrier, safety does too.

Housing conditions can also intensify these risks. Older or poorly insulated homes often trap heat more easily and require more energy to cool, increasing both indoor temperatures and electricity use during heatwaves. In practice, that means some households are entering extreme heat events with far fewer protections than others.

4. High energy burden can magnify risk

For households where energy bills already take up a significant share of income, staying cool isn’t just expensive—it can become destabilizing. The financial strain of cooling during extreme heat often compounds existing vulnerabilities, especially for households already navigating housing insecurity, chronic illness, disability, aging infrastructure, or other economic pressures.

These aren’t one-time decisions. They happen day after day during a heatwave: running the AC less, delaying its use, or trying to cool only part of a home. Over time, those tradeoffs can lead to hotter indoor temperatures, disrupted sleep, worsened health conditions, and increased exposure to dangerous heat.

And because energy burden is not experienced equally across households, the same heatwave can carry very different consequences depending on income, housing conditions, health status, and access to resource.

5. Disconnection carries cascading impacts

For some households, those tradeoffs eventually lead to something more severe: utility disconnection. When electricity is shut off, cooling doesn’t just become unaffordable—it becomes inaccessible. And the impacts extend quickly beyond heat:

• Homes become unsafe during extreme temperatures
• Food and medications spoil
• Medical devices stop working
• Families may be forced to leave their homes

Disconnection is not just a financial event: it’s a sign that the system meant to provide essential service is failing to protect the people who rely on it. During extreme heat, it can turn dangerous conditions into life-threatening ones.

Policies meant to protect households from shutoffs during extreme weather vary significantly by state, utility, and season. In many parts of the country, protections during extreme heat are weaker than those against winter shutoffs, even as summers become increasingly dangerous. And while programs like Low Income Energy Assistance Program can provide critical support, cooling assistance and summer coverage remain limited or inconsistent for many households. Recent federal data from the US Energy Information Administration found that residential electricity service was disconnected 13.4 million times in 2024 because of unpaid bills, highlighting the scale of energy insecurity many households continue to face.

6. These risks aren’t shared equally

The weight of these conditions isn’t evenly distributed. Some households are entering summer with higher energy burdens. Some are living in homes that trap heat more easily. Some are navigating health conditions that make heat more dangerous. And some are doing all of this at once.

The result is that the same heatwave can carry very different consequences depending on where you live, how your home is built, and what resources you have access to.

7. These outcomes are not inevitable

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The systems shaping these experiences—electricity costs, housing quality, grid investments, shutoff policies, and energy assistance programs—were built over time. And they can be reshaped.

We can design programs that reduce energy burden. We can invest in cooling access and resilience. We can prevent disconnections during extreme weather and strengthen protections for households most at risk. We can plan for extreme heat as something we know is coming—not something we react to after the fact. And we can work to reduce the climate pollution driving more dangerous heat extremes overtime.

Because the reality is people shouldn’t have to navigate life-or-struggle decisions just to stay cool in their own homes.

My parents’ stories are part of a longer thread—one that continues today in different forms, in different places, across the country (and around the world). The details may look different. But the underlying question remains the same: What does it take to get through the day—and what does it cost?

As summer approaches, that question becomes harder for too many households to answer. And that’s something we still have the power and responsibility to change. Behind every rising bill is a set of decisions about how our energy system is built and run—and who it’s built to serve.

To state things plainly: this executive order and the initiative it kicked off have weakened scientific integrity (SI) policies and protections across the federal government. SI policies help support the ability of scientists to work independently and speak about their work honestly. They prohibit political appointees from altering, suppressing, or hiding research findings to serve some political, financial, or personal agenda. The goal of SI policies is to give policymakers the whole, unfiltered story when they’re developing legislation and regulation, helping them create effective, evidence-informed policies to protect people and the planet.

When you think about how much we’ve learned as a society from conducting scientific research—how to cure life-threatening diseases; to protect ourselves and our communities from pollution and toxic chemicals; to predict and prepare communities for extreme weather events—I hope we can all agree that scientists should be able to do their jobs without political interference.

There’s nothing to celebrate about a year of the Trump administration’s duplicitous “gold standard science” campaign. Rather, I want to highlight what has been lost because of this administration’s hostility to actual science and the people who carry it out, and the loss of critical, evidence-informed safeguards that were created to protect federal science from politicization. We don’t have to accept this—and you can help.

Pay attention to what’s behind the curtain

The most realistic way to think about the EO and its directives is as a smoke screen. The EO uses concepts and terms well-known and accepted in the scientific community, like “transparent,” “reproducible,” and “falsifiable,” to make it seem like the administration is supporting science. But this language cynically hides the reality that the Trump administration is undermining science in many ways.

• The EO was signed against the backdrop of a sky-high number of attacks on science, a number that continues to grow. At the time the EO was signed, researchers at UCS had recorded 327 attacks on science (instances of political interference with scientific work). Almost a year later, the administration has racked up an additional 247 attacks; as of April 30^th, 2026, we’ve recorded 574 total attacks on science.
• Under the guise of encouraging data transparency, the EO directed agency heads to make public the data, models, and source code associated with scientific information the agency would produce or use to inform policies (except as prohibited by law or policies that protect sensitive personal or business information). This same language has been weaponized for decades by different industry groups, including the tobacco industry and the fossil fuel industry, who oppose public health regulations. In practice, this would increase the time, expense, and inefficiency of producing scientific information, and promote an idea that scientific analyses can’t inform policy decisions unless underlying data are made public. That idea was at the core of a dangerous Environmental Protection Agency rule adopted during the first Trump administration that would have severely hampered the agency’s ability to use the best available science to set pollution standards. A court vacated that rule, but creating an expectation of publicly available datasets for influential science could help future such regulations stand.
• It increases the ability of political officials to interfere with science under the guise of preventing that interference. Before the EO, SI policies were overseen and enforced by scientific integrity officers (SIOs), agency employees whose tenures were not tied to any one presidential administration. Under the new EO, political appointees (or HR representatives) could be in charge of this process. The EO directs these political appointees to evaluate alleged violations of these new standards—which center the administration’s policy agenda, not the validity of the underlying science. This is alarming to scientists, who fear they or their work could be targeted if it doesn’t accord with the administration’s priorities.  
• The EO directed federal agencies to revert their SI policies—policies designed by experts to protect science from political interference—back to what they were before President Trump’s first term ended. Without giving a deadline, the order also directed agencies to revise their policies to ensure alignment with the administration’s dubious definition of “gold standard science.”

Despite the lip service paid to scientific principles in the EO, reverting these policies back to what they were in January 2021 has weakened and, in some cases, eliminated documented agency safeguards against politicization. Without a specified deadline for agencies to release new SI policies, it’s unclear how long agencies will adhere to these weakened (or absent) versions. It’s also unclear how much the revised policies will resemble the ones based on guidance developed by federal SI experts. The actions taken by the President and his appointees thus far are not encouraging.

What’s been lost

Federal SI policies are a hard-fought win, resulting from a long history of efforts inside and outside government.

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, many agencies created their first SI policies during the Obama administration.

During the Biden administration, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) convened a group of SI experts charged with making evidence-informed recommendations to strengthen these policies. That group also sought input from the public in developing a framework for agencies to use to create new SI policies. It was thanks to a partnership between the public, these experts, and the federal government that these policies were strengthened and adopted in more agencies during the Biden administration.

Erasing the last four years of this work, informed by dedicated research and public input, is enormously consequential to federal science. We’re at risk of losing necessary safeguards these experts recommended in 2023, including explicitly defining scientific integrity and providing criteria and processes agencies can use to iteratively assess and improve their policies. For some agencies, they’ve been asked to remove the first SI policy that they developed.

A review of agencies’ policies

By searching and reviewing federal agency websites, I’ve been able to understand the history and evolution of these agency policies. I have a record of the URLs where SI policies have historically lived on agency websites, and I check them periodically for changes and removal of policy. I also use the Internet Archive to confirm general timing of when changes occur, and to compare policies from different administrations.

To illustrate one of the most beneficial changes between policies informed by OSTP’s evidence-informed recommendations in 2023,let’s focus on the creation of the SIO role. When they reverted their policies back to what they were before January 2021, several agencies removed all mention of the SIO positions, and how SIOs assume the responsibility of SI enforcement, resolving SI violations, and helping to professionalize SI within agencies through training and professional development.

For instance, in the current (i.e., pre-2021) versions of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Institute of Standards and Technology policies, there are vague descriptions of who oversees SI enforcement and oversight. But even across these two agencies, the people appointed to these positions differ from one another. And there is no mention of any such person or position in the current (i.e., pre-2021) National Science Foundation policy.

Something in common across the current policies in these three agencies is that there is no explicit detail of what happens when a potential SI violation is reported and what processes occur to try to resolve them.

According to web data on Internet Archive, when President Trump returned to the Oval Office in January 2025, all three of these policies explicitly described SIO positions and promised their implementation.

And more jarring yet, several agencies have removed their policies from the URLs where they have historically lived. This includes agencies like the Department of Transportation, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health. With the absence of these policies, the question becomes what version of scientific integrity protections are being enforced in these agencies—or if there are any protections at all.

This executive order was the first domino that fell in the administration’s official use and application of the deceptive “gold standard science” phrasing. Since the EO was signed, we’ve seen many examples of political officials invoking this phrasing to justify baseless stances, deregulatory actions, and information suppression.  

Reverting agency policies back to their pre-2021 versions not only weaken critical scientific integrity safeguards, it also makes protections and policies inconsistent across agencies. A clear benefit of OSTP’s 2023 evidence-informed recommendations was that the policies agencies adopted as a result followed the same formula, and agencies were all held to the same standard in terms of how to prevent and resolve politicization of science.

The path forward

But all hope isn’t lost. If Congress passed the Scientific Integrity Act, science would be better and more consistently protected. The Scientific Integrity Act would codify safeguards against politicization of science into law, requiring agencies that fund, conduct, or oversee science to adopt and enforce scientific integrity policies that prohibit the suppression of or interference with scientific findings. It would make it much harder to rescind and weaken these protections as the Trump administration has done

The Scientific Integrity Act has bipartisan support and real momentum: it was just introduced in the Senate for the first time in seven years, sponsored by Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii. This is a huge win for federal science!

Your help and advocacy have brought this bill to both houses of Congress. If you want to continue to help us defend federal science, please use this link to thank Sen. Schatz and show your support for the SI Act.

Since the emergence of the environmental justice movement in the 1980s, environmental advocates, scholars, leaders, and communities on the front lines of pollution have understood the role of science as a tool for exposing and validating environmental harm.

The environmental justice executive order signed by President Bill Clinton more than 30 years ago marked a crucial step in recognizing those inequities. President Donald Trump’s executive orders rolling it—and many other protections—back reflect a broader pattern of undermining and weakening environmental safeguards against toxic pollution exposure and limiting communities’ ability to prepare for and recover from climate change-fueled disasters that are not of their own making. That’s why scientists at nongovernmental organizations, universities, and other levels of government must step in to work with the most-harmed communities and help fill the void left by federal government.

The consequences of the Trump administration’s actions are clear. Distressingly, policies meant to protect the public’s health are eroding, and environmental justice communities continue to bear disproportionate burdens.   

Every community deserves the right to a safe and healthy living environment—the right to safe drinking water, clean air, and land free of toxic contamination. These principles have long underpinned the EPA’s mission.

The public should be able to count on the federal government to standardize and coordinate environmental and energy policies that govern economic and land use decision making. Regulations often serve to level the playing field for industry, cut out confusion across jurisdictional borders, and provide a backstop when state or local decisions fail to protect public health and the environment.

Increasingly, that role is being reversed. Under President Trump, the current administration, across all offices and departments, has prioritized fossil fuel interests and corporate polluters over community protections and scientific integrity—to the point of using taxpayer dollars to pay off developers to cancel US clean energy projects against our own interests.

The role of the scientific community

In an administration that has overwhelmingly favored fossil fuel expansion while attacking policies, programs, and research that serve the public interest, scientists have a critical duty to support communities with their unique set of tools, expertise, and resources.

That is an ongoing goal for UCS that we were able to put into practice at the December 2025 American Geophysical Union (AGU) annual meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana—to encourage the scientific community to see themselves as spokespeople for scientific integrity, especially for the most vulnerable among us. As the largest conference of earth and space scientists globally with 20,000 attendees, it offered a forum for sharing innovative science. More importantly, it was an opportunity for researchers, policymakers, and advocates to explore solutions to pressing environmental and societal challenges and an important platform for elevating local experiences.

With the area known as Cancer Alley just 30 miles north, New Orleans is not only proximate to some of the nation’s most egregious and visible examples of environmental injustice, it is also the site of one of the most devastating climate change-fueled disasters in US history, Hurricane Katrina. Community leaders—who had been fighting for more resilient housing and emergency preparedness—found themselves in the same debates as before Hurricane Katrina. Coming together with community members and scientists at a time President Trump is politicizing disaster aid was an opportunity to connect more directly with the lived realities of environmental injustice and disproportionate environmental burdens. It was also an opportunity to listen to what deregulation means for local people.

For instance, with the leadership of two leading environmental justice organizations, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a Harlem-based organization with national reach, and the Louisiana-based Healthy Gulf, we organized a Toxics Tour connecting AGU participants and environmental researchers to energy and industrial pollution, disaster recovery and restoration in Plaquemines Parish, LA, just an hour outside of New Orleans.

We also hosted a panel session featuring environmental justice leaders from Louisiana like Sharon Lavigne and Caitlion Hunter of Rise St. James from Cancer Alley, and a former Tulane University research scientist, Dr. Kim Terrell. The discussion was moderated by Jane Patton of the Center of International Environmental Law, whose work focuses on the human rights and environmental harms of the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries, helping to connect local experiences to broader global accountability efforts. 

These community-based scientists, advocates, and researchers who expose environmental injustices have faced intimidation, funding cuts, and institutional barriers. One example they shared is a 2024 Louisiana law to stop community air quality monitor data from being used in compliance or enforcement decisions. The law goes so far as to impose up to $30,000 in penalties on groups that publicly discuss their use of the pollution monitors.  This kind of intimidation is happening in other states too, according to UCS senior analyst Darya Minovi, who also presented at AGU.

This administration’s antagonism towards environmental justice has created more academic censorship, which Dr. Terrell faced by Tulane University for reporting findings of environmental injustice in the petrochemical industry. She is now with the Environmental Integrity Project continuing her work. With Louisiana scientists under pressure, it is even more important for the broader scientist community to continue researching the harms the fossil fuel industry is causing there. 

One of the stops on the toxic tour at AGU was the Plaquemines liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal—part of the fossil gas infrastructure in Louisiana that handles 61% of US LNG exports. The site exemplifies long-known high-climate change impact risk areas where, because of corporate greed, fossil fuel facilities continue to be permitted and financed. The Plaquemines terminal was built in an area clearly susceptible to chronic flooding, coastal erosion, and health impacts to workers and residents for its profit potential for financiers and the insurers that underwrite them. Meanwhile, homeowners in Louisiana and elsewhere experience a growing protection gap as insurers leave coastal states citing increasing climate risk.

Communities face mounting climate threats

Beyond the insurance crisis and exposure to pollution, Louisiana’s coastal areas are ground zero for other deadly impacts of climate warming. Particularly exposed are people living in Plaquemines, St. Bernard, Terrebonne, Lafourche, Cameron parishes. There, concentrations of low-income households are already facing land loss, subsidence, and rising seas. UCS’s 2024 analysis Looming Deadlines for Coastal Resilience, identified public and affordable housing among the most-threatened infrastructure in coastal states, including Louisiana. Without major resilience investments, affordable housing stock will become increasingly uninhabitable, the analysis found.

Extreme heat, the deadliest climate impact, compounds the dangers these communities face. That threat is intensified for people living in older, poorly insulated, or substandard affordable housing, according to a 2025 UCS study, Colliding Crises: The Dangers of Extreme Heat in Affordable Housing.

Louisiana is among the states with the largest number of affordable homes exposed to three or more weeks of extreme heat alerts in 2024, the report found.

Like Louisiana, other states and the country face a mounting need for housing systems that better adapt to and protect against climate impacts. Meanwhile, we face a federal government that is acting against our interests and taking steps that will accelerate the pace of climate change.

That’s why it is important for Congress to also take action—to ensure greater protections for environmentally overburdened communities. Sadly, environmental justice voices continue to “pull up a folding chair” to the table in legislative debates, as the first black woman elected to the US House of Representatives Shirley Chisholm famously said. 

Yet, frontline communities have long persisted—using science, data, and advocacy to fight for health, safety, and justice as the government puts fossil fuel companies’ interests above theirs.

What you can do

This moment calls for engagement across the scientific community and beyond. Scientists, advocates, and community members all have a role to play in defending science-based policy and supporting environmental justice. At the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), we are using all the tools at our disposal to challenge the rollbacks of federal protections through the courts, organize our supporters to speak up, provide opportunities for scientists to support communities, produce elucidating analyses, and stand with scientists and frontline communities during difficult challenges.

Defending science and advancing justice requires an “all hands-on deck” approach. You, too, can help by:

• Speaking out in support of science-based environmental protections by supporting sign-on letters, writing op-eds, or participating in expert testimony or contacting your legislators. UCS provides many opportunities.
• Supporting and working directly with organizations working in and alongside frontline communities.
• Engaging in public comment opportunities and policy processes.
• Advocating for restoring funding for climate science, environmental justice and resilient infrastructure investment.
• Joining our Science Network so we can keep you informed about future events at scientific conferences, like AGU.

Special Mention: Special appreciation to all who made our organizing efforts at AGU possible, including Samuel Kay and Bria Crawford as individual contributors, Kelly Crawford (UCS National Advisory Board member), and Manuel Salgado and Tali Natter of WE ACT for Environmental Justice.

The United States is facing a “Triple Danger Season” this year with one of our biggest safeguards against increasingly extreme weather wrought by a warming climate—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—under threat. That’s why UCS is actively tracking the Trump administration’s attacks on this critical agency to ensure the public has all the facts: from previous to proposed NOAA budgets to cuts to its datasets, tools, and services, as well as previous and continuing impacts from NOAA staffing shortages. Our NOAA tracker lays bare what is at stake and what the administration has stolen from the US taxpayer.

Danger Season (defined by UCS as the time of the year between May and October when the United States experiences numerous extreme weather and climate-related hazards) is amplified this year as the triple crises of climate change, a reckless authoritarian government, and economic insecurity start to collide. Yet, it feels like Danger Season has been underway for months now. This year has brought astonishing weather extremes across the country, including a record-shattering March heatwave that exacerbated the ongoing snowpack drought across the West and contributed to an early start to the wildfire season, a heatwave across the East that made April feel like July, and an ongoing widespread drought across the US.

As a nation, we rely on NOAA for scientific data, research, and predictions that help us understand and prepare for all kinds of weather, including extreme weather. You would think that with present and oncoming hazards, there would be ample funding, staffing, and prioritization of all of NOAA’s activities and mission. Unfortunately, and similarly to last year, NOAA is again under threat from the Trump administration.

Over the last year, the administration has relentlessly attacked staffing, budgets and scientific resources at the agency. The President’s latest fiscal 2027 budget proposal, which NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs supports, continues that trend. And to top it all, the White House Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) have been withholding funds that Congress already appropriated, with a strategy of trickle-down disbursement of funding that is making the valuable and life-saving work of NOAA much, much harder to do.

So let’s talk about that value of NOAA’s work during Danger Season, what exactly the Trump administration is doing to make Danger Season even more dangerous with a weakened NOAA, and what UCS is doing to track the attacks and fight back.

What NOAA does during Danger Season

All year, and particularly during Danger Season, NOAA plays a crucial role in forecasting weather events: researching, observing, and understanding our weather, climate, freshwater sources, and oceans. The agency also develops new tools and operations that enhance our ability to prepare for extreme events.

These operations contribute to the health of the national economy: we see $30 billion a year in annual economic benefits from just public weather forecasts and information.

NOAA’s strength comes from its integrated structure. The agency’s six line offices operate as an integrated system where observations, forecasts, research, and operations reinforce one another to deliver life-saving benefits.

Let’s take the example of a hurricane. The National Weather Service (NWS), which provides us with hurricane forecasts and warnings, relies on a suite of observations: satellite data from the National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service (NESDIS), ocean data from the National Ocean Service (NOS), and aircraft reconnaissance information from the Office of Marine and Aviation Operations (OMAO).

Hurricane and hurricane forecasting research from NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) provides NWS with invaluable information to develop new hurricane forecasting tools. NOAA’s integrated approach to hurricane forecasting has led to more effective evacuations and better emergency planning, saving Americans nearly $5 billion per major US-landfalling hurricane.

During Danger Season, NOAA’s integrated functionality is critical to the translation of observational and modeling data into forecasts, warnings, and guidance that communities rely on to make life-saving decisions. Extreme events grow more frequent and more severe in a warming climate, therefore the demand for these services is increasing, not decreasing.

And yet the administration is undermining NOAA AGAIN

At the very moment the nation depends most on the NOAA, policy and budget decisions by the Trump administration are weakening NOAA. The Trump administration via the OMB—and supported by NOAA’s Administrator Neil Jacobs—has proposed to Congress to slash NOAA funding by 32% ($1.6 billion) for the next fiscal year. This includes terminating NOAA’s research arm, OAR, and numerous existing oceanic, atmospheric, and weather grant programs.

And even worse, despite Congress rebuking the Trump administration’s proposed budget cuts to NOAA for this current fiscal year, OMB director Russ Vought is doing the administration’s bidding, conducting sleezy trickle-down disbursement tactics, across multiple agencies, including the National Science Foundation.  For NOAA, this includes stalling the disbursement of NOAA grants that many of NOAA’s activities, such as its Cooperative Institutes, rely on.

Just recently, half of the employees at NOAA’s Global Monitoring Lab (GML), which oversees and maintains long-term measurements of heat-trapping emissions like CO₂, would have been laid off by May 15 because the OMB allowed the grant that pays them to  lapse on March 24.

The grant funds NOAA’s Cooperative Institute for Research and Environmental Sciences (CIRES), where scientists operate tools that take many of GML’s measurements, including aerosol networks, atmospheric and oceanic CO₂, and the Antarctic ozone recovery. The OMB finally approved the disbursement of the funds, one-month post-lapse.

Despite Congress appropriating funds for NOAA CIRES and GML months ago, the OMB is choosing to either stall or slowly disburse funds, leaving critical life-saving information on a thread. This funding delay was just one in a series of attacks on NOAA by this administration.

Last year, NOAA faced unprecedented staffing shortages, funding cut threats, abrupt dataset terminations, and the proposed shutdown of valuable products—including key satellites that inform hurricane forecasting during the middle of the Atlantic Hurricane Season. One of NOAA’s core climate archives, the Global Historical Climatological Network, is still facing severe disruptions, with only about 6,000 of its 20,000 observational stations reporting valuable weather and climate information. This happened against the backdrop of intense heatwaves, wildfires, severe thunderstorms, and flash flooding all throughout Danger Season 2025.

Any one of these losses reverberates throughout the entirety of NOAA’s integrated system. The administration is reorganizing the NWS while NWS is still struggling to recover from the staffing shortage impacts from last year, as the Director of the NWS shared that staff are “burning out.” These losses and lingering impacts are why worry is mounting ahead of this Danger Season.  Will there be more lapses of funding for NOAA activities that impact our ability to prepare for extreme weather events? Will there be abrupt cancellations of NOAA datasets that inform our understanding of these extremes? Will this affect our long-term ability to forecast, observe, monitor, and research these extremes, putting people and the economy in greater danger?

What UCS is doing: NOAA Tracker

In the face of growing threats to NOAA, UCS is working to ensure the public, policymakers, and stakeholders have a clear understanding of what is at stake. UCS has developed a NOAA tracker, a centralized database that documents ongoing changes to NOAA’s programs, funding, and scientific datasets.

Specifically, you will find an overview of previous and proposed NOAA budget by line office and its subsequent activities, existing cuts to NOAA datasets, tools, and services, and previous and continuing impacts from NOAA staffing shortages. There is also a “Readme” for more information.

Our publicly available NOAA Tracker can be found here. I highly recommend that anyone, especially members of Congress, take a look and see the breadth and value of NOAA’s activities and work; the latest on what is being proposed by the Trump administration, and what are existing impacts from announced closures, funding freezes, and other impacts to NOAA’s activities. It is important we see in full transparency what the administration is planning or executing on NOAA that impacts all of us.

Communities, businesses, farmers, emergency management officials and many more rely on NOAA. Congress must step up to defend this vital scientific resource that has been carefully built up through taxpayer investments over decades. That includes ensuring it is robustly funded and staffed, protected against harmful dismantling, and that its scientific integrity policy is strictly adhered to.

Also check out our latest on Danger Season and the latest blogs on NOAA here.

Overall, the nation’s ability to navigate extreme weather events, including those occurring during this upcoming Danger Season, depends in part on the strength of NOAA and the scientific infrastructure it supports. Weakening that integrated system at this moment would mean less time to prepare, less certainty in forecasts, and greater harm when disasters strike.

Late last week, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) announced  that it may no longer require larger employers to collect demographic information on the sex, race, and ethnicity of their workers. In response, a dozen former EEOC officials released a statement warning of the risks to workers, employers, and the public if the agency abandons collecting demographic data. As the former officials correctly highlight, these data serve as the foundation for evidence-based decisionmaking to ensure fair practices in the workplace.

This change directly targets important protections against discrimination for workers. It is also, of course, an attack on science—a  familiar page out of the authoritarian playbook to suppress facts and consolidate power. UCS has been tracking the Trump administration’s attacks on science. We believe the EEOC’s plan to halt data collection is yet another example of an attack on science: it appears to be a politically-motivated effort to suppress publicly-relevant information.

Employee data have a long history

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a dataset is worth a million. Data help us uncover patterns including, for example, discrimination patterns in hiring or pay for workers. The EEOC has been tasked with collecting this information since 1966. The US Constitution requires equal protections for all citizens, and over the years the US Congress has enacted laws refining the rights of employees, including Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1997, and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was created in 1965 under Title VII, and in 1966 the newly formed EEOC promulgated a new rule, called regulation EEO-1, outlining the process to ensure employers with 100 or more employees comply with the law by reporting workforce demographic data on sex, race and ethnicity, across each year.

For nearly sixty years the EEOC has protected underserved and historically disenfranchised workers. If this administration is able to push through these proposed changes at EEOC, those protections could come to a halt. Under Trump 2.0, the EEOC has already taken actions that strip transgender and nonbinary workers of workplace protections and removing the option to include non-binary employee counts in the EEO-1 reporting notes, undermining the comprehensiveness of this data. These dogged attempts to undermine employer data in order to ignore laws protecting workers shouldn’t be surprising to anybody: the first Trump administration attempted to stop this data collection, and it was a target of the Project 2025 agenda.

Employee demographic data inform worker protections

The EEOC serves as the primary enforcement agency at the federal level to protect against workplace discrimination. It investigates complaints and seeks resolution through a multi-tiered resolution framework that includes mediation and conciliation. If these early approaches fail, individuals may pursue claims in federal or state courts or through other arbitration systems. The data that the EEOC collects serve as fundamental evidence in these processes.

That’s why these data are essential to advancing the agency’s core mission: ensuring equal employment opportunity. These official government numbers—across 56 million employees and 73,000 employers – are the only reliable way to compare demographics across companies and years nationwide. While the individual EEO-1 reports are confidential, the EEOC uses these data to inform investigations of employment discrimination, help identify where there may be barriers to equal opportunity, focus limited resources to address violations, and publish public-facing reports that aggregate the data to identify trends. For example, in 2024 the EEOC issued a report with findings that Black, Hispanic and female workers continue to be substantially underrepresented in the high-tech workforce. This type of information is useful in pointing out where we, as a country, need to identify and address the barriers that perpetuate these gaps—gaps that are prevalent in the sciences. 

Outside of the EEOC, these data are used by state and local agencies that enforce civil rights laws; employers who want to ensure there aren’t unintentional hiring barriers; researchers; and the media. These entities can also help identify and inform actions to reduce disparities in the workplace. For example, the Center for Investigative Reporting used public EEO-1 reports to examine diversity at Silicon Valley tech companies. Their report found that, although needing improvements, the dataset is useful for comparing diversity at Silicon Valley tech companies and highlighting the blind spots they have when it comes to women of color, regardless of their public messaging.

Hiding the data means abandoning the law

Without these data, we lose the ability to protect underserved and historically disenfranchised workers, including women, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ workers. Workplace discrimination is real and disproportionately impacts these communities, and federal data collection offers us solid evidence of workplace discrimination in the US. In 2023, the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine published a report looking at the EEO-1 data to investigate pay discrimination. Their first two statements assert that there are inequalities in the earnings between men and women, and between groups with different race and ethnicities. The report demonstrates that these differences—according to evidence and data—cannot be fully explained by employees’ education, experience, or occupation. Worker surveys back up this finding. In a 2023 Monster Poll, nine out of ten (91%) of respondents said they have experienced discrimination at work, and 77% reported witnessing employment discrimination. If we close our eyes to problems, the problems still exist—they’re just harder to understand and solve.

The administration isn’t uniformly against collecting demographic data, as long as that collection serves their political purposes. But by declining to collect data about demographics and discrimination in the workplace, they’re deliberately evading their responsibility to enforce anti-discrimination laws.

The administration has been on an anti-DEI crusade. They’ve used their disdain for DEI as an excuse to slash programs and cancel funding across the administration. Back in the real world, science shows us that diversity is our strength. Our country’s laws prohibit discrimination in the workplace, and businesses benefit when there is equal treatment and a diverse workforce. Research studies in this area report that when there are diverse and inclusive management teams and staffs, there is greater employee engagement and satisfaction, more innovation, and greater productivity and profitability. According to its own website, an EEOC study reports more innovation in the tech industry when diverse teams are a part of research and development. That same research study showed that companies with diverse employees are better at attracting talent, improving employee satisfaction and retention, and increasing customers and sales revenue. Additionally, in this report they state that employees in more diverse workplaces are less likely to experience harassment. Interestingly, a National Institute of Standards and Technology special publication found that software developers with similar demographic backgrounds tended to make similar misjudgments, while diverse teams resulted in better performance. These data inform practices that reduce hiring barriers and biases in pay. Losing this dataset means losing the benefits of a diverse workforce and fair workplace practices. It’s a willful decision to ignore the evidence, disregard the law, and enable workplace discrimination.

We can support worker protections and science

This administration has enacted multiple types of attacks on science: cutting funding, firing federal scientists, releasing dubious reports that undermine the best available science, and enacting executive orders that reduce scientific integrity requirements and scientific independence. Recently, the Scientific Integrity Act was introduced in the US Senate, which would require federal agencies to institute scientific integrity policies, creating a federal government culture that supports science, scientists, and science-based policies. With stronger protections for science and scientists, it would be harder for political appointees to halt data collection and studies that they don’t want to consider.

You can sign this petition to demonstrate your support for the Scientific Integrity Act. Additionally, taking away the data that support worker protections must go through a rule change, and that change, by law, includes a public comment process. Once the proposal posted, you will be able to comment on this rule here, to oppose halting data collection that supports fair workplaces.

Some would like to keep the nuclear power plant open all the way to 2045. While there’s no proposal or legislation yet, people are again talking about the plant’s fate, including California lawmakers.

Originally scheduled to shut down last year, Diablo Canyon was given a lifeline in 2022 when California’s legislature extended that deadline to 2030 in response to rolling blackouts and ongoing grid reliability concerns. Since then, the plant has gotten all the approvals it needs to continue operating, including the recent go-ahead from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to continue operating through 2045. Now the main thing standing in the way of Diablo Canyon continuing to operate past 2030 is the California legislature.

I’ll walk through the pros, the cons, and the unknowns of keeping Diablo Canyon running through 2045. In the end, I think Diablo Canyon should shut down in 2030 as planned. But should California decide to allow the plant to run longer, I’ll also highlight a few pitfalls the state should avoid.

The clean energy transition would be easier

One particularly compelling argument in support of keeping Diablo Canyon open beyond 2030 is that it would help California achieve its clean energy and emissions reduction goals.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) recently conducted analysis to understand how keeping Diablo Canyon online through 2045 would affect California’s clean energy transition. The analysis found that, while the state will still need to build over 120 GW of new clean resources even with Diablo Canyon online, keeping the plant operating could reduce the amount of solar, storage, and wind the state needs to build by 8-12 GW. The need for new in-state transmission could also decline by as much as 2 GW, and the state could retire an additional 1.5 GW of gas power plant capacity.

Those numbers are significant. Especially since California has already been struggling to build wind and the historical pace of the state’s solar buildout falls far short of the pace required by the state’s most recent clean energy planning. No matter what, California will need to pick up the pace to meet its clean energy goals, and I think it’s fair to say that keeping Diablo Canyon online through 2045 would make those goals easier to achieve.

It would help with grid reliability

Thankfully, California’s grid reliability situation has improved dramatically since the beginning of the decade. After the California rolling blackouts in 2020, the state has added a tremendous amount of new capacity to the grid, particularly energy storage. As a result, the state’s grid operator hasn’t had a close call since 2022.

Back in 2022, when California’s legislature authorized Diablo Canyon to run until 2030, the grid reliability situation was still dire. That’s not the case today. From a grid reliability perspective, keeping Diablo Canyon running past 2030 is more of a “nice to have” than a “need to have.”

In the long term, keeping Diablo Canyon online could help ensure grid reliability through the clean energy transition. For example, as I mentioned earlier, the CPUC analysis found that keeping Diablo Canyon online would allow for the retirement of an additional 1.5 GW of gas power plant capacity. So while it’s not strictly necessary to keep Diablo Canyon around for grid reliability, the nuclear power plant could reduce reliance on fossil-fueled power plants, which will continue to be a part of the grid for years to come.

Safety is still a concern

There have been serious seismic safety concerns around the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant since the very beginning. The plant is near multiple earthquake fault lines, and to complicate matters further, one of those fault lines wasn’t discovered until 2008, decades after Diablo Canyon was designed and constructed. The Union of Concerned Scientists has written extensively about the seismic safety risks at Diablo Canyon, warning that the seismic safety systems at the plant are insufficient. The plant’s owner and operator, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) has long argued the plant can safely withstand earthquakes, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has consistently sided with them.

Further adding to the safety concerns is that the NRC, which oversees the safety of commercial nuclear power plants, isn’t exactly an independent agency anymore. The current federal administration has completely reshaped the agency by firing commissioners, instituting a process for White House review of major new NRC rules, and empowering the Energy Department to secretly rewrite safety rules for new nuclear reactors.  The NRC has also slashed safety and security inspections and weakened enforcement at operating plants, which will have immediate safety impacts at Diablo Canyon. With the independence of the nation’s nuclear safety regulator in question, California should think twice before continuing to operate its last nuclear power plant.

Ecosystem damage would continue

Diablo Canyon uses a once-through-cooling (OTC) system to cool the power plant. In short, the power plant consumes up to 2.5 billion gallons per day of ocean water to cool the power plant, then that warm water gets discharged right back into the ocean. The problem is that California has been striving to phase out OTC systems at power plants because the warm water discharge is harmful to marine life. PG&E went through an extensive study process over a decade ago to study alternative cooling technologies for Diablo Canyon, but PG&E ultimately decided not to pursue any of the alternatives.

However, ignoring the problem won’t make it go away. Continuing to operate Diablo Canyon for another 15 years past 2030 would surely cause significant further damage to local aquatic ecosystems.

Effects on ratepayers depend on the details

One of the biggest questions surrounding Diablo Canyon’s extension is: would it save Californians money to keep the plant open? The answer depends on the details. And more specifically, it depends on how much money California legislators offer PG&E to keep it running.

In 2022, when the California legislature voted to extend Diablo Canyon operations, the last-minute deal included a $1.4 billion loan which PG&E will likely never repay to the people of California, at least not in full. And the deal also included hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives for PG&E. For example:

• $100 million per year “fixed management fee” that goes straight to PG&E shareholders.
• $260 million per year “volumetric performance fee” that’s spent on grid expenses unrelated to Diablo Canyon, but it functions more like a slush fund that might actually be benefitting PG&E shareholders.
• $300 million “liquidated damages fund” reserved for paying for replacement power if Diablo Canyon has an unplanned outage, but it effectively means that ratepayers will pay for replacement power even if PG&E negligence leads to the outage.

If this sounds to you like a pretty sweet deal for PG&E and a kick in the pants for the people of California, you’re right. This is not normal. The legislature threw way more money at PG&E than what was required to keep Diablo Canyon open. As a result, Californians have been paying up to keep the plant open.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Diablo Canyon doesn’t need all those ridiculous incentives to turn a profit during extended operations. The CPUC analysis I mentioned earlier indicates that, in the long term, Diablo Canyon extended operations through 2045 could save hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in energy system costs each year.

So, will Diablo Canyon save Californians money? It’s possible. It just depends.

Should Diablo Canyon operations be extended?

Putting it all together, I think the answer is no. Diablo Canyon operations should not be extended beyond 2030. It’s certainly a balance, but the persistent nuclear safety concerns, along with a weakened NRC, present too much risk. And while it’s true that keeping the plant operating through 2045 would help with the clean energy transition and grid reliability, there are emerging clean energy technologies (e.g., advanced geothermal) that could play a similar role on the grid, but without risk of a catastrophic nuclear accident.

However, different folks could reasonably come to a different conclusion. It all comes down to the values and risk tolerance of Californians. Some folks may be comfortable with the theoretical (and highly uncertain) low probability of a catastrophic nuclear incident and the sustained damage to local ecosystems in order to get the clean energy, grid reliability, and (potential!) ratepayer benefits of extended operations. I just think it’s not worth the risk when so many better solutions are readily available.

How to protect Californians from extended operations

If policymakers do seriously consider an extension, it needs to be very different this time. The 2022 deal was rammed through the legislature at the last minute. It left Californians holding the bag, and PG&E pocketed the cash. Here’s what should change:

1. An extension deal should go through the full legislative process. That means a bill should be introduced at the beginning of the legislative process. It should go through all relevant committee hearings and be fully vetted by legislators and the public. This is important because it will help prevent another PG&E cash grab and protect California ratepayers. (This also means the legislature really shouldn’t take up the issue this year, since the legislative process is already half-way done.)
2. An extension deal should not further subsidize PG&E. That means the ridiculous incentives from the past deal that have lined PG&E’s coffers should be a thing of the past. If Diablo Canyon continues operating, PG&E shouldn’t get a special deal.
3. An extension deal should benefit ratepayers. That means that Diablo Canyon should only continue operating if it helps facilitate California’s clean energy transition at least cost. Ratepayers shouldn’t pay extra to keep this risky plant operating.
4. The CPUC should make the final decision. There’s a normal regulatory process whereby the CPUC scrutinizes utility decisions to operate or retire their power plants. If the legislature allows Diablo Canyon to continue to operate, the plant should be treated like any other power plant and go through the full CPUC process to determine if it is truly in the interest of ratepayers to keep the plant open beyond 2030.

California should let Diablo Canyon shut down in 2030. But if legislators want to consider extended operations, they shouldn’t repeat past mistakes.

Unfortunately, committee leaders Rep. Graves and Rep. Larsen’s proposal does not steer our transportation system away from being the highest-emitting sector of heat-trapping emissions or the second-highest household expense. Here are the toplines:

• Over the 5 years it covers, it increases highway funding by 8% (+$28 billion), while decreasing transit and rail funding by 20% (-$43 billion) compared to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL).
  
• It cuts key programs that support electric vehicles, disaster resilience, and bike and pedestrian infrastructure. Other popular proposals, such as a new program for transit operations or to require maintenance before highway expansion, did not make it in.
  
• It proposes an additional fee on electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids (on top of the state and local fees owners already pay), despite evidence showing that this would not come close to meeting the structural deficit in the Highway Trust Fund due to the cost of roads. Meanwhile, heavy-duty trucks cause over 90% of damage to roads and will still pay far less than their fair share in this bill.  

This is just the first step in what has historically been a drawn-out process to reach a final deal on the country’s surface transportation. But setting the BUILD America 250 Act as the starting point is worrying – let’s break it down.

The devil is in the bureaucratic funding mechanism details

The BUILD America 250 Act looks a lot like a highway contractor’s wishlist. Despite all the hubbub about Highway Trust Fund insolvency, the bill proposes highway funding increases. There’s $11 billion in new funds for bridges, at the expense of transit and rail funding. Instead of novel, targeted pilot programs like the Reconnecting Communities grants that supported undoing the harm of urban freeways, there’s $750 million for a new Truck Parking program, a priority of the American Trucking Associations in the highway lobby. Still, the total program amount of $583 billion falls short of asks by the highway lobby for BIL levels with inflation, and so they’ll have to debate asking for more.

This situation gets more stark when you take a look at funding mechanisms. Federal transportation dollars are not all equal. Some programs are tagged with the gold standard for funding security – contract authority from the Highway Trust Fund. For agencies who need to build large, multi-year infrastructure projects, this is a protected and secure pot of money for transportation projects. On the other side are programs that are merely authorized, subject to appropriations from the General Fund. What does this mean in practice? Legislators and transportation agencies have to fight for funding in the fray that is yearly budget negotiations, and often, funding comes in much less than initially authorized, as is the case for the Active Transportation Investment and Infrastructure Program (ATIIP). In the middle, the BIL was able to make use of a more novel funding mechanism called advance appropriations, which allowed for a similar guarantee to contract authority for $184 billion of programs that skewed towards those supporting more transportation options or climate-friendly investments.

This most recent proposal gets rid of advance appropriations. This hits rail funding the hardest – which received $66 billion in advance appropriations funding and $36 billion authorized but subject to appropriations under the BIL, but in this proposal is only reliant on $65 billion of funds completely subject to appropriations. Transit faced a similar fate – it received $21 billion of advanced appropriations funds under the BIL, giving the certainty needed to make capital investments in new train lines and electric buses, whereas this bill provides none. While the bill’s proposed transit funding is considerably more than the doomsday scenario of a full cut of federal transit support, in the end it proposes a 5% reduction in transit funding. This is all while inflation has increased costs considerably since the BIL was enacted in 2021.

If you remove the funding subject to appropriations (so only $475 billion total), the situation is clearer. Highways still get an increase of 7% (+$26 billion) of secure, stable funding. Transit and rail lose 45% (-$71 billion) of their guaranteed funding. In total? That’s an 81/19 split of guaranteed funding, a far cry from the BIL’s 70/30 split of the same numbers.

Where did these cuts come from? Successful programs from BIL that should have been built on were instead gutted:

• Carbon Reduction Program: repealed completely (-$6 billion compared to BIL)
  
• Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient, and Cost-Saving Transportation (PROTECT) Grants: cut the formula program, with some eligibilities added to the Surface Transportation Block Grant (-$6.2 billion, -71%)
  
• National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program and the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Program: cut (-$5 billion and -$2.5 billion, respectively), with a +$1 billion set-aside in the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program.
  
• Neighborhood Access and Equity Program/Reconnecting Communities: cut, except for an eligibility in the new consolidated Surface Transportation Accelerator Grant Program (-$1 billion)
  
• Active Transportation Infrastructure Investment Program (ATIIP): cut completely (-$1 billion)
  
• Healthy Streets Program: repealed completely (-$400 million)
  
• Reduction of Truck Emissions at Port Facilities: repealed completely (-$400 million)

The BIL helped these programs make change across the country, and the BUILD America 250 Act’s funding numbers threaten the progress that was made on those fronts. And meanwhile on the flip side, the bill proposes a new $130/year registration fee for electric vehicles and $35/year for plug-in hybrids that will increase in the future, which both disincentivizes people adopting lower emission vehicles while also barely making a dent in the funding gap for federal transportation.

Mixed results on holding agencies accountable

Amid a tumultuous year of cancelled, delayed, and otherwise disrupted federal grants, there have been increasing calls by the public and legislators for Congress to ensure that the laws that are passed will be carried out by the administration. Some, like Sen. Whitehouse, a lead negotiator for the surface transportation reauthorization on the Senate side, have been clear that the administration’s funding cuts and project cancellations would shut down negotiations unless they’re addressed.

The BUILD America 250 Act has one small guardrail (Sec. 1101(f)) to prevent the administration from terminating, withholding, or delaying a grant agreement on the basis of non-statutory goals or agency priorities, but it remains uncertain how effective it would be amid the many routes the administration has been taking to slow down good projects.

Meanwhile, on the state side, there is a new dynamic with the Consolidated State Block Grant program in the transit title (Sec. 3006) and the Consolidated Funding Pilot program in the highways title (Sec. 1128). Both are optional programs for states to take the reins of multiple programs, throw the money into a lump sum pot, and distribute it to their liking. In essence, this is the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials’ (AASHTO) request for more discretion and less accountability for how they use transportation funds. The worrisome part is if this functionality is used by states to shift away the remaining funding for affordable and sustainable transportation options towards other purposes.

As for other venues of accountability? Every mile of new roadway comes with a $47,300 annual cost (per lane) to keep in good repair — on top of an existing $216 billion backlog over 5 years. But there are no requirements for state departments of transportation to prioritize repair over expansion (aka fix-it-first). This will burden both transit riders and drivers with added costs and travel delays due to poor roadway conditions. Lastly, legislators failed to take the opportunity to make transportation planning at metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) more representative of the populations they serve, a key step the UCS recommends as a part of a democratic transportation system.

We need to BUILD something different

The bottom line is, the BUILD America 250 Act digs its heels into more roadways while robbing from the multitude of sustainable and affordable transportation options that the country needs. This means that people would be trapped in our current expensive, car-oriented system while giving away billions to the highway lobby for new highways without strong protections to ensure current infrastructure doesn’t crumble. With less support for transit and bike and pedestrian ways, in the end, we’ll spend more money and continue to pollute in order to get where we need to go.

This is just the first public draft, and UCS will continue to follow along as this bill develops. Coming up on the country’s 250^th anniversary – we have a crucial choice. Do we want to stay stuck in the fossil-fueled and car-dominated past? Or do we want to look towards an affordable, sustainable, and just future?

CORRECTION -5/20/26- We have corrected a previous version of this blog which reflects revised funding interpretations, corrected figures, and minor typographical fixes.

The reason for this diversity is that the US government actively invested in our science and technology enterprise. These large-scale federal investments resulted in world-class research facilities and broad opportunities—in academia, the private sector, and national laboratories—that created a virtuous cycle: reliable funding attracts talented scientists and STEM talent from abroad, yielding progress and discovery that benefit us all, like decoding the human genome, developing modern computing, and finding cures for rare cancers.

None of this scientific progress—or our STEM prominence on the world stage—would have been possible without immigrants. Immigrants make our country great, and they make science great too. People come from around the world—uprooting their lives and moving their families—for an opportunity to study and advance scientific pursuits in the United States. And our country has historically been committed to recruiting and retaining this global scientific talent. To be true, there’s room for improvement when it comes to diversifying US STEM programs and advancing fair access and treatment of people of color in STEM fields, and we should be focused on this improvement, rather than tearing down the progress we’ve made.

Betraying our scientific colleagues

But now, the United States is turning its back on the very communities that helped build its global prominence in science and technology. Over the last year, the Trump administration has implemented a number of anti-immigrant policies to the detriment of STEM students, postdocs, faculty, and workers—with devasting impacts on research and progress itself.

The Trump administration has created hurdles for international students, including by revoking student F-1 visas, banning immigrants from six countries, and aggressively targeting major universities that enroll students from abroad. The administration also tried to cut the indirect costs that help sustain students and early career researchers in academic settings. The Trump administration has also made it harder for scientists and engineers to come here and stay by targeting H-1B visas, a critical tool for recruiting and retaining top talent in the sciences.

Scientists who speak up on these issues might face consequences such as losing their jobs or legal status or being deported. For example, Chinese researchers at Indiana University were deported under the guise of national security concerns, and their advisor who spoke out against the administration’s actions faced FBI searches and was locked out of his lab in an apparent act of retaliation. These acts will undoubtedly cause more and more scientists to question whether the United States is the right place for them. These attacks are in addition to the administration’s cuts to research grants and federal science at large, and the specific efforts to cancel funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion elements of scientific research, as my colleague Sonja Spears recently wrote about.

The Trump administration’s unlawful and cruel crusade against immigrant communities has involved Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) using racial profiling tactics and violently terrorizing people in the streets—particularly Black and Brown people. The administration claims they are going after criminals, but innocent people—including scientists—are getting caught in their dragnet. For example, a Colombian civil engineer in Maine with a valid H-1B visa was violently removed from his car, held for a day, and left hours from his home. Acts like these serve as a warning to international students to stay away and will have a chilling effect on our ability to welcome foreign scientists who fear for their safety.

Together, these Trump-era policies are affecting the US STEM talent pipeline and send a signal that the United States is now a more hostile environment for international researchers who might otherwise bring their talents here. With this backdrop, it’s no surprise that recent data show there has already been a 20% drop in enrollment of international students coming to the United States and major academic conferences are choosing host cities outside US borders. The latter move further hits US-based international students, who need conference presentations and networking opportunities for career growth, but may not want to risk a trip outside the United States for fear they won’t be let back in. Hostilities on multiple fronts.

A generational loss for American science and humanity

The consequences of the Trump administration’s actions on immigration will have profound adverse impacts over time in STEM fields. They’ll have impacts on our doctors, engineers, architects, and healthcare workers. Immigrants are our professors, classmates, mentors, and students. No matter where you live and what you do, you can be certain that your life has been made better by a foreign-born scientist in more ways than you’ll ever know.

In 2025, half of the US Nobel Prize winners in science were immigrants. Immigrants also play an outsized role in innovation—representing just 16% of inventors but authoring 23% of patents. The world needs science, and science needs the world.

For those of us in the scientific community, we should stand in unity with our international colleagues. Foreign-born scientists’ presence and contributions are woven into the fabric of the STEM experience in the United States, and the world benefits from their immense contributions. We owe it to them to loudly and proudly stand by their side, and insist that our institutions do, too.

In the years since my graduate experience, I’ve had the chance to travel beyond the borders of the United States. I’ve visited my graduate school colleagues in their home countries, and presented at international scientific conferences. From those experiences, I’ve gotten to see the global reach and deep respect of the American science enterprise on the global stage. We built something amazing with the US federal science and technology enterprise, thanks to the ingenuity and commitment of a global science community. We must defend it and all the people who comprise it, no matter where they’re from.

Here is what that path looks like and how you can help pass this bill.

What the Scientific Integrity Act does

If enacted, the Scientific Integrity Act would protect federal science and scientists from political interference by requiring agencies to create and uphold strong scientific integrity standards. It would help ensure that policy decisions can be guided by independent, evidence-based science, while protecting scientists’ rights and strengthening accountability for abuses of power.  It would help to strengthen public trust in federal scientific research by keeping it free from political, ideological, or financial influence. And critically, it would codify these protections so they couldn’t be dismantled or ignored by an administration hostile to science.

And the Trump administration presents exactly that kind of serious danger to federal science and its ability to promote the public good. UCS researchers have identified 562 attacks on science since January 2025, and around 33% of those attacks are what we’d consider potential violations of scientific integrity . That includes instances when political officials delayed the release of scientific reports, ordered federal scientists to withdraw peer-reviewed studies from scientific journals, or redid analyses that produced results at odds with the administration’s policy preferences. The Scientific Integrity Act would put critical safeguards in place to ensure this never becomes the new normal.

Federal scientists monitor severe weather, study diseases and how to prevent them, and analyze the impacts of pollution to make sure laws like the Clean Air Act are effective. This work must be independent and free from political interference, censorship, retaliation, or intimidation. Those attacks can disrupt critical research and undermine public trust in government. Without a strong foundation of science and evidence, federal policy can be shaped by ideology or the financial interests of powerful corporate actors, at the expense of our health and safety. Scientific integrity policies don’t just protect scientists—they protect all of us.  

The legislative process

Now that Senator Schatz has introduced the bill, it will be referred to a committee–likely to the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, as it was the last time it was introduced into the Senate back in 2019. In order for the bill to advance to the Senate floor, the committee will need to:

1. Schedule a hearing, where witnesses will testify in support of or against the bill.
2. Schedule a markup, where Members will amend the bill.
3. Hold a vote on whether to send the amended bill to the Senate floor.

Each of those steps presents a challenge, starting with the fact that the decision on whether to hold the committee hearing rests largely with the majority of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, which is chaired by Senator Ted Cruz. A hearing would give the law’s proponents the opportunity to make their case, and allow lawmakers to hear from experts and better understand the need for stronger scientific integrity protections.

This is why supporters need to speak up now.

The Scientific Integrity Act is an important step toward ensuring that federal scientists can share their expertise honestly and that the public can rely on government science—but lawmakers need to hear from voters that it’s a priority. Our policymakers need to understand that having scientific integrity is not optional; it is non-negotiable. We need Scientific Integrity Act supporters to urge Congress to protect science from political interference and give this bill the hearing it deserves.

The House connection

With the Senate version now introduced, the Scientific Integrity Act has a renewed opportunity to gain momentum in both chambers. The House version, introduced by Representative Paul Tonko, has been referred to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. As of publishing of this blog, 132 Members of the House, including one Republican, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, had signed on as co-sponsors. However, despite that strong support, the House bill has not advanced since its introduction.

The Senate introduction changes the equation. For the first time in years, the Scientific Integrity Act has a real chance to advance through committee in both chambers. But that progress will not happen on its own. It will take the work of advocates across the country urging their members of Congress to give the bill the attention and action it deserves.

While the road ahead is challenging, we should recognize the importance of this moment. UCS has been working towards the introduction of this bill in the Senate for a long time, and it wouldn’t have happened without the engagement of scientists and science supporters across the country. We at UCS know the value of independent federal science and the risks we all face when it comes under attack. The Scientific Integrity Act would go a long way toward protecting the scientific research and science-based policies we all depend on. We can win—but we need your help.   

Y el político grueso
nos convida al progreso,
trayendo la amnesia total;
sustituye el alma
por concreto, con calma,
trayendo la amnesia total.

-Roy Brown, Yo no sé cual es la verdad

The Caribbean—and Puerto Rico in particular—is at the intersection of multiple, overlapping crises: climate, energy, economic, and political. These crises are not isolated; they compound one another dynamically, increasing vulnerability and dispossession for people and places in ways that are not accidental, but structural. Some of these crises are colliding: in 2024, climate-fueled extreme heat exposed nearly all affordable housing residents in Puerto Rico to multiple days of dangerous heat. By 2050, an alarming number of critical infrastructure assets on which Puerto Ricans depend to live their lives could be underwater at least twice per year due to flooding from sea-level rise alone. Compounding this dire climate reality is the historical context of colonial subordination: for more than a century, the key decisions that affect Puerto Ricans are made outside of Puerto Rico.

Now, a proposed bill in the Puerto Rico legislature threatens to dispossess Puerto Ricans of their cultural and constitutionally protected coastal heritage. This bill will restrict public access to beaches and facilitate maladaptive private coastal development at a time when the climate, energy, and affordable housing crises require safeguarding coastal assets.

The climate and energy crises in Puerto Rico cannot be ignored

Sea level rise, accelerated coastal erosion, and powerful hurricanes worsened by climate change are reshaping the Puerto Rican archipelago. Coastal and inland flooding are no longer an exception; they are becoming the norm, threatening homes, critical infrastructure, and ecosystems. These changes carry direct consequences, such as displacement of coastal communities, loss of habitable land, contamination of aquifers and sanitation systems, impacts on fisheries and food security, and compromised evacuation routes during emergencies.

At the same time, reliance on fossil fuels for energy generation exacerbates these multiple crises. Burning fossil fuels not only contributes to the emissions driving climate change, but also imposes disproportionate social and economic costs: high electricity rates, grid instability, and persistent vulnerability following extreme weather events.

In the aftermath of Hurricane María in 2017, Puerto Rico experienced significant property devaluation, especially in vulnerable areas. Combined with a mass outmigration of Puerto Ricans, this created conditions ripe for accelerated land and property acquisition.

Beaches and other coastal zones: a new front of dispossession

While real estate investors—both local and foreign—and so-called “digital nomads” acquire property and land on the island, Puerto Rican government officials create policies that favor outside investors and disadvantage Puerto Ricans, distorting the real estate market and increasing barriers to affordable housing. Now a new front in the Puerto Rican legal landscape has been opened that threatens to deny Puerto Ricans access to their coastal zones and accelerate dispossession.

In Puerto Rico, coastal zones have historically been in the public domain, accessible and usable by all, and are culturally significant spaces that also provide protection from climate impacts. These sites are now a battleground between Puerto Rican communities and investors, and a government that often prioritizes investors over the wellbeing of Puerto Ricans. Struggles over coastal areas are linked to the worsening social and economic situations in the aftermath of María, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2019-2020 earthquake sequence. As the cost of living—in particular, housing and energy—continues to rise, Puerto Ricans are being displaced from their homes, excluded from decision-making, and left at the mercy of real estate speculation.

Puerto Rico’s House Bill 25 (PC 25), which proposes to redefine and reduce the Maritime-Terrestrial Zone (MTZ), seeks to considerably shrink the MTZ, giving the public domain away to private property owners. It is driven by a growing demand for coastal luxury developments, whose developers and investors seek to change legal and constitutional protections to the public’s access to beaches and other coastal areas. Indeed, the bill was authored by the Puerto Rico Builders Association. PC 25 emerges amid intensifying climate impacts and mounting coastal development pressure. Coastal areas are no longer just ecological or recreational spaces; they have become a colonial fault line, where access, control, and belonging are being renegotiated.

What is the Maritime-Terrestrial Zone?

The Maritime-Terrestrial Zone (MTZ) is a coastal asset in Puerto Rico’s public domain protected by the constitution of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. It is defined by a 1968 law as “the coastal zone of Puerto Rico—washed by the sea in its ebb and flow, where the tides are perceptible [i.e, measurable], and by the greatest waves during storms in those places where the tides are not perceptible” (Google translation). This means that the MTZ:

• Includes all land reached by the tides, but also by waves from tropical cyclones
• Belongs to all people and is not subject to private use
• Cannot be purchased, sold, titled, or impounded

In addition, there are restrictions on permanent construction inland from the MTZ that provide buffers of protection against climate impacts.

Currently, the MTZ includes the portion of the coastline that is washed by the tides, as well as by waves from tropical cyclones. The Puerto Rico Department of Natural & Environmental Resources (DRNA in Spanish) is the state agency tasked with the conservation and protection of the MTZ. The DRNA also establishes the boundaries of the MTZ with respect to private property. Puerto Rican law also establishes a series of consecutive easements 50 meters long inland from the MTZ where no permanent structures may be built (see this planning law blog for an excellent explanation in Spanish).

The Maritime-Terrestrial Zone provides social, economic, ecological, and climatic benefits

The MTZ is the reason why Puerto Ricans and visitors have been able to freely enjoy and make use of the many beaches, rivers, and coastal areas of the archipelago. Free access to navigation along waterways, tourism, and food security from fishing and other coastal and riverine economic activities in Puerto Rico’s blue economy (worth $2.3 billion in 2022 according to NOAA!) are made possible by the MTZ.  Mangroves, coral reefs, and other natural barriers help buffer climate impacts, including coastal erosion and storm surge—all thanks to the protections of the MTZ. The MTZ protects the Puerto Rican shorelines from private, haphazard, and maladaptive development. Sites of archaeological importance along the coastal areas are also protected from development by the MTZ.

PC 25 ignores climate science to reduce the MTZ

PC 25 proposes to change the legal definition of the MTZ by using the reach of the astronomical tide as its criterion—based on NOAA’s tide gauges—and eliminating the second criterion of using the reach of the waves during cyclonic storms. With this change, the public domain of the MTZ would end where the tide reaches the shore, typically identified by where sargassum, seaweed, or other debris is washed ashore by the tides. If this bill were to pass, the only part of the beach that beachgoers could place their chairs on would be the wet sand that the tides have reached. But reducing the public coastal zone is not just problematic for beachgoers. It would also deprive Puerto Rico of critical protections against flooding from storm surge, sea-level rise, and coastal erosion, and would likely result in privatized access to coastal areas, with negative impacts for public beach access, housing affordability, tourism, and the blue economy.

What’s the problem with using only the tides to redefine the MTZ? The coastal environment in Puerto Rico is microtidal, barely reaching a vertical range of 0.3-0.4 meters (so it does not contribute much to shaping the coastline). What really accounts for shaping the Puerto Rican coastline are waves, swells, tropical storms, storm surge, and climate variability—processes with much larger magnitudes than tides, according to testimony submitted by Dr. Miguel Canals, director of the Center for Applied Ocean Science & Engineering of the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez campus, and a tidal dynamics expert. In a world without sea-level rise, without powerful hurricanes, without catastrophic storm surge, or widespread coastal flooding and erosion, an MTZ defined only by tides would increase private property boundaries—as the authors of the bill (again, the Puerto Rico Builders Association) no doubt are counting on in order to facilitate coastal development. Redefining the MTZ based on tides will legally shrink the MTZ, effectively rendering it entirely a maritime zone with no terrestrial component. The portion that will be underwater will be unsuitable for many users, namely beachgoers (who don’t generally set up their chairs in wet sand!) and to homeowners who buy and then lose to the sea the properties built by the same developers that authored the bill.

Excluding cyclonic storms from a new definition of the MTZ will have the effect of ignoring not only wave height, but also storm surge that could reach higher and further inland with sea-level rise. Clearly, the proposed redefinition of the MTZ willfully ignores the very real impact of climate change in reshaping the Puerto Rican coastline. For example, a study found that most beaches experienced loss of elevation and width following María in 2017. And no consideration of future sea-level rise (projected for Puerto Rico to range between 0.33-3.75 meters by 2100 across low to extremely high emissions scenarios) or coastal erosion is included in PC 25.

PC 25 says it intends to conserve and protect—but does the opposite

Another mind-boggling aspect of PC 25 is its invocation of Regulation 4860 of the DRNA to justify its choices for including and excluding certain scientific data. Regulation 4860 pertains to the administration and conservation of territorial waters, submerged lands within, and the MTZ. It was adopted in 1992 to provide guidance to update the MTZ according to “scientific breakthroughs, environmental public policy, and current needs related to conservation and preservation of the MTZ” (our translation). But as we have seen, PC 25 does exactly the opposite of that. It excludes the latest science on climate-worsened cyclonic storms from the proposed MTZ definition, is out of tune with the constitutional principle of preservation and conservation of natural resources, and ignores the current (and future!) need to protect the entire MTZ from climate impacts.

PC 25 could have far-reaching consequences for coastal management and development under a changed climate. This proposed change requires a comprehensive discussion that includes the opinions of experts and community members from multiple areas of civil society. But the proposed bill is not informed by key scientific voices—and multiple Puerto Rican scientific institutions and professional societies have registered their concerns about the lack of adequate scientific data in the PC 25 draft.

And who stands to benefit from the reduction of the MTZ? It is telling that the Puerto Rico Builders Association drafted the law. An MTZ redefined as proposed in PC 25 would facilitate maladaptive and haphazard coastal development by private developers, who would reap short-term profits from the sale of coastal investments that would be chronically flooded and eroded in years, and swallowed in decades by the encroaching seas.

The MTZ needs to be expanded, not reduced

Reducing the MTZ as proposed by PC 25 ignores the scientific evidence of climate change and contradicts the fundamentals of climate-resilient planning. It also violates the Puerto Rican constitution’s mandate that natural resources be protected. Shrinking these zones exposes communities and common resources to greater risk.

Building infrastructure in coastal zones that will be encroached by the seas will result in the loss of investments and potentially lives. Puerto Rican geomorphologist and UPR professor Dr. José Molinelly Freytes said recently that the MZT needs to be extended inland because climate change is resulting in ever-more dramatic coastline losses. Similar opinions were shared by Pedro Cardona-Roig, an urban planner who served on the Puerto Rico Planning Board: “What is being proposed is reckless and illogical, because what we should be doing is the exact opposite: enlarge the [MTZ] space in order to have a buffer zone and ensure that the encroaching waves do not affect life and property”.

The MTZ should be understood as a dynamic, shifting boundary—not a fixed line—whose definition must incorporate sea-level rise projections, storm surge potential, coastal erosion rates, flood risk assessments, and adaptation needs for critical infrastructure.

Civic organizations are mobilizing to stop PC 25

Scientific societies are not the only ones who are taking action to stop PC 25. Community-based organizations like Murciélagos Beach Defenders (MBD)—whose mission is to safeguard public and free access to Puerto Rico’s beaches— have outlined a set of grounded, justice-oriented recommendations that should serve as a baseline for responsible policy:

• Review and adapt the definition of the Maritime-Terrestrial Zone to expand and conserve it
• Guarantee public, free, safe, and equitable access to Puerto Rico’s coastal zones
• Establish binding community participation in all public policy decisions
• Require the use of scientific criteria and empirical evidence, including climate impacts, in policymaking
• Adopt a comprehensive, multidisciplinary planning approach in environmental policy, legislation, and land-use and permitting regulations

These are not aspirational goals; they are necessary conditions to protect lives, local economies, and ecosystems. Research and advocacy from the Union of Concerned Scientists conveys a similar tone by consistently underscoring that resilience cannot exist without justice. In Puerto Rico, this means:

• Transitioning to distributed renewable energy systems
• Centering equity in post-disaster recovery
• Integrating community-based and feminist frameworks into planning
• Aligning public policy with the best available science on how climate change is reshaping the present and future

So: let’s recap. Why is this bill bad?

1. Restricts the coastal public domain which will dispossess Puerto Ricans from enjoying their constitutionally protected beaches and other coastal areas
2. Increases the potential for maladaptive private coastal development that will likely be chronically flooded anyway in a few decades—which can lead to increasing impacts of sea-level rise and storm surge flooding, which already getting worse due to climate change
3. Does the opposite of what is needed, which is to increase the MTZ to create buffers that will protect the coast from worsening climate impacts.

The evidence is unequivocal: meaningful resilience will remain out of reach as long as structural inequalities in access to land, coastal areas, energy, and resources persist. Puerto Rico stands at a critical juncture. Decisions made today about coastal management, energy systems, and land use will define not only our ability to adapt to climate change but also the kind of society that emerges from it. The question is not whether the territory will continue to change; that is already happening. The question is who bears the costs and who benefits from those changes.

The coast is not a commodity. It is memory, sustenance, protection, and the future. To defend it is, fundamentally, to defend life.

If you live in Puerto Rico, take action here to say NO to PC25.

Y el político grueso
nos convida al progreso,
trayendo la amnesia total;
sustituye el alma
por concreto, con calma,
trayendo la amnesia total.

-Roy Brown, Yo no sé cual es la verdad

El Caribe—y Puerto Rico en particular—se encuentra en la encrucijada de múltiples crisis que se traslapan: climática, energética, económica, y política. Dichas crisis no están aisladas; se alimentan una a la otra dinámicamente, incrementando la vulnerabilidad y el despojo de la población a su entorno natural de forma estructural, y no accidental.

Algunas de estas son crisis chocantes: en 2024, el calor extremo acrecentado por el cambio climático expuso a casi todos los residentes de vivienda asequible en Puerto Rico a muchos días de temperaturas peligrosamente altas. Para el año 2050, un alarmante número de instalaciones de infraestructura esencial costera de la cual dependen los puertorriqueños a diario estarán bajo agua por lo menos dos veces al año — solamente debido al incremento en el nivel del mar. Esta difícil realidad climática se complica con el hecho histórico de que la precariedad moderna en Puerto Rico toma forma debido a la subordinación colonial: hace más de un siglo que las decisiones que afectan las vidas del pueblo puertorriqueño se toman fuera de Puerto Rico.

Ahora una nueva propuesta de ley en la legislatura puertorriqueña pretende despojar al pueblo de Puerto Rico de su paisaje costero que al presente está protegido por la constitución.  Dicha propuesta, de convertirse en ley, limitaría el acceso público a las playas y facilitaría un desarrollo costero privado en momentos en que la crisis climática, energética, y de asequibilidad de vivienda exigen la protección y conservación de los recursos costeros.

La crisis climática y energética en Puerto Rico

El aumento en el nivel del mar, la erosión costera, y feroces huracanes empeorados por el cambio climático alteran el paisaje del archipiélago de Puerto Rico. Las inundaciones costeras, ribereñas y tierra adentro son la norma y no la excepción, lo cual pone en riesgo vidas y viviendas, así como la infraestructura esencial y los ecosistemas. Estos cambios tienen consecuencias visibles: comunidades costeras desplazadas, pérdida de terrenos habitables, contaminación de acuíferos y sistemas de saneamiento, impactos en áreas de pesca y seguridad alimentaria, y rutas de desalojo en peligro.

Simultáneamente, la dependencia en combustibles fósiles para la generación de energía eléctrica agrava las múltiples facetas de la crisis. La quema de fósiles no solo contribuye a las emisiones que causan el cambio climático, sino que también impone elevadas y muy desiguales cargas sociales y económicas: altos costos energéticos, inestabilidad en la red de generación y distribución eléctrica, y vulnerabilidad que persiste entre la población durante y después de eventos climatológicos extremos.

Después del Huracán María en 2017, Puerto Rico atravesó por una vertiginosa devaluación inmobiliaria, especialmente en las áreas más vulnerables. Esto se combinó con un éxodo masivo, lo cual creó las condiciones para una transferencia acelerada de terrenos e inmobiliario.

Las playas y otras zonas costeras son fallas coloniales de despojo

Mientras que los inversionistas—tanto locales como extranjeros—y los llamados nómadas digitales adquieren inmuebles, el gobierno de Puerto Rico establece políticas públicas para favorecer a los inversionistas, las cuales ponen en desventaja a los puertorriqueños, distorsionando el mercado inmobiliario y dificultando el acceso a la vivienda asequible. Así las cosas, se abre un nuevo frente en el ámbito legal que amenaza con limitar el acceso a la costa y acelerar el despojo costero.

En Puerto Rico, la costa es un bien común con larga trayectoria en el dominio público, con acceso y disfrute públicos, a la vez que un espacio con gran sentido cultural que también brinda protección contra los impactos climáticos. Dichas costas se han convertido en un campo de batalla entre el pueblo de Puerto Rico e inversionistas y un gobierno que atiende los deseos de los inversionistas y no del pueblo. La lucha por el uso de las zonas costeras está ligada a la crisis social y económica después del Huracán María, la pandemia del COVID-19, y la secuencia de temblores de 2019-2020. Mientras el costo de vida—en particular los costos de vivienda y energéticos—siguen subiendo, el pueblo de Puerto Rico es desplazado de sus hogares, excluidos del proceso de toma de decisiones, y a la merced de la especulación en bienes y raíces.

El Proyecto de la Cámara 25 (PC25), el cual propone redefinir la Zona Marítimo-Terrestre (ZMT) busca reducir por mucho la ZMT, otorgando el dominio público a los dueños de propiedad privada. Dicho proyecto está impulsado por la creciente demanda de desarrollos costeros de lujo, cuyos desarrollistas e inversionistas buscan evadir las protecciones constitucionales que garantizan el acceso libre y público a las playas y otras zonas costeras. Y efectivamente, el proyecto fue redactado por la Asociación de Constructores de Puerto Rico. El PC25 emerge entre impactos climáticos en alzada y presión para incrementar el desarrollo costero. Las zonas costeras ya no son meramente espacios ecológicos o de esparcimiento. Se han convertido en una falla de despojo colonial, donde el acceso, el control, y el sentido de pertenencia están cambiando.

¿Qué es la Zona Marítimo-Terrestre?

La Zona Marítimo-Terrestre es un bien de dominio público protegido por la constitución del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico. Está definida por una ley de 1968 como “el espacio de las costas de Puerto Rico que baña el mar en su flujo y reflujo, en donde son sensibles las mareas, y las mayores olas en los temporales en donde las mareas no son sensibles, e incluye los terrenos ganados al mar y las márgenes de los ríos hasta el sitio en que sean navegables o se hagan sensibles las mareas”. Esto significa que la ZMT:

• Incluye la parte de la costa que mojan las mareas, pero también las olas que crean los ciclones tropicales.
• Pertenece a todas las personas, no está sujeto a usos privados
• No puede ser comprada, vendida, escriturada a particulares, o embargada.

Adicionalmente, existen protecciones que prohíben la construcción de estructuras permanentes tierra adentro de la MTZ, las cuales proveen protección contra los impactos climáticos.

Al presente, la ZMT incluye la porción de la costa que mojan las mareas. así como las olas de los ciclones tropicales. El Departamento de Recursos Naturales (DRNA) es la agencia en Puerto Rico encargada de proteger y conservar la ZMT. El DRNA también establece los límites (o deslindes) que separan la ZMT de la propiedad privada. La ley en Puerto Rico establece una serie de servidumbres desde el límite de la ZMT 50 metros tierra adentro donde está prohibida la construcción de estructuras permanentes (este artículo contiene una excelente explicación.)

La ZMT brinda beneficios socioeconómicos, ecológicos y climáticos

Gracias a la ZMT el pueblo de Puerto Rico y los turistas pueden disfrutar libremente y hacer uso de las muchas playas, ríos, y zonas costeras del archipiélago. La libre navegación en los cuerpos de agua, el turismo, y la seguridad alimentaria mediante la pesca y otras actividades en la economía azul en costas y ríos (con un valor estimado de 2,3 mil millones de dólares en 2022 según NOAA) es posible gracias a la ZMT.

Los manglares, arrecifes de coral y otras barreras naturales protegen la costa de impactos climáticos como la erosión costera y las marejadas ciclónicas—también cortesía de la ZMT. La ZMT protege la costa puertorriqueña del desarrollo costero privatizado, atropellado y mal alineado con las necesidades de adaptación climática de Puerto Rico.  Las áreas de valor arqueológico tanto como hábitats de especies anfibias a lo largo del litoral también están protegidas del desarrollo por la ZMT.

El PC25 hace caso omiso de la ciencia climática

El PC 25 propone usar el “mayor desplazamiento horizontal de la marea astronómica durante los equinoccios” en base a los mareógrafos de NOAA como criterio para cambiar la definición legal de la ZMT, eliminando el segundo criterio en la definición existente que incluye el alcance de las olas durante tormentas ciclónicas. Con este cambio, el dominio público de la ZMT terminaría donde la marea moja la arena, usualmente donde el sargazo, algas marinas u otros escombros son llevados a tierra por la marea.

Si esta propuesta se convierte en ley, la parte de la playa donde podrán poner su silla de playa los bañistas sería en la arena mojada por la marea. Pero esto no es un mero inconveniente para los que gustan disfrutar de la playa; también privaría a Puerto Rico de protecciones esenciales en contra de marejadas ciclónicas, incremento en el nivel del mar, y erosión costera, y fácilmente resultaría en la privatización de zonas costeras. Todo esto traerá nocivas consecuencias para el libre acceso a las playas, acceso a la vivienda, el turismo, y la economía azul.

¿Cuál es el problema con usar solo el nivel la marea para redefinir la ZMT? El litoral de Puerto Rico es micromareal, alcanzando apenas un rango vertical de 0,3-0,4 metros, o sea, que no contribuye la gran cosa a la morfología de la costa. Los factores que realmente cambian la forma de la costa en Puerto Rico son el oleaje, los ciclones tropicales, las marejadas ciclónicas, y la variabilidad climática—procesos con amplitudes mucho más grandes que las mareas, según el testimonio sometido por el Dr. Miguel Canals, director del Center for Applied Ocean Science & Engineering de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Mayagüez y experto en la dinámica de las mareas.

En un mundo sin cambio climático, sin potentes huracanes, sin marejadas ciclónicas desastrosas, y sin inundaciones ni erosión costera, una ZMT definida solamente en base a las mareas incrementaría el tamaño de la propiedad privada costera como indudablemente esperan que ocurra los autores de la medida (como ya dijimos—la Asociación de Constructores de Puerto Rico) para facilitar el desarrollo costero. Pero vivimos en un mundo con un clima alterado que hace que el mar se trague la costa, de manera que redefinir la ZMT solamente en base a la marea va a reducir de manera legal la ZMT, eventualmente convirtiéndola en una zona marítima—sin componente terrestre. La porción que esté bajo agua no podrá ser fácilmente utilizada. Por ejemplo, los bañistas usualmente no van ponen sus sillas en la arena mojada. También saldrán perjudicados los que compren, y luego pierdan, sus inmuebles cuando se los trague el mar—inmuebles construidos por los mismos desarrollistas que escribieron la ley.

Excluir las tormentas ciclónicas de la nueva definición del ZMT intencionalmente hace caso omiso del muy real impacto del cambio climático en la morfología del litoral boricua. Por ejemplo, un estudio determinó que la mayoría de las playas en Puerto Rico perdieron elevación y amplitud después del Huracán María en 2017. Las proyecciones de incremento en el nivel del mar para Puerto Rico (entre 0,33-3,75 metros para el año 2100 en base a un rango de escenarios de emisiones bajas a extremadamente altas), tanto como de erosión costera—las cuales cambiarán la MTZ—no fueron incluidas en el borrador del PC25.

El PC25 dice que plantea conservar y proteger—pero hace lo contrario

Otro aspecto desconcertante del PC25 es que menciona el Reglamento 4860 del DRNA para justificar el uso arbitrario tanto de datos como de la realidad climática. El Reglamento 4860 compete al manejo y conservación de las aguas territoriales, los terrenos sumergidos bajo estas y la ZMT. Fue adoptado en 1992 para actualizar la ZMT de acuerdo a avances científicos, política pública ambiental, y necesidades actuales relacionadas a la protección y preservación de la ZMT. Pero como hemos visto, el PC25 hace exactamente lo contrario: Hace caso omiso de los avances científicos de la ciencia climática al obviar los efectos de las tormentas ciclónicas en la definición del ZMT, no está a tono con el principio constitucional de preservar y conservar los recursos naturales, e ignora las necesidades actuales (y a futuro) de proteger la ZMT de los impactos climáticos.

El PC25 pudiera traer graves consecuencias para el manejo y desarrollo costero de un Puerto Rico que se enfrenta a su difícil realidad climática. Los cambios propuestos por el PC25 requieren una discusión exhaustiva que incluya la opinión y el sentir de expertos científicos y miembros de la comunidad de toda la sociedad civil. Pero el borrador del proyecto no cuenta con el peritaje de voces científicas clave—muchas instituciones científicas y profesionales han expresado sus preocupaciones sobre la falta de criterios científicos adecuados en el PC25.

¿Y quién se beneficiaría de las reducciones de la ZMT? Es muy revelador el hecho de que la Asociación de Constructores de Puerto Rico haya redactado la propuesta de ley. Una ZMT redefinida en la forma en que propone el PC25 facilitaría el desarrollo costero atropellado (y mal alineado con las necesidades de adaptación climática) por parte de los desarrollistas, quienes generarían cuantiosas sumas de dinero en el corto plazo por la venta de inmuebles costeros que se verían crónicamente bajo agua en apenas unos años y tragados por el mar en décadas.

La ZMT debe ser ampliada—no reducida

La reducción de la ZMT propuesta por el PC25 hace caso omiso de la evidencia científica del cambio climático y contradice los principios más fundamentales de la planificación resiliente al clima. De paso, violenta el mandato constitucional de protección y conservación de los recursos naturales en Puerto Rico.

Construir infraestructura en zonas costeras que serán devoradas por el mar resultará en pérdidas materiales y posiblemente de vidas humanas.  El geomorfólogo puertorriqueño y profesor de la UPR, el Dr. José Molinelly Freyes dijo recientemente que la ZMT debe expandirse tierra adentro porque Puerto Rico está perdiendo cada vez más sus costas debido al cambio climático. Pedro Cardona-Roig, planificador urbano y quien en años pasados formó parte de la Junta de Planificación de Puerto Rico, ofreció una opinión similar: “Es imprudente y es ilógico lo que se está proponiendo porque lo que debiéramos estar haciendo es totalmente lo contrario: es ampliar ese espacio para tener un área de amortiguamiento y estar seguros de que la energía de la ola no afecte la vida y propiedad”.

Debemos pensar en la ZMT como un límite elástico y cambiante, y no como una línea fija, cuya definición debe incorporar proyecciones sobre incremento en el nivel del mar, marejadas ciclónicas en potencia, la velocidad con la que avanza la erosión costera, evaluaciones de riesgos de inundación tanto como las necesidades de adaptación climática de la infraestructura esencial.

La sociedad civil está en pie de lucha para detener el PC25

Las instituciones científicas no son las únicas que están tomando acción para detener el PC25. Organizaciones de base comunitaria como Murciélagos Beach Defenders (MBD), cuya misión es proteger el acceso libre y gratuito a las playas de Puerto Rico, han creado una serie de recomendaciones enfocadas en la justicia social y ambiental que deben ser integradas en la creación de política pública responsable:

• Revisar y adaptar la definición de la Zona Marítimo-Terrestre para expandirla y conservarla
• Garantizar el acceso público, libre, seguro y equitativo a las zonas costeras de Puerto Rico
• Facilitar la participación comunitaria vinculante en todas las decisiones de política pública
• Requerir el uso de criterios científicos, inclusive de la evidencia sobre impactos climáticos, en la formulación de política pública
• Adoptar un enfoque abarcador y multidisciplinario en materia de política ambiental, legislación, y gestión de permisos de uso de terrenos.

Estas metas no son aspiraciones; son esenciales para proteger vidas, economías locales y ecosistemas.

La investigación científica y la gestión de la Unión de Científicos Conscientes recalca que la resiliencia climática no puede existir si no hay justicia. En Puerto Rico, esto significa que se debe hacer lo siguiente:

• Crear la transición hacia la generación de electricidad en base a fuentes renovables
• Centrar la equidad social en la recuperación después de un desastre
• Integrar marcos de base comunitaria y feministas en la planificación
• Alinear la política pública con la ciencia que informa como el cambio climático altera nuestro presente y futuro

En resumen: ¿Por qué es tan nocivo el PC25?

1. Reduce el bien de dominio público costero, lo cual despojará al pueblo de Puerto Rico del uso y disfrute de sus playas y otras zonas costeras cuyo acceso al presente está protegido por la constitución puertorriqueña.
2. Aumenta la probabilidad de desarrollos costeros privados no alineados con las necesidades de adaptación climática, los cuales de todos modos se inundarán crónicamente en apenas unos años o serán tragados por el mar en décadas.
3. Hace lo opuesto de que lo hace falta, que es expandir la ZMT para crear umbrales que protejan la costa de los impactos climáticos que empeoran cada año.

La evidencia es inequívoca: la resiliencia de Puerto Rico ante el cambio climático estará fuera de su alcance en tanto y en cuanto persistan las desigualdades en el acceso a la tierra, energía y otros recursos. Puerto Rico se encuentra en una encrucijada crucial; las decisiones que se tomen hoy en materia de manejo costero, generación energética y uso de suelos definirán no solamente la capacidad de adaptarse al cambio climático, sino también el tipo de sociedad que emergerá de la misma. La pregunta no es si el archipiélago continuará cambiando—eso ya está ocurriendo. La pregunta es ¿quién carga con el costo y quién se beneficia de esos cambios?

La costa puertorriqueña no es mercancía. Es memoria, sustento, protección y futuro. Defenderla es, ante todo, defender la vida.

Si vives en Puerto Rico, toma acción aquí para decirle NO al PC25.

His work—growing federal climate policies and programs from the ground up and helping create climate-informed resources with US government decision makers and communities—showed Reyes firsthand how science-guided leadership brings about positive, sustainable outcomes that benefit us all. And he’s watched in disbelief as the Trump administration has dismantled essential agencies that would protect farmers, ranchers, and foresters and help them understand and prepare for climate risks.

The Trump administration’s plan to slash the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service offices and relocate and consolidate its research and development (R&D) facilities would also potentially abandon generational investments in critical forestry data, samples, and resources. This would leave land managers, firefighters, and decision makers without the crucial information they need to manage climate risks and protect US forests from wildfires growing in frequency and intensity. These long-term data are irreplaceable and can help us solve future problems no one has conceived of yet.

There’s also a more immediate concern: what gutting the Forest Service means for the US as it faces what’s expected to be a severe wildfire season.

We spoke with Julian Reyes about what happens if President Donald Trump’s administration carries out a sweeping US Forest Service restructuring, and what he thinks its iconic mascot Smokey Bear would say about the plan.

AAS: What’s important about the US Forest Service that has you and UCS concerned about the restructuring?

Julian Reyes: In addition to the very important firefighting capabilities at the Forest Service, agency scientists also provide a critical line of defense for our nearly 200 million acres of national forests and grasslands through scientific understanding of the complex nature of climate change and its role in longer, more intense wildfire seasons and increased insect and disease outbreaks.

The expansive restructuring of the agency, which includes moving headquarters to Utah and spreading staff to the winds, is irreversibly destructive to the federal scientific enterprise and leaves the nation to face growing climate threats with fewer experts predicting and managing wildfires. It also leaves us less equipped to protect forests that provide clean air and water, and less able to support many rural livelihoods. More importantly, the reshuffling of Forest Service staff poses an imminent threat as hotter, drier conditions across much of the country are setting up dangerous wildfire risks in the coming months.

AAS: The Forest Service restructuring plan is part of an ongoing pattern of attacks on science from the administration. What kind of impact will this latest attack have?

Julian Reyes: As National Coordinator for the USDA Climate Hubs program, I worked hand-in-hand with many Forest Service R&D scientists, the very same ones who are being uprooted from their research stations. I also fondly remember meeting  Smokey Bear for the first time at the San Bernardino National Forest while learning about their wildfire control strategies and research. Seeing the news about the relocation and reorganization made me very sad for my Forest Service colleagues, knowing that the next few years will require many to leave the agency, move states, and/or switch careers completely. Truly devastating.

Forest Service R&D scientists were essential to bringing their perspectives on climate-related impacts and adaptation on forestlands, including their interplay with agriculture. For example, the Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station collaborated with regional geneticists to build the Seedlot Selection Tool, which helps forest managers match planting materials based on current and future climates.

Another important resource that may no longer be updated, or may be lost, is the Fire Management Adaptation Menu, produced by the USDA Northern Forests Climate Hub and Forest Service Northern Research Station. Losing this critical information would take away tools that help land managers anticipate climate change impacts and identify steps they can take to adapt forests to changing fire regimes. These are just two of many examples of what will be lost.

AAS: What lessons have we learned from previous Trump administration agency reshuffling, and what do they tell us about this plan will work?

Julian Reyes: We can get some insight into what the impact will be from similar moves by the first Trump administration’s relocation of the USDA’s Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture, as well as the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Headquarters. These moves yielded negative results and decimated those agencies.  Relocation of federal agencies outside of Washington, DC, was a tactic by the first Trump administration to diminish the use of science, data, and evidence in decision making. In 2019, the USDA’s ERS and National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) were moved to Kansas City for flimsy reasons like “cost savings,” to “provide better customer service,” and “better attract and retain staff.”

Likewise, the BLM, a major federal land management agency and partner to the Forest Service, had its headquarters moved “out West” to Grand Junction. Already, 97% of BLM staff were located in the western United States. And according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), nearly half of the relocated staff declined reassignment, and the agency’s reorganization efforts did not yield effective reforms.

Having worked at BLM headquarters in 2024, I can share my personal observation that the agency was still hamstrung from the 2019 relocation with decreased staffing, missing expertise, and loss of institutional knowledge.

I see a parallel here with Forest Service headquarters being moved to Salt Lake City. It will disrupt key services and important research, accelerating the demise of its world-class research. After seeing what happened at BLM, ERS, and NIFA, I believe the Forest Service will be less effective at coordinating issues across states and less visible in important policy conversations with other land management agencies.

The disastrous effects of President Trump’s recent push to deregulate industry have been most visible in the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) chaos. The now largely defunct department’s haphazard cuts, combined with budget proposals to slash funding and staffing for dozens of federal agencies, make the sole purpose of these moves clear: the destruction of competency, experience, and effectiveness at federal agencies. The administration is not seeking efficiencies or savings: they are seeking to clear a more profitable path for special interests through the exploitation of public goods like our national forests. Industry only profits from horizontal trees, not vertical ones.

If the Trump administration were to move forward with this restructuring as planned, Forest Service R&D would join research efforts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as casualties of this administration’s deliberate, dangerous subterfuge.

AAS: How exactly does moving scientists to different sites negatively affect Forest Service research?

Julian Reyes: The More than Just Parks Substack explains the impact of relocating scientists well:

“You cannot move a thirty-year watershed study. You cannot relocate a decades-long old-growth monitoring program. You cannot box up a forest and ship it to Colorado. When these facilities close, the experiments die. The datasets end. The partnerships with universities that took generations to build collapse. And the institutional knowledge of the scientists who ran those programs walks out the door, because the administration damn well knows most of them won’t follow a forced relocation to a single consolidated office that has nothing to do with the ecosystems they’ve spent their careers studying.”

By its own account, Forest Service R&D is the “world’s leading wildland fire research organization.” This work includes how climate change alters fuel moisture and fire behavior through warmer and drier conditions. And the science is clear—the wildfires burning now aren’t the same fires that burned 30 years ago. They are burning at higher elevations, over longer fire seasons, growing with greater speed, and under more extreme fire weather conditions.

These longer, more intense wildfire seasons are destroying homes, livelihoods, and lives. In addition, costly wildfire seasons are driving up property insurance premiums and contributing to rising housing affordability challenges, according to UCS Senior Policy Director for Climate and Energy Rachel Cleetus. As my colleague succinctly put it, “Without robust science, staffing, expertise, and resources, as well as fair pay for wildland firefighters, the job of tackling worsening wildfire seasons will be much harder—and that could put people in greater danger.”

The scale of disruption across R&D sites will yield a significant brain drain and push scientific discovery back decades, especially on issues relevant to the Forest Service: wildfires, pests, post-fire restoration, and more.

AAS: You’ve met Smokey Bear. What do you think he’d say about the Trump administration’s Forest Service restructuring plan?

As Smokey Bear has taught millions, only YOU can prevent forest fires. In this case, only YOU really can prevent literal forest fires by fighting the Trump administration’s plan to dismantle the Forest Service and ensuring that critical science on wildfires, climate, and carbon continues.

In a recent blog post, I wrote about how the Trump administration’s effort to shutter 57 of its 77 research and development facilities isn’t really about efficiency—it’s about hollowing out another science agency whose mission is to protect people, places, and livelihoods.

The Forest Service has since updated the text on its website to qualify that these research and development (R&D) closures are “possible” but not a foregone conclusion. Yet, as details of the restructuring emerge, they make one thing painfully clear: this plan would dismantle the world’s premier, and largest, wildfire research agency at a time when wildfire risk, climate impacts, and economic losses are accelerating. I think Smokey would agree that it’s disgraceful.

AAS: What can people reading this do?

Julian Reyes: Right now, we can call or email our congresspeople and tell them to protect critical forest management research. We can demand that Congress reverse the gutting of the US Forest Service. There is much to lose if we don’t speak out against these harmful actions. We’ve seen the administration make a show of indiscriminately slashing federal agencies only to reverse course soon afterward and scramble to rehire staff in order to meet basic needs and avert disaster. But once talent and longtime institutional knowledge are lost, they may never be recovered.

The Trump administration’s plan to slash the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service offices, and relocate and consolidate its research and development (R&D) facilities would also potentially abandon generational investments in critical forestry data, samples, and resources. This would leave land managers, firefighters, and decision makers without the crucial information they need to manage climate risks and protect US forests from wildfires growing in frequency and intensity.

Michelle Rama-Poccia is a bilingual writer and podcast host at UCS.