While it may not feel like Louisiana is teeming with data centers just yet, the boom in energy-hungry artificial intelligence is poised to change the landscape. We’re talking about multiple cities’ worth of electricity demand being added to the grid over the coming decade.

New modeling by the Union of Concerned Scientists has found that data center growth could leave Louisianans paying for billions of dollars in additional electricity system costs over the next 15 years. And under current policies, the AI facilities in the state are set to be powered largely by fossil fuels, bringing potentially billions of dollars in public health costs and tens of billions in global climate damages.

Preparation for this type of massive, yet highly uncertain, load growth requires careful attention by regulators and policymakers tasked with protecting the public. In other parts of the country, data centers have brought risks of costly and dangerous power outages while also raising utility bills at a time when energy costs are already rising for several other reasons. And depending on how data centers are powered, they can bring significant harms to public health and the global climate. Unfortunately, Louisiana’s current policies and regulatory approaches are not well set up to address the wide array of risks posed by the data center boom.

Fortunately, there are steps that policymakers and regulators, particularly the staff and elected officials at the Louisiana Public Service Commission (LPSC), can take to protect their constituents from these risks and ensure that Big Tech’s burdens don’t fall on Louisiana residents and businesses. Let’s get into the details.

Data centers set to make Louisiana’s grid way more expensive

Depending on the extent of data center load growth, our findings show that over the next 15 years, Louisiana’s wholesale electricity system costs could be a cumulative $14 billion to $26 billion higher than they would be without data center growth. We call these the “Mid” and “High” data center growth scenarios, respectively. This analysis draws from state-level results from our Data Center Power Play report, a national-level study using the Regional Energy Deployment System (ReEDS) modeling framework that was released earlier this year.

Louisiana ratepayers are at risk of paying substantial electricity system costs caused by data centers. “Bulk” electricity system costs are only at the wholesale level. Calculation was done by comparing the Mid and High Data Center Growth scenarios with a No Data Center Growth counterfactual scenario. Source: UCS

These costs are only at the wholesale level—essentially, the costs to build and operate large-scale power plants and transmission lines. It doesn’t reflect ”ratemaking” at the LPSC, the process whereby those wholesale costs are allocated to residents and other businesses.

However, the dollar amount reflected on energy bills includes other costs as well, such as the utility company’s profit margin.  These additional costs are covered by retail ratepayers, like residents and businesses. And Louisiana does not have comprehensive protections to insulate ratepayers from data center-triggered costs. In fact, the LPSC’s recent fast-track approval pathway, established through the recent “Lightning Amendment,” clears the way for potentially more than half of such costs to be passed to other ratepayers.

Data centers’ projected impact on the average Louisiana utility bill is uncertain, because that depends so heavily on how the LPSC allocates the wholesale electricity system costs between different types of customers (e.g., residential, commercial, industrial). But with electricity system costs potentially $26 billion higher due to data center load, and without comprehensive protections in place for other ratepayers, Louisianans are at risk of substantially subsidizing—to the tune of billions of dollars—Big Tech’s AI ventures.

Status quo would keep Louisiana over-reliant on a single fossil fuel: gas

About 75% of Louisiana’s electricity generation is currently from fossil gas power plants, making it one of the most gas-reliant states in the nation. Our analysis shows that under current policies, the state will meet growing demand with even more gas. This includes demand from data center companies, which thus far have not made any attempt to plan for flexible operations (essentially reducing demand during times of grid stress) in an effort to reduce overall costs and the need for new fossil fuel plants.

Therefore, without policy changes, the Louisiana power grid’s overdependence on a single fossil fuel, gas, would sustain into at least the 2040s, making up roughly two-thirds of the electricity mix in our 2041 modeling results.

Under current policies, Louisiana is projected to stay overreliant on gas-fired electricity. Source: UCS

The unpredictable spikes in utility bills that Louisianans are all-too-familiar with would therefore continue, since utilities pass fuel cost increases directly to their customers. The latest spike was caused by Winter Storm Fern in January 2026, which sent gas prices soaring above $30 per million British Thermal Units (MMBtu)—the highest in at least 29 years. For perspective, the price was around $3 per MMBtu just a week earlier. Though the effect on utility bills is not yet clear, ratepayers will feel the impacts of those price increases in the coming months even if they use the same amount of power.

While short-term commodity price changes aren’t captured by long-term modeling frameworks like ReEDS, those spikes can still have significant real-world impacts on energy burdens.  Some Louisianans were paying bills in 2025 that were 29% higher than the year before due to increases in gas prices. And during a 2022 price spike, some customers were paying double the fuel charges—these days roughly 20-30% of a total bill—than they were paying the year before.

Diversifying away from price-volatile fossil fuels and toward zero-marginal-cost resources like wind and solar can help protect ratepayers from these types of bill increases. Otherwise, Louisiana households will continue to be forced to fund the unpredictable costs of utilities’ overreliance on those fuels, whose price is sensitive to an increasing number of extreme weather events, and global conflicts such as the wars in Ukraine and Iran. While the US has thus far been insulated from the latter in terms of gas prices, that is not all guaranteed to be the case as the war continues.

Data centers set to bring higher public health and climate damages           

Beyond utility bill increases, data centers are also set to trigger higher public health costs and climate damages from Louisiana’s gas plants. Our findings show that the public health damages could range from $1.5 billion to $3 billion from 2026-2041 due to increases in nitrogen oxides (NO_x) and sulfur dioxide (SO₂) emissions, two pollutants that can cause respiratory and cardiac issues.  While these public health harms can cross state lines as pollutants flow downwind, the impacts are predominantly local.

Data centers drive billions of dollars in public health and climate damages as Louisiana relies on gas plants to meet growing electricity demand. Calculation was done by comparing the Mid and High Data Center Growth scenarios with a No Data Center Growth counterfactual scenario. Source: UCS

Over the same period, data center-driven increases in heat-trapping emissions from Louisiana fossil fuel plants could trigger $35 billion to $87 billion in global climate damages. While these damages are felt globally,  Louisiana already experiences a number of impacts that scientists expect to worsen as climate change continues, including hurricanes, heat waves, and sea level rise. It is therefore imperative that the state make concerted efforts to reduce both toxic air pollution like NO_x and SO₂, as well as heat-trapping emissions like carbon dioxide and methane.

But how much data center demand will actually come online?

One big question remains: how much data center growth is actually coming to Louisiana? The short answer: no one knows.

Regulated utilities have financial incentives to overestimate demand and overbuild, because they earn ratepayer-funded profits on capital infrastructure spending. We therefore have to take data center demand estimates from utilities with a skeptical eye.  

To account for the uncertainty, UCS ran multiple data center demand scenarios at the national level. Our “Mid Growth” scenario is in the range of other national-level studies. (See this blog for more on our latest national data center analysis.) However, in Louisiana specifically, looking at recent announcements in a vacuum makes the “High Growth” scenario seem far more likely, and maybe even conservative.

Our High Growth scenario projects about 5 GW of data center load added to Louisiana’s grid by 2041. Let’s compare this to Meta Platform’s plans for a new data center near Rayville, LA. The size of the data center expansion is thus far confidential, but Mark Zuckerburg said last year that the facility could grow to 5 GW, which would consume roughly six times the electricity as the entire city of New Orleans on an annual basis. Last year, the LPSC approved Entergy Louisiana’s application to build 2.3 gigawatts (GW) of gas capacity for this data center. And Entergy recently filed another LPSC application to build seven new gas plants totaling 5.2 GW on top of the already approved 2.3 GW, all for the expansion of Meta’s data center.

There’s much more to be said about this new application and who will end up covering the costs. But for now, I want to underscore the significant remaining uncertainty with the data center landscape in Louisiana and beyond, even as the press releases and LPSC applications make it all seem like a foregone conclusion.

To understand the uncertainty, we don’t have to look any farther than Meta itself. Right after Entergy got approval to build the first 2.3 GW of gas capacity for the data center, the tech giant fundamentally changed the financial structure of the planned AI facility. Meta offloaded 80% of the data center project ownership onto Blue Owl Capital—a much riskier company—and gave itself the option to exit the data center lease after just four years. The electricity infrastructure being built, meanwhile, will last for decades. Meta has financially shielded itself greatly, in no small part by getting a ratepayer guarantee of this long-lasting infrastructure.

Worries about an AI bubble bursting have only grown since UCS conducted this modeling in late 2025. These worries are due to a number of factors, including circular financing, lack of AI profitability in comparison to massive capital expenditures, private credit scares (of which Blue Owl is at the center), and now, Donald Trump’s war in Iran.

If the AI bubble isn’t bursting in the way some warn, and our High Growth scenario proves to be on the conservative side, then the need for safeguards is even more urgent, because the impacts will be that much greater. Policymakers at the LPSC should act now to protect communities from the wide array of risks stemming from the growth in data centers.

Looking ahead: better protections from data center threats are needed

As discussed above, we estimate that the growth in data centers could cause up to $26 billion in additional Louisiana electricity system costs between 2026 and 2041. The state would remain alarmingly overdependent on gas for its power sector needs, leaving ratepayers highly vulnerable to unpredictable price shocks. The additional pollution from these fossil fuel power plants specifically to serve data centers would trigger up to $3 billion in public health damages and up to $87 billion in global climate damages.

Fortunately, the commissioners at the LPSC have the ability to stave off a situation which is untenable for many of their constituents, particularly since an estimated 50% of households in the state are already financially struggling.

We recommend several reforms in our issue brief that would begin to put the state on a path toward a cleaner, more affordable, and more reliable electricity system. Included in these recommendations is an improved process for long-term utility resource planning, as well as comprehensive, mandatory ratepayer protections from data center-triggered costs.

We also recommend that the state take advantage of its significant clean resource potential, including by embracing long-range transmission planning by regional transmission grid operators MISO and SPP. Further, reforms are needed to enable a wider set of stakeholder voices to inform decisionmaking at the LPSC. For far too long, utilities have had disproportionate influence at the agency, and that is being perpetuated in part by low transparency and arbitrary barriers to participation.

The time is now for Louisiana utility regulators to protect their constituents from data center threats, and you can urge them to do so at this link. They should not continue to cater to Big Tech and utility company interests at communities’ expense.

This is a problem even in the best of times, but recent events are underlining the implications of excess fertilizer use. Now more than ever, understanding the true cost of this resource is key to building a food and farm system that is both economically resilient and environmentally sustainable.

Rising costs may bankrupt more farmers

Recent developments in the corn market underscore how fertilizer prices, production decisions, and broader policy adjustments are intertwined. Fertilizer costs represent a substantial share of operating expenses for US farmers, ranging between 33% and 44% for corn and 34% to 45% for wheat. That alone places enormous pressure on farm budgets.

Then came the tariffs of early 2025. These added an estimated 8% to 15% increase in agricultural input costs at a time when margins were already strained. More on this can be found in a blog post by my colleague Dr. Omanjana Goswami, who discussed the implications of tariffs on fertilizer costs. The situation worsened as key export markets contracted. Soybean exports, for example, declined from 985 million bushels in 2024 to 218 million bushels in 2025, while the dismantling of a USAID purchasing program eliminated another $2 billion in crop demand. The United States is experiencing a historic agricultural trade deficit as a result.

Compounding these pressures is the war against Iran, which effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, an essential shipping route for inputs used in fertilizer production, further disrupting global fertilizer markets and driving up input costs for farmers. My colleagues Dr. Goswami and Dr. Kathryn Anderson explored these impacts in recent posts.

These disruptions come at a moment when the United States is estimated to have a bumper harvest for corn. This record-high supply, combined with shrinking markets and persistently high fertilizer prices, will cause many more farmers to face extreme financial pressures. More farmers filed for bankruptcy in the first quarter of 2025 than in any full year since 2021. Given these dire financial conditions, reducing costs becomes not just a matter of improving efficiency, but a matter of economic survival.

The environmental price we don’t talk enough about

When excess fertilizer doesn’t stay on the farm, the costs flow downstream, literally and metaphorically. Excess fertilizer runs off into waterways and pollutes drinking water. In fertilizer-intensive states like Iowa, this is linked to rising cancer risks and infant health harms. Excess fertilizer also contributes directly to heat-trapping emissions, including nitrous oxide, which is 273 times more potent than carbon dioxide, and harmful air pollutants like particulate matter and ozone lead to poor air quality. Excess fertilizer is also responsible for toxic algal blooms in lakes and rivers, and the Gulf of Mexico dead zone. Algal blooms are not only bad for human health, but also result in losses in tourism spending, shoreline property values, fishing revenue, and biodiversity.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the total annual impact of agricultural nitrogen pollution on health, drinking water, and recreation and fisheries is a staggering $157 billion. Taxpayers and local communities ultimately bear the burden of these downstream impacts through increased water treatment costs, pollution cleanup costs, public health expenditures, tourism income losses, and the taxes we pay to subsidize conservation programs. Recognizing these hidden costs, which my fellow economists and I call externalities, is essential if we want to address both the environmental and economic viability concerns of agriculture.

Conservation programs that cut fertilizer use can help keep farmers afloat . . .

Farm bankruptcies in 2025 were up 46% from 2024 due to high input prices and low output prices. Many commodity crop farmers have had a long-term dependence on federal subsidies for profitability. This is a clear warning sign that something isn’t working. Fertilizer makes up the highest operating cost, and evidence suggests that up to 50% of fertilizer applied in fields remains unused by the crop. The clear solution to this is applying less fertilizer; after all, the least expensive pound of nitrogen is the one you don’t have to buy.

The good news is that US Department of Agriculture (USDA) conservation programs could both cut costs for farmers and reduce the pollution associated with fertilizer overuse. These programs offer practical, proven pathways to reduce fertilizer dependence, lower input costs, and protect natural resources.

Federal conservation programs fall under Title II of the farm bill, which authorizes the provision of financial incentives and technical assistance for addressing environmental concerns such as soil health, erosion, and water quality and quantity. The Agricultural Conservation Easement Program, the Conservation Reserve Program, the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) are all managed by the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).

In both the 2014 and 2018 farm bills, Congress set aside roughly $6 billion to $6.5 billion for conservation programs each year (in 2023 dollars). This is relatively small compared to the much larger share of farm bill spending that goes toward commodity support and crop insurance that reinforce the current system.

When implemented correctly, conservation practices significantly improve environmental outcomes. Our study shows that CSP and EQIP can reduce heat-trapping emissions from fertilizer. More broadly, Title II conservation programs result in significant gains for soil health, and other environmental benefits such as reduced soil erosion and improved wildlife habitat. In addition, conservation practices can help cut costs for farmers: a nutrient management plan, for example, can save farmers approximately $30 per acre in fertilizer costs.

. . . But the programs are underfunded and understaffed

With the frequency and severity of extreme weather events increasing, and the environmental impacts of industrial agriculture following suit, it is all the more important to invest in conservation practices that have positive effects not only on the environment, but also on farmers’ input use and, ultimately, profitability. Yet, demand for these programs far outstrips available funding. In fiscal year 2024, only about 43% to 44% of EQIP applicants and 53% to 55% of CSP applicants were funded, even with increased funding from the Biden administration; funding rates are likely to decline as those temporary funds expire, particularly if the current House farm bill proposal to cut EQIP by $1 billion is enacted. This suggests that farmers, being land stewards, are eager to adopt conservation practices but need technical and financial resources to support them, especially early in their transition.

At the same time, conservation programs alone are not enough. Annual appropriations for NRCS field staff and technical assistance are critical to delivering these programs effectively, but they have not kept pace with demand. Without adequate appropriations, even expanded conservation funding will fall short of reaching farmers at the scale needed.

At a time when farmers are facing unprecedented financial strain, expanding access to conservation programs is not just an environmental imperative but a critical economic lifeline. As Congress negotiates the next farm bill, it has a clear opportunity to address the economic and environmental burdens of fertilizer use. By expanding investment in conservation, alongside sustained appropriations for NRCS staffing and technical assistance, Congress can empower farmers to lower their costs, help them achieve their conservation goals, and reduce the environmental impacts that affect us all.

Repealing the clean energy standards would be a step backward, failing to solve reliability or cost concerns while ignoring the real emerging challenge: load growth from AI data centers. In fact, UCS analysis of this load growth demonstrates that to ensure a clean, affordable, and reliable energy future, Michigan must strengthen the clean energy standards—not abandon them. It also reveals loopholes that would increase fossil fuel use, even without the repeal.

In this blog, I’m going to break down the structure of the current clean energy standards in Michigan, demonstrate how load growth from data centers puts them to the test, and explain how they must be strengthened to keep moving toward a clean, healthy, and affordable energy future.

The basics of Michigan’s clean energy standards

There are three key points to keep in mind about the clean energy standards:

The categories of energy sources overlap. Wind, solar, and hydro-power are included in the definition of “renewable energy,” while “clean energy” includes renewables in addition to other low carbon energy sources, such as nuclear and fossil gas with carbon capture and storage (CCS) (see Figure 1). While labeling some of these sources as “clean” is a bit of a misnomer,  I’ll refer to them as clean here to be consistent with the Michigan standards.

Michigan’s energy standards phase in over time. The renewable energy requirement started at 15% in 2024, increases to 50% in 2030, before reaching 60% in 2035. The clean energy requirement starts at 80% in 2035 then jumps to 100% in 2040.

The standards only apply to retail electric sales to “end users” in the state, while also allowing for renewable and clean energy to be purchased outside of Michigan.

Despite the clean energy standards, Michigan’s emissions increase

The Union of Concerned Scientists recently published an analysis of potential load growth from data centers in the United States, demonstrating how that growth affects the grid under different policy pathways. We included a deep dive in Michigan, which produced a surprising result: despite the clean energy standards, heat-trapping emissions from power plants increase steadily over time (see Figure 2). 

This effect appears across all load scenarios, but because data centers drive massive new demand, they act as a “stress test” for Michigan’s clean energy standards. Our analysis shows that while the standards reduce emissions early on, emissions begin rising steadily after about 2035.

A look at the underlying generation mix helps explain how this is possible. Figure 3 shows the shares of energy generation across renewables, other clean energy, and fossil fuel (coal and fossil gas without CCS) under the “current policies” scenario in our analysis.

This highlights the problem: shouldn’t renewables plus other clean sources hit 100% by 2040? Let’s explore why that isn’t the case in our modeling results.

Clean energy standards don’t apply to exports

The first big caveat to Michigan’s clean energy standards is that they only apply to energy sales within the state: any electricity that is exported elsewhere is exempt. According to our analysis, exports increase dramatically over time (see Figure 4).

These exports are not subject to the clean and renewable energy standards. This “export loophole” allows utilities to cover their retail sales with clean and renewable energy, while fossil plants can continue running and exporting the energy they produce without limits.

As demand grows due to data centers, our modeling shows that this loophole becomes more consequential, with exports increasing steadily under current policies. But under a different clean energy pathway (which I’ll detail below), exports are subject to clean energy requirements, meaning they don’t cause emissions to increase.

While that growth in exports is significant, it’s still not enough to explain why carbon emissions are increasing over time.

Utilities can buy clean and renewable energy if they don’t make enough themselves

The next caveat is that Michigan utilities can buy credit for renewable and clean energy that they don’t generate themselves. This is where things start to get complicated. Utilities have three basic pathways to meet the state’s clean and renewable standards:

• Generate clean/renewable energy themselves
• Purchase clean/renewable energy directly
• Purchase clean/renewable energy attributes

For renewable energy, the second pathway is often referred to as “bundled renewable energy credits” (or “bundled RECs”), where a utility both buys the energy from a renewable generator and takes credit for its renewable attributes. Typically, this means the utility is paying for the energy from a specific renewable energy project.

The third pathway is “unbundled RECs,” where a utility only pays for the renewable attributes, without the associated energy.

To oversimplify, a utility buying bundled RECs is replacing some of the energy it would sell to its customers with renewable energy generated somewhere else. But a utility buying unbundled RECs is continuing to sell dirty energy to its customers, and paying what amounts to a fine. Unbundled RECs are the indulgences of the energy world.

Fortunately, Michigan has limits on how many unbundled RECs can be used to meet the clean energy standards; they have to come from within the same regional markets that Michigan is a part of (MISO or PJM, depending on the utility), cannot exceed 5% of the utility’s total, and can’t be used for compliance after 2035.

While these limits are a good thing, and bundled RECs are certainly preferable, there’s still a big caveat: Since utilities can just purchase bundled RECs to cover their obligations for retail sales within their territory, there’s nothing stopping power plants from continuing to generate dirty electricity to sell somewhere else.

How does Michigan meet the standards while fossil generation increases?

Now that we understand some of the loopholes in the clean energy standards, let’s take a look at how Michigan is actually meeting these requirements in our modeling, despite the rising emissions. Figure 5 shows the mix of in-state and imported energy credits that are used to meet each of the requirements in 2035 and 2050.

In 2050, Michigan relies on significant imports of clean energy from other states to meet the 100% clean energy requirement which takes effect in 2040, even meeting the requirement ahead of schedule in 2035. The shares for clean energy exceed 100% for a few reasons, but mostly due to the fact that Michigan generates more energy than it needs, leading to exports to other states.

Due to some nuance in how the model calculates and reports renewables requirements, the figure doesn’t quite show Michigan hitting the 60% requirement that takes effect in 2035, but we can see that imports here are also required to comply.

In contrast to the mix of energy credits used to comply with the standard, Figure 6 shows what the shares of actual generation (including exports) look like.

The results show a system where legal compliance and physical reality diverge. Michigan is not actually decarbonizing its energy supply, and it’s getting worse over time—even as it complies with the clean energy standards. Most glaring from our results is that in 2050, Michigan would be “meeting” its clean energy standards while nearly 60% of energy generated in the state comes from fossil fuels.

A better path: regulating emissions directly

To explore more robust clean energy policies, we proposed an alternative scenario based around a CO₂ Reduction Policy in our data center load growth analysis.

The key feature of this policy is that it regulates actual power plant emissions, including both imported and exported energy. This approach closes the loopholes in the existing laws: utilities can continue to sell to (or buy from) other states, but all of that energy is subject to emissions limits, not just the portion that’s sold to end users in the state.

Table 1 shows how we modeled phasing the policy in over time, compared to the existing renewable and clean energy requirements. Though the fossil fuel industry is likely to object sharply, this phased approach gives utilities a reasonable planning timeline for compliance.

You can see the impact in Figures 7 and 8. First, the generation plot shows that renewable and other clean energy sources increase their share over time, approaching 97% of the total by 2050.

Finally, Figure 8 shows that across all load scenarios, CO₂ emissions decrease over time, eventually going below zero due to technologies like biopower with CCS (which explains the last 3% from Figure 7).

Looking ahead

As data centers add enormous new load to the grid, significant new generation will be needed. The existing clean energy standards place guardrails on what types of generation are allowed, guiding the state towards a clean and renewable future. But as we’ve seen, the loopholes in these standards allow utilities and power producers to rely on accounting mechanisms to meet the letter of the law while still expanding fossil fuel generation.

This has measurable negative impacts: under the existing laws, our analysis shows that the expected growth in data centers would lead to $118 billion in climate damages and $1.6 billion in health damages by 2050 due to air pollution and emissions from fossil fuel power plants in Michigan.

Michigan’s clean energy legislation in 2023 was a strong start, but as load growth from data centers reshapes the system, stronger policies are needed. Rather than moving backward with misguided attempts to repeal the clean energy standards, they must be strengthened with actual limits, regulating emissions of heat-trapping gases directly. Policies that focus on actual emissions ensure that every megawatt-hour of electricity moves the system closer to the clean, healthy energy future Michiganders deserve.

I recently attended a conference in which a Bosnian politician, Sabina Ćudić, described a problem she faces that also affects scientists. She said, “I think [many professionals] are… somewhat embarrassed that they’re in politics. And there is this kind of distance: I could be somewhere else, doing something smarter, I could be paid better. There is almost a resentment towards politics.”

We see that often in science, too. Politics is sometimes perceived by scientists as something for others to do, or something to avoid. But politics is how our society is run. Politics is peoples’ lives.

For many of us watching National Institutes of Health (NIH), we are seeing clearly how the decisions made by the Trump administration affect basic science, and how changes to science agencies affect our society and people’s lives. 

Attacks on NIH began on day one

Starting Jan 21, 2025, the day after Inauguration Day, the National Institutes of Health was barred by the White House from posting notices to the Federal Register. It is hard to exaggerate the massive implications of this seemingly minor change: it blocked new grants from being awarded by preventing peer review panels from being scheduled.

This block was only one part of a larger effort to slow funds at NIH going out the door, as I described in another essay in April 2025. The White House plan seemed to be to use rescission to cut the NIH budget, bypassing the Congressional appropriations process. More actions that hampered the grant-making process followed, from reviews of banned words, mass firings, new paperwork justifications for many processes, and upfront funding requirements. The spending slowdown came to a head in July when OMB, led by Russell Vought, the Project 2025 co-lead, issued a memo that stopped NIH from making new grants. Vought then declined to deny plans to include NIH money in a future rescission package, seemingly confirming the goal to cut the NIH budget this way.

In the end, though, the rescission gambit failed. A bipartisan group of Senators urged the White House to allow NIH to spend its full budget, and OMB backed down. That highlights how powerful science can be to the public, and how applying pressure to our lawmakers can yield results. Congress has been unwilling or unable to restrain the Trump administration on many issues this year. But on science, especially on NIH and biomedical science, Congress has occasionally acted in a bipartisan way to push back.

Congress, not the President, should set scientific priorities

But the ban on postings to the Federal Register also reflects a new and more ominous trend. For 80 years NIH has been largely independent of presidential control. Major agency priorities were set in law, by Congress. From there, as the NIH scholar Natalie Aviles has described, the work of biomedical science support has been run largely by non-partisan civil servants working with external scientists.

For example, when Richard Nixon launched his War on Cancer in the early 1970’s, he announced this in a State of the Union address, and worked with Congress to pass this new priority into law. The same was true for Barack Obama and the BRAIN Initiative at NIH: it was announced in a State of the Union, then passed into law by Congress. Presidents can certainly weigh in, but a multi-year research agenda works best if priorities are set by broad bipartisan support and statute.

Now, things are different. NIH has been politicized and “presidentialized:” its operation and priorities have been increasingly dictated by the president and White House. As just one example, the Trump administration has decreed grant awards must be approved by presidential political appointees. White House or HHS review steps have been added throughout the agency, from review of contracts, review of formerly-perfunctory employee term renewals, review of travel, and even review of weekly money disbursements to grantees, a process that has always been handled by civil servants without presidential interference. Before 2025 there were only two political appointees at NIH, and even these, the NIH and National Cancer Institute directors, were accomplished, respected scientists, not political commissars.

Another critical part of NIH’s operation is the way the scientific community serves in an advisory role. External scientists fill rotating positions on committees: peer review panels, councils, and other advisory committees, which together have had enormous influence over the direction of NIH. This is as it should be. Doing top-notch science is extraordinarily hard—e.g., curing cancer or dementia is difficult. The people in the best position to choose innovative projects for funding, or how programs should be designed for maximum scientific impact, are trained scientists. The US has this scientific talent, and it has been deployed to help run NIH.

This system of governing NIH has worked exceptionally well. Having NIH run by civil servants informed by practicing, expert scientists has created over the past eight decades a “golden goose” of technological innovation. That’s now being wrecked, as independent scientific decision-making is subordinated to the political desires of the president.

NIH must return to independent scientific decision-making

The shift at NIH, from a system where Congress and statutory law set priorities to one where the president does, is a terrible thing for US science.

Most scientific projects are long-term efforts where people must be hired, equipment designed or purchased, and experiments done over several years. It’s not just science projects that take a long time to develop: talent does too. Individual scientists plan years ahead, as students choose whether to pursue PhDs and take on academic positions. Under this new presidential governance scheme, science priorities will swing back and forth with each new president. That instability is a sure way to break a scientific industry.

Fixing NIH will require returning the agency to its former, successful governance scheme, where Congress sets priorities, the agency carries them out, and political appointees of the president stay out of the way. This is also more democratic than presidential control. Congress, as the most democratic branch, represents the public’s priorities, and the US scientific community is engaged as advisors.

Reforms can be done within that framework, but an NIH governance scheme that preserves scientific independence is vital to US scientific success.

The new NIH budget bill is only partial comfort

In FY26 appropriations, Congress has slightly increased the NIH budget, in nominal dollars. That is good news compared to the proposed massive cuts in the President’s budget request. Some other budget bill provisions are also positive, for example avoiding cuts to research buildings and support (indirect costs).

However, all is not saved—in fact, there remain many reasons to worry. First, the bill does little to restrain the presidential transformation that is breaking NIH. The new NIH budget report contains non-binding language to restrain some of the Trump administration’s worst political moves. But what we have seen from this Project 2025 White House is a willingness to move right up to the line of what is written in law—and sometimes step over into brazen illegality. They may just ignore the report language. Indeed, it has already been reported that the White House is ignoring report language instructing NIH to use the longstanding institute director search committee process, including external expert advisors.

Meanwhile, one of the few provisions written in the law to restrain Trump, the multi-year funding provision, allows it at last year’s level—which saw success rates drop by 50%, a devastating cut for many labs. Reports are that this was important to the White House, suggesting they plan to intervene inside NIH further in future.

Finally, there is a reason to worry about even the rejection of budget cuts, which could be a political shield: a way for some Republicans to seem to avoid cutting biomedical research and cures, while allowing Vought and Trump to gut the agency from the inside via presidential control. We will need to be vigilant this year, and push back as hard as possible on the increasing politicization of science agencies.

Why haven’t more scientists acted in the last year?

There are two longstanding norms about the way scientists interact with the public that have hurt our ability to react in the Trump era.

The first norm is that scientists should not be engaged in politics at all. The science community has for decades embraced what some historians call the “social contract for science”—scientists would focus on producing knowledge while remaining relatively apolitical as an institution. The idea was that science’s authority and public trust depended on its perceived objectivity and distance from partisan concerns. This framing dates at least to Vannevar Bush’s ideas for building a US science ecosystem, which heavily inspired the structure of US science after World War II.

But staying out of politics and the public sphere is untenable in the current moment, and not because of what scientists have done.

Despite loud voices on the right claiming that scientists have politicized science, the opposite is true. As with climate change and asbestos before it, powerful and wealthy interests found biomedical science, during COVID, opposed to their partisan agenda. So they ran the so-called “Merchants of Doubt” strategy: they found scientists who would criticize biomedical science and NIH, and elevated them. Such junk scientists, from Scott Atlas to Jay Bhattacharta, were given high-profile platforms on billionaire-owned news networks, and given awards from billionaire-funded think tanks.

It was primarily billionaires, acting through merchants of doubt they boosted, that “politicized” science and NIH.

Biomedical scientists should have learned from the assault on climate science. But given where we are now, we cannot return to the old way of trying to ignore power and politics—if we do that, scientists will just be run over and US science will continue to collapse. We have to find ways to fight for science. When people who know the most about a segment of society disengage from politics, that simply gives an opportunity for the wealthy to remake that part of society in their image.

The second norm is that biomedical scientists and NIH should not speak to the public. This is related to the idea that political advocacy should only be done in the halls of Congress, if it is to be done at all. Mary Lasker, a powerful advocate for NIH and biomedical research for nearly 30 years, was the clearest leader of this explicitly elite-to-elite advocacy model. Lasker “built a powerful lobby that won large research appropriations” through direct relationships with key members of Congress.

This advocacy model, acting primarily inside the halls of Congress, too, must change. Scientists must speak to the public about what is at stake—not just about their own science, but about the value of publicly-funded science to all, and why politics affects science.

Some of NIH’s low profile in the public sphere is because of Congress’ desire to discourage agency public relations efforts. But scientists should urge our institutions to talk up the role of government. I was at an event a year or two ago held by a major NIH grant recipient  known to have received hundreds of millions from NIH. The event had a professionally-produced PR presentation, celebrating all the major scientific advances made and the amazing work done, but I heard NIH mentioned exactly zero times.

Too many people I talk to know about wonderful university research in biology, but associate that with the university: e.g., they know about Harvard research but don’t know that it’s NIH money, public money, behind it. We can speak up and change that: tell people how important the government is to science and disease cures.

Billionaires won’t replace public funding for science

As NIH and US science this year has been devastated, some have looked to billionaire philanthropy to fill the gaps. That’s a dangerous source of funding to depend on. NIH funding is a democratic way to support science. Public funding through agencies relies on direct democratic accountability through Congress, and spreads money to many different investigators.

Applying for NIH funds is a competition where great ideas win. The peer review system is not perfect, but it has done a good job allocating funds for basic research. The worst schmoozer in the room at a cocktail party might write the best grant. We don’t want to rely only on funding models that reward those who are good at flashy sales pitches; we want a stable funding system supporting a broad workforce of many scientists with many ideas. Sustained, strong science, as with all public goods, requires government investment if it is to deliver long-term societal benefit.

Democratic systems of allocating public money have created a robust scientific research system in America. Shifting to a system where a few rich people choose the science they want seems destined to end in disaster.

Fixing science means we all must fight together

The lesson for scientists, as with other attacks on science, is to confront the challenge, not back down. A fight is needed. Institutions must be strengthened. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the American Medical Association’s Department of Investigation published information to protect the public from health fraud and quackery.  Similar initiatives to identify junk science can come out of scientific and medical groups today: scientists and doctors will have to continue to organize with each other and stand up for the public benefit.

We will also need to find ways to support journalism that stands explicitly for public health. Media and social media groups like The Evidence Collective are doing heroic work reaching the public, but have had trouble finding sustainable business models.

The collapse of the US journalism industry in the past 25 years has been part of the collapse in social trust which has undermined trust in science. It is an urgent need for us to figure out how to boost and sustain real journalism that stands up for science and evidence. There has been progress, but Trump administration policies defunding public media have made the problems worse. In the past in America, journalism outlets have been funded by political parties, unions, and even public dollars. Today social media changes the landscape, but not our core needs for trust and truth. Scientists need to join the fight to improve news and information too.

Although most existing institutions have done relatively little to push back, there are many reasons to hope. At NIH, a group of federal workers issued the Bethesda Declaration, working together to share their concerns about what was happening inside the agency. Recently, several brain medical research groups, from the American College of Psychopharmacology to the American Academy of Neurology, issued strong statements in opposition to the Trump administration’s removal of NINDS Director Walter Koroshetz. Stand Up For Science and Defending Public Health are leading scientists and allies in new kinds of fight.

Also, scientists are beginning to get organized on a person-to-person basis. Groups of scientists are working on better communication and sharing information about politics and policy. But much more will need to be done. Just as realtors and car dealers invest time and money in influencing politics, scientists will need to get involved in politics—that is, the core and important issues of how societies function—at least until a stable liberal democracy returns to the United States.

The value of free speech is in its use

One thing I hear from scientists across the country is that they are afraid to speak out. They are afraid of the Trump administration retaliating against them or their university, weaponizing the grant system to punish their speech.

That is a horrible development. One of the most important principles of the American constitutional order is freedom of speech. The Trump administration has launched an unprecedented war on free speech, and we must defend it. In a democracy, people should be free to criticize their government and speak about matters of importance without fear of retaliation. We should work hard to protect scientists and universities that are speaking out for liberal democracy and academic freedom.

What has not been widely discussed in recent years is that government employees are protected by the First Amendment when they speak on matters of public concern. In the landmark 1968 case Pickering v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled in an 8-1 majority decision that a public school teacher could not be fired for writing a letter to a newspaper criticizing how his school allocated funds.

Justice Thurgood Marshall, writing for the Court, declared that “the public interest in having free and unhindered debate on matters of public importance [is] the core value of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment,” and that speech by public servants is protected. Public servants are “the members of a community most likely to have informed opinions” on the operation of government and “accordingly, it is essential that they be able to speak out freely on such questions without fear of retaliatory dismissal.”

That means that government employees, subject to some conditions, have the right to speak about matters of public concern, and that their deep knowledge of those programs has special value to inform public opinion.

But it is not just public employees who should be able to speak out about matters of public concern without fear of retaliation. Too many American citizens and institutions—law firms, university faculty, scientists, even news outlets—this year have been afraid to talk about what is going on with the collapse of American democracy. Let’s find ways to speak out together: the more people who speak out together, the stronger we all are.

What can scientists and the public do?

Science and academia help to define what constitutes credible evidence in a society. This is one reason why authoritarians come after both science and academia.

Public funding has built in the US the greatest science superpower the world has ever known. Freedom of speech, pluralism, freedom of and from religion, integration of talent from around the world, separation of church and state, equality, rule of law: these are all principles that are part of the recipe for successful science. Scientists should not be political partisans, but they should be partisans for liberal democratic principles. And if political parties sort themselves based on those values, that shouldn’t stop us from describing the situation accurately.

Harnessing the power that scientists have is going to require working together and engaging. Find like-minded people near you, meet with them regularly, talk about these issues. Take actions, first small, then larger. Stand up for science and for democracy. We will win if we do that.

We asked Precious Tshabalala and Omanjana Goswami, co-authors of the new UCS report Less Fertilizer, Better Outcomes, about the factors at play and one solution that would bring farmers some relief while protecting public health and the environment.

Q: Despite farmers’ support for President Trump, his administration (both now and in his first term) has pursued policies such as trade wars and targeting immigrant workers that have harmed farmers. The administration has responded by giving farmers a handout. This approach doesn’t make a lot of sense—what do you think is behind it?

PRECIOUS TSHABALALA: Tariffs have often been used as leverage in trade negotiations and to reduce trade deficits, but in this case, farmers end up being collateral damage in the process. Since they’re key constituencies politically, the administration gives them bailouts to keep them from escaping bankruptcy. The farmer aid packages helped during the president’s first term, but now, with an estimated bumper corn harvest and significant market losses through tariffs and cuts to foreign aid, many farmers are at risk of a crisis. Only half of farms will turn a profit this year, farmer bankruptcies have doubled, and the United States is experiencing a historic agriculture trade deficit. The new $12 billion aid package will not be sufficient to offset these losses.

Q: The Trump administration’s tariffs seem to hurt farmers in two ways: by lowering the price of their products while driving up the costs of inputs such as fertilizer and equipment. Is this a fair assessment?

PRECIOUS TSHABALALA: Yes. Tariffs led to retaliatory tariffs and trade measures from other countries, then drove down the price of commodity crops. China, for example, which is a major US export market, imposed tariffs on agricultural products and suspended soybean imports from the United States, seeking alternative sources such as Brazil. Reduced export demand means there is excess supply in the US market and, in turn, prices plummet.

While commodity prices fell, tariffs have simultaneously increased the cost of agricultural inputs. For example, between 25% and 30% of nitrogen fertilizer is imported into the United States, and almost all phosphorus and potassium is imported. Consequently, input costs have increased well above commodity prices, and farmers are operating at a loss even after receiving support from USDA subsidy programs.

Q: The rising cost of one type of input in particular—fertilizer—brings us to your recent analysis that shows farmers are applying much more fertilizer than they need to. Can you elaborate?

OMANJANA GOSWAMI: Fertilizer overuse is a pervasive problem in today’s agricultural systems, especially on farms that engage in monoculture of commodity crops like corn and soybean. Our report highlights that in 2022, 78% of all cropland in the country—roughly 236 million acres—received synthetic fertilizer input of some kind. Plants cannot use all of that fertilizer, so it remains behind in the soil, leading to environmental damage through runoff, soil degradation, and breakdown into heat-trapping gases that directly contribute to climate change.

In our analysis we highlight that recent peer-reviewed scientific publications show as much as 50% of fertilizer is applied in excess. Agriculture often isn’t associated as a direct source of pollution; our brains automatically think of pristine green and rolling fields when we imagine farms. But despite that beautiful picture, agriculture is actually a major source of pollution in the United States, and overuse of synthetic fertilizer is creating a multi-pronged pollution crisis. It’s not that farmers want to pollute and cause environmental damage—they see themselves as stewards of their land. But farmers are caught in a system that is hard to escape, locking them into cropping patterns that demand more fertilizer.

Q: But don’t farmers know what’s best for their operations? Are they being misinformed?

OMANJANA GOSWAMI: Farmers overapply fertilizer as an insurance policy to make sure their crops have enough nutrients when needed. Today’s agricultural systems and markets are set up in a way to maximize yield, which puts pressure on farmers to apply more fertilizer. There are no penalties that come with fertilizer overapplication—besides of course the higher costs.

Farm consolidation is also responsible for the overapplication problem. Fertilizer manufacturers and agribusiness corporations aggressively lobby to influence agriculture policy, and their profits rise when producers are dependent on high application rates. Most fertilizer application recommendations for the Midwest come from retailers who sell fertilizer and who stand to profit the most, not from independent institutions that have no conflict of interest.

Q: Fertilizer overuse obviously wastes money that farmers can’t afford to lose given their extremely tight profit margins, but how else does it hurt farming operations?

PRECIOUS TSHABALALA: With heavy use of fertilizer, the soil’s ability to store water and replenish nutrients is depleted, keeping farmers in a vicious cycle of fertilizer overapplication.

OMANJANA GOSWAMI: Soil that can’t hold water loses its sponge-like quality and becomes hard and cement-like. This is why once farmers hop onto the fertilizer treadmill it is almost impossible to hop off; they need to supply nutrients from synthetic sources that soils have lost the ability to store naturally.

Q: And besides the impact on farmers, what are the other consequences of fertilizer overuse?

OMANJANA GOSWAMI: Nitrogen runoff from excessive fertilizer use wreaks havoc on the environment. When washed into lakes and streams, this runoff helps algae multiply very quickly and create massive algal blooms that consume dissolved oxygen in the water, creating low- to no-oxygen areas in aquatic ecosystems called “dead zones,” where nothing can survive. The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that appears every summer and spans thousands of square miles has been directly attributed to fertilizer runoff from midwestern farms that is carried down the Mississippi River. It is perhaps the best example of how far-ranging the impact of nitrogen pollution can be.

Nitrates from fertilizer runoff also pollute groundwater sources and often end up contaminating drinking water supplies, threatening communities and affecting human health.

Fertilizer overuse is also a major contributor to the climate crisis. Unused fertilizer is transformed by soil bacteria into nitrous oxide and released into the atmosphere, where it is 273 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in capturing heat. In the United States, fertilizer mismanagement on agricultural soils is the largest unmitigated source of nitrous oxide, responsible for about 75% of the total emissions.

PRECIOUS TSHABALALA: The cost of fertilizer overuse is not only environmental but economic too. Taxpayers are on the hook for pollution cleanup costs and public health expenditures. Additionally, the tourism industry loses approximately $1 billion in income due to water bodies being contaminated by nutrient pollution and algal blooms, and the total annual impact of nitrogen pollution on health care, water treatment, and recreational opportunities is estimated to be a staggering $157 billion. These costs are not sustainable in the long run, and action should be taken immediately.

Q: What is likely to change farmers’ behavior?

OMANJANA GOSWAMI: Farmers need robust policy instruments to ensure they have the right financial and technical incentives to adopt and implement practices that improve fertilizer application and management. Several conservation-focused practices, such as no-till, cover crops, buffer strips, wetlands restoration, and managed grazing have been shown to reduce fertilizer use, improve soil resilience, keep nutrients in place, and build long-term soil health.

Voluntary USDA conservation programs such as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) provide farmers with financial and technical assistance to implement these practices. CSP and EQIP are backed by decades of scientific evidence and farmer experience, and they are pretty popular among farmers, but they are chronically underfunded and oversubscribed, so only about one-third of eligible applications are approved.

Q: You recommend that this funding be incorporated into the new food and farm bill, but we have been waiting almost three years for Congress to pass it. What is holding it up and how likely are we to see the situation change this year?

OMANJANA GOSWAMI: The food and farm bill has been extended three times in the last few years, so essentially we are still operating under the framework of the 2018 bill. Party-line disagreements on critical provisions have prevented a new bill from being passed. Several versions of the bill have been introduced in prior years, but lack of bipartisan support did not allow full consideration of the bill in both chambers of Congress. A new draft of the bill was introduced by the House Agriculture Committee in February, and it passed out of committee last month.

Since 2022, UCS has been advocating for a transformational food and farm bill that creates a fair and equitable food and farming system for all. This would include an expansion of voluntary conservation programs that allows more farmers to adopt practices that retain farm productivity while preserving air and water quality and soil health.

We are yet to see whether these provisions can be negotiated into the current version of the bill, whether the bill can be signed into law with bipartisan support, or whether it will fall on its face and we’ll get another extension instead.

In a true sign of the times, when the thrusters stopped burning and the mission was a seeming success, I immediately opened my phone to check social media to see how people were reacting. While I saw dozens of my peers expressing the same joy I had, I also saw a steady drumbeat of people questioning the cost of this mission and why their tax dollars had gone to this. As someone who has spent time looking at the federal budget, I couldn’t help but chuckle. NASA’s fiscal year 2026 budget was $24.4 billion—a minuscule portion of the federal government’s nearly $2 trillion budget.

On Friday, April 3, President Trump released his budget request for fiscal year 2027. It revealed just how ludicrous is the idea that NASA funding is a waste of tax dollars: the request includes a whopping $1.5 trillion for defense, up more than $400 billion from last year. Meanwhile, it slashes NASA’s budget by 23%, gutting $5.6 billion from the agency. Watching the Artemis launch, I felt hope for US science for the first time in a while. The president’s budget request brought me back down to Earth.

The costs of a much bigger military

In a previous piece, I discussed how a $1.5 trillion defense budget would not only achieve very little, but end up hurting the United States through its waste. With the president’s budget finally out, the $1.5 trillion in defense spending Trump called for on Truth Social in January came true. What I did not imagine was that the president would pair his exorbitant defense budget with cuts to vital environmental, healthcare, education, and science budgets. The administration plans to cut 10% of non-defense discretionary spending across the board—not enough to make up for the ridiculous increase in defense spending, but enough to devastate a host of important programs.

More clearly than ever, the current administration has demonstrated the trade-offs in our federal budget. The new budget would fund fantasies like “Golden Dome,” Trump’s infeasible anti-missile system, and “Golden Fleet,” his nonsensical shipbuilding program. Meanwhile, it would cut more than half of the Environmental Protection Agency’s funding, almost 20% of the Department of Agriculture’s funding, and 12.5% percent of the health department’s budget, among others. Most telling of all, the president’s budget request would more than halve funding for the National Science Foundation. This administration would rather fund its war against Iran than invest in our society’s basic needs.

The launch of Artemis II proves the United States can still do big things in science and technology, even while the federal government is starving our science agencies of the necessary funding. There are reasons why science is worthy of government funding: it saves lives, drives economic growth, and improves quality of life. The Apollo missions—the best analog to the Artemis missions—drove major advancements in flight control, food safety, and materials science that still benefit us all today.

The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to sell voters the theory that its budget cuts are intended to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse. But the president’s new budget request has put in starker relief than ever that cuts to our domestic institutions, including science, are actually done to spend more on weapons and war fighting—even if the cuts do not make up for the jaw-dropping military spending. Especially given the recent wars of choice undertaken by the Trump administration, the threats from a massively expanded military budget and handouts to defense contractors are clearer than ever.

A moment of hope in challenging times

The launch of Artemis was truly a moment of hope for many people my age. My generation was in elementary school when the Great Recession scrambled our home lives, finishing high school when the COVID pandemic forced schools to go online, and graduating college when DOGE ripped the federal workforce apart. This makes it easy to fall into a sense of dread, in an era where backsliding feels normal.

Artemis II should remind us all that the United States can still do great things in science when we put our mind—and money—to it. The president, sadly, has other plans.

We ended up in a rental house we couldn’t afford, as many Americans do. To keep a roof over our heads, we had to make hard decisions between keeping the lights or the water on or paying for groceries, and sometimes we had to go without. Public benefits and other programs that may have helped us scrape by existed, but they were hard to navigate when my family was busy working and trying to get through each day.  

It’s because of these formative experiences that I understand the necessity of housing justice. According to the Urban Institute, housing justice means: “Increasing access to safe, affordable housing and promoting wealth-building by confronting historical and ongoing harms and disparities caused by structural racism.”  

In March, I was excited to attend the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s (NLIHC) annual Housing Policy Forum in Washington, DC for the first time. UCS is a member organization of NLIHC because our climate resilience team knows that we must solve the climate crisis and the affordable housing crisis at the same time to ensure people are safe wherever they call home and advance a human right to housing as climate change transforms our communities through disasters and slower-moving climate impacts like sea level rise.  

Here’s what I learned at the forum and what I think all climate justice advocates should know as we work toward housing justice.

1. We are stronger together  

Working toward a more just, healthier world requires all movements to link arms and bring in our neighbors if we are to have a chance against an authoritarian government.  As Quiana Fisher, executive director of Texas Housers, said in a panel conversation on building local power, “our silos are falling.” Advocates for social and climate justice can no longer pretend to work in an insulated bubble (a silo)—our work is interconnected and all of it is under attack by the Trump administration. For example, Fisher said, “housing is health care,” meaning that inadequate, unsafe, or the lack of housing puts peoples’ health and well-being at risk. And we know that climate change also affects health.

A 2025 UCS study found that people living in affordable housing experienced several days to several weeks’ worth of heat alerts during the hottest summer on record in 2024, with households headed by people of color facing disproportionately high risks. 

If people don’t have access or can’t afford to cool themselves where they live, they’re at risk of heat-related illness and death. Our work on affordable, safe housing and climate change is not separate. To achieve climate resilience for all, we must advance solutions with partners in housing justice.  

2. There is value in lived experience 

Sometimes academics (and others) can fall into a trap of valuing theory over lived experience, Tracy Beard, Coalition Coordinator at Housing for All Tennessee said, talking about her work as a housing justice advocate and PhD candidate. Denying someone’s expertise unless they have an advanced degree or what Ms. Beard humorously called “certified brains,” shuts out important insights that could lead to valuable, practical solutions. 

We talk about centering equity and justice in our climate work, and we know that the people most impacted must guide the development of the solutions. After all, they know best what they need to move from surviving to thriving. Beard advised folks with “certified brains” to work intentionally with people with lived experience; know when to step back and let them lead; and—for those who work at well-resourced organizations—share resources, expertise, and power. Simply “amplifying the voices” of those most marginalized isn’t enough: building trusted partnerships and working in collaboration together is the way forward.

3. Housing is a human right 

The same week of the conference, President Trump allegedly said, “Nobody gives a ‘bleep’ about housing.” That’s simply not true, especially for the 300+ people who attended NLIHC’s lobby day at Capitol Hill on March 13 to tell our congresspeople how essential investment in housing is in the face of a “national shortage of 7.2 million homes affordable and available for extremely low-income renters,” according to NLIHC’s newest report. And to further refute President Trump’s claim, a few days after his out-of-touch comment, the Senate passed a major bipartisan housing bill. But wait there’s more…the White House then announced two housing-related executive orders that are problematic (read my colleague Zoe Middleton’s blog for more on this). 

Housing is a human right. The United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” 

But in the US, wages are not keeping up with costs of living: rent, utilities, groceries, and people are struggling through no fault of their own. My experience with housing insecurity inspired me, first to be an organizer and then a policy advocate, because everyone deserves access to the knowledge and resources to make the change they need to live their fullest lives.  

The climate crisis and the affordable housing crisis must be addressed at the same time to ensure people are safe where they live in a climate-changed world. Most of us in the US are susceptible to wildfires, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, or extreme heat that can damage or destroy where we live and threaten our health and safety. With Danger Season starting next month, we urgently need stable federal funding for housing and the passage of major housing legislation.  

Whether people rent, buy, or seek shelter from the streets every night, all families deserve safe and affordable housing, and those homes must be able to literally weather the storms ahead.

Much like libraries, the post office, and our public roadways, public transit is a public good where the government has a crucial role. Time and time again, Congress has enshrined in federal law that fostering the development and revitalization of public transportation systems is in the economic interest of the US while also meeting national goals for air quality, energy conservation, international competitiveness, and enhanced mobility for elderly, disabled, and disadvantaged populations in both urban and rural areas.  

Yet, like clockwork, in the President’s Budget for FY27 released last Friday, the Trump administration has again proposed to cut the federal role in public transit. This is the latest in a long line of attacks from the administration: a leaked proposal from November 2025 to cut all federal transit funds, and freezes on transit grants to intimidate political rivals in Colorado, New York, Illinois, and many more places, just to name a few.

Even before Trump’s second term, key current US Department of Transportation appointees such as Deputy Secretary Steven Bradbury wrote Project 2025 proposals to decrease federal investment in transit and shift it to the private sector to fund and provide. In Trump’s first term, the administration requested similar cuts and slow-rolled the distribution of funds they did have control over. This affects millions of Americans who take transit every day and all of us who benefit from a robust system. Ultimately, cuts would leave us without a crucial, affordable option to get around.

Amid these attacks, legislators need to stand up for their constituents and instead increase federal transit investment in budgets and the next surface transportation reauthorization. The country deserves and needs to fill the gaps of decades of transportation policy that has favored an unsustainable, unaffordable, and choiceless transportation status quo.

Public transit has immense public benefits

In addition to helping folks get around, public transit investment comes with numerous public benefits. Decades of research have shown that transit increases productivity, helps anchor regional economies, and reduces poverty and unemployment. It is a key low-cost transportation option that makes places more affordable to live in and promotes upward mobility. Every billion dollars invested in transit generates five billion dollars in economic activity and over 40,000 jobs. This holds for rural and urban areas alike, yet transit service across the US lags behind its global peers.

It makes sense that the government should invest in transit to support affordability and the economy, but the benefits stretch even further than that.

Transit is also crucial for public health. In small cities and rural areas, transit can be a lifeline and prevent people from missing crucial healthcare appointments, especially for aging adults or people with disabilities. It reduces social isolation and provides food access, which are crucial for our health. Transit also promotes better air quality, increasing levels of physical activity, and decreasing injuries from motor vehicle crashes.

Investing in transit is also a crucial part of the government’s role in addressing climate change. In our report, Freedom to Move, we show that a system with improved transportation options and reduced driving could save up to $201 billion in energy infrastructure and $128 billion in public health costs through 2050, presenting a more effective climate solution than the current car-dependent model.

Public transit comes with public accountability

Of note, transit is a public service, so a transit agency’s goal is to serve all its customers, whether they’re rich or poor, whether it’s on the maximally profit-inducing route or not. Transit agencies come with accountability mechanisms such as boards, public engagement, and crucial regulations like Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that are already under attack by the Trump Administration. These public processes are a crucial place where communities across the country are able to provide important input on what they need.

In this era of destruction of science and democratic processes, transportation policy has been weaponized as a tool of retribution for Trump’s authoritarian agenda. It is increasingly crucial to preserve the public processes that allow for democratic participation in transportation policy processes. As my colleague Steven Higashide puts it, “[transportation policy] can be part of the antidote, demonstrating the ability of government to improve our lives and fueling the organizing we need to win a more democratic society.”

Engaging the private sector requires strong civil servants

Throughout the past century, it was public investment that kept people moving despite the tides of private sector financing. More recently, when the COVID-19 pandemic brought havoc to our transportation systems, it was federal investment that helped keep transit running–a successful, bipartisan effort that recognized how essential transit was for essential workers, and by proxy, all of us.

In this, finding the right role for the private sector in public transit is tough. There is a fundamental mismatch of goals between making profit and the mobility of all people that requires careful design to align. To bring these together, we need skilled government staff who are able to navigate technical nuances and stand up for the public interest. Proposals for the private sector’s role come in a variety of flavors:

Privatization, or the ownership and operation of transit services by the private sector, poses significant risks. Removing guardrails from the public sector and hoping for public benefits is wishful thinking. Privatization often foregoes greater oversight on things like safety and civil rights, mechanisms for public accountability, and ultimately is no panacea for the country’s large transit needs.

• The rare closest example of this in the US is Brightline, a private company that owns and operates an intercity rail line between Miami and Orlando. Of note, Brightline has still received nearly half a billion dollars in public subsidy, relies on this and cross-subsidy from real estate investments to cover its net losses ($549 million in 2024), and is a sub-sub-subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi state-owned investment firm Mubadala Investment Company. Yet, despite financial and safety challenges, overwhelming demand for transit continues—Brightline still provided 3.1 million rides in 2025.
  
• Outside of the US, when places like the United Kingdom privatized most of their bus services, banning municipal companies outside of London, the result was an “expensive, fragmented, unreliable, and dysfunctional bus service” that the country has been trying to reverse for years.

Public-Private Partnerships (P3) describe a wide array of private sector participation where the devil is in the details. The strongest push for these comes from a desire to increase the involvement of private capital when public dollars aren’t enough. On the plus side, P3s can sometimes save costs and allow projects to be built that would otherwise not happen. On the negative side, P3s often fail to do so, resulting in excess complexity, cost overruns, and longer timelines or, as was the case in Denver, lower reliability and rider satisfaction. Ultimately, the risks are smaller than full privatization because of more public sector involvement, but the devil is in the details.

P3s are complex and come with tradeoffs that rely on initial negotiation of a long-term concession agreement. In lieu of project delivery capacity, P3s require a savvy government staff to negotiate successfully and ensure project implementation. In the case of the A, B, and G lines in Denver, $450M in private financing supplemented $1,750M in public funds, which ultimately got the project built. This was in exchange for locking the transit agency into less control over services and 29 years of high “availability payments” to the private sector.

“We have to live with those contracts, for now.” – Patrick O’Keefe, Denver Regional Transit Districts Director

Lastly, contracting out to the private sector for narrowly building new capital projects or operating a service is already a common model. This is often in the name of reducing costs, with mixed results. Some prevalent applications are in rural areas for dial-a-ride, vanpool, and commuter bus services.

However, whether contracting out is beneficial or not depends on numerous factors. Similar to P3s, research from the Transit Costs Project points to the lack of investment in strong government staff as a key factor in raising transit costs. In essence, when agency staff don’t have the experience or time to manage these contracts, we get higher costs, delays, and overruns.

In any of these forms, increased privatization as an excuse to absolve governmental responsibility for transit is a recipe for leaving us stuck, and the complexity of these arrangements highlights the importance of investing in a government workforce savvy enough to ensure public benefits. And whether it’s supplemented by private dollars or not, the fact is that the clearest way to improve transit across the country is for the public to invest in it.

We deserve better transit

We already have a very privatized transportation system—an expensive, privately-funded system of car ownership that is to blame for transportation being the US’s second-highest household expense, costing households over $13,000 per year. Public transit ensures we have another option—one that isn’t so “pay-to-play,” one that supports our communities big, small, rural, and urban, one that is rooted in democracy.

We call it public transit for a reason. Being able to get where we need to go is something we all should be able to do. Transit offers an affordable, accessible, and sustainable option for getting around, while simultaneously contributing to the economic vitality of our communities. As Congress prepares its next federal surface transportation reauthorization and debates annual budgets, now is the time to make sure they know to keep the ‘public’ in public transit.  

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.

Nobody wants this

My own experience as a civil servant at USDA working directly with Forest Service R&D scientists tells me this relocation is bad for the American people, bad for American producers and foresters, and bad for rural communities. Not only is the agency’s headquarters moving to Salt Lake City, but the Forest Service will shutter 57 of 77 research facilities located in 31 states. Many R&D staff will likely be consolidated into a centralized office in Fort Collins, Colorado.

The Forest Service’s mission in administering over 193 million acres of land—including 154 national forests and 20 national grasslands—is to “sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation’s forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations.” Through its R&D arm, the Forest Service conducts independent science it makes available to the public that also provides the foundation for many forest management decisions. The agency has done all this on a budget that equates to roughly 0.6% of the president’s proposed $1.5 trillion budget for national defense spending. At about $9 billion, the entire Forest Service budget would pay for 18 days of fighting the war against Iran (assuming $500 million cost per day).

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.

So what’s the big deal if researchers are moved around? The More than Just Parks Substack explains the impact 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.”

I also share the sentiment expressed by Robert Bonnie, former USDA undersecretary during both the Obama and Biden Administrations, and who helped oversee the Forest Service during the Obama Administration: “Nobody is asking for this. None of the farm groups want this. No one in conservation wants this. Nobody.”

Compromising US wildfire research

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.

Threat to forests as a land carbon sink

Among other concerns, the Trump Administration’s restructuring is a threat to forests’ role as a land carbon sink, and management choices under different climate futures affect long-term carbon outcomes. Globally, forests have historically absorbed roughly one-third of human heat-trapping emissions, but climate change is threatening that carbon sequestration capacity. Canada’s forests are already a source of carbon to the atmosphere following record-breaking wildfire seasons and devastating insect outbreaks.

In the US, the future of our land carbon sink remains murky, with climate change playing a key role in forests’ trajectories. Wildfires threaten to release huge amounts of carbon to the atmosphere and zero-out a forest’s capacity to absorb carbon for years, while drought can lead to tree mortality and facilitate insect outbreaks.

Critical research on these dynamics comes from Forest Service researchers and relies on the agency’s long-term monitoring programs that expand our understanding about how forests respond to climate change. Loss of that scientific and forest management capacity threaten not only our immediate ability to respond to climate-fueled wildfires, but also our ability to use forests to adapt to and mitigate climate change.   

Cutting science agencies benefits no one

It’s worth noting that similar moves by the Trump administration to relocate the USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Headquarters yielded negative results and decimated those agencies.  Relocation of federal agencies outside of Washington, DC to be closer to stakeholders 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 oft-used 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.  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, the Forest Service will be crippled 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, rather they are seeking a more expansive, 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.

The dismantling of the Forest Service is another example in a long list of the Trump Administration’s assault on science. The Administration has already begun dismantling our world-class earth system science research and modeling center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a public good that, if broken up, would have serious economic, national security, and public safety harms, including wildfire research and—consequently—preparedness and response to wildfires. And like last year, the Trump administration has asked Congress to essentially defund NOAA’s research arm.

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.

Even with the media attention around this disruptive and corrupt move, one should ask themself—not if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound—but if the Trump Administration breaks apart the Forest Service and no one is around to stop it, does it survive?

Everyone’s interested in the price of gasoline this spring. Well, everyone with a gasoline-powered car is. Rising gasoline prices means Californians are now spending about $6 billion per month on gasoline. Currently, that’s due to the conflict in the Middle East, but this is just the latest shock to prices, with both international issues (like the invasion of Ukraine and the COVID pandemic) and more local disruptions like refinery fires causing past spikes in the price at the pump in California. But gasoline spending would have been much higher if drivers in the state had not been already cutting gasoline use.

EVs, efficiency and alternatives to driving are saving Californians money

These price shocks will certainly cause drivers to look at ways to cut gasoline use, but even before this crisis, California’s gasoline consumption has been falling. While the state’s population has increased slightly, gasoline sales in California have dropped 2.4 billion gallons per year since the peak in 2017. That’s over 60 gallons per person in annual consumption.

Californians are spending more on gasoline with the dramatic price increases, but we are spending less than we would have in the past. Since February 1, GasBuddy.com reports the average price for unleaded gasoline in the state has increased $1.36 per gallon to $5.86 per gallon as of March 30, 2026. Improvements to gasoline vehicle efficiency, the replacement of gasoline cars with EVs, and lower driving with remote and hybrid work arrangements means that drivers in the state are saving $1.2 billion per month compared to if they were driving and using gasoline at the same volume as they were in 2017. And this lower gasoline consumption is despite having more people in the state and having a GDP that grew by $1.7 trillion and at a faster rate than the US as a whole since 2017. Climate policies are a big reason Californians are spending a lot less on gasoline than they otherwise would be. From 2005 to 2025—a period when federal fuel economy standards and both federal and California greenhouse gas standards compelled automakers to produce cleaner cars—the average new vehicle fuel efficiency grew from 19.9 miles per gallon to 27.2 miles per gallon (25.6 miles per gallon when excluding plug-in vehicles). Over that same time, California’s air quality regulator continued to push automakers to develop and deploy electric vehicles and offer financial incentives to encourage drivers to make the switch. 

There are now over 1.5 million fully electric vehicles on the state’s roads. If these EVs replace the average gasoline vehicle, they would eliminate over 700 million gallons of gasoline consumption in California every year. These facts may be cold comfort when going to fill up your gasoline vehicle during this current price spike and the bill tops $100. “Well, it could be worse” doesn’t really offer much relief. But it really could be worse —billions of dollars worse—without the climate and clean vehicle policies enacted over the past two decades. Unfortunately, just as we are seeing the benefits of such policies, federal rollbacks of fuel economy and emissions standards and attacks on California’s authority to set its own standards mean further progress is stalled.

Switching from gasoline to electricity lowers costs and emissions

But even when (if?) gasoline prices come down, car buyers should remember these periods of price shocks and choose vehicles that are both cleaner for the environment and cheaper to refuel. If you can switch from gasoline to electricity, that’s your best bet. But whether you are looking at an electric vehicle or gasoline car, choosing a more efficient model will save money for refueling and lower total emissions.

Lowering costs without buying a new car

Used EVs are increasingly available, including late-model vehicles coming off leases. This will give more affordable options for people that want to make the switch from gasoline to electricity but can’t afford to buy a new car. And data from auto industry experts show that used EVs are retaining their battery capacity, even when they have significant mileage.

However, replacing a car with walking, biking, and/or public transportation altogether is even cheaper than getting an EV. Not only does that save money on fuel, but also maintenance, insurance, parking, and registration costs. That’s why we should support both policies that make it easier to switch to EVs AND advocate for better pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure and public transportation funding.

Looking ahead, April shows continued above normal risks in the Southeast and the Southwestern United States.

Climate-change driven heat, drought drive risk

Across much of the country, March brought above-normal temperatures—including an alarming, record-breaking early heatwave in the western US (and other parts of the country)—virtually impossible without climate change. Drought has also spread, with a third of the country now in severe or extreme drought. As of the end of March, 60 percent of the country was in some stage of drought. And precipitation was also below normal in many parts of the country, including “snow drought” conditions in the West. In addition, the March heatwave triggered a much earlier melt-off of snowpack—in some cases as much as 4 to 6 weeks earlier than the previously recorded earliest melt-off dates, according to the latest wildland fire outlook. Reductions in snowpack have been linked to more severe wildfire, while earlier snowmelt increases the timeframe for large wildfire activity by allowing vegetation to dry out for longer periods.

Together, these hotter, drier conditions bear the classic fingerprints of climate change, and they’re setting up dangerous risks for wildfires later this year, moving westward as the season progresses. These background conditions mean that, should a fire break out due to lightning or human ignition sources, the chances of it growing in intensity and size are much greater.

Multi-year risk factors are also critical to monitor. For example, the latest Fuels and Fire Behavior Advisory for the Central and Southern Great Plains shows that above-normal rainfall in 2025 led to vegetation growth that has now turned exceptionally dry with the rainfall deficit and drought in the first part of 2026. These exceptional grass loads are volatile tinder for this year’s wildfire season. According to the report, “Oklahoma Forestry Services reported extreme fire behavior and high resistance to control as a grassland fire spread to junipers on the Cedar Canyon Fire in late March, and similar conditions have been reported elsewhere in the region.” Similarly, the report for the Northern and Central Great Plains notes that: “Historically dry fuels are leading to extreme rates of fire spread and fire behavior not typically seen in March.“

By July, much of the western US—including northern California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado Idaho, and Utah—will experience high fire risk, along with the south-central US, barring major rainfall events that can help blunt risks.

Climate change is one major part of the picture. Other factors—such as the proximity of wildfires to communities, homes and critical infrastructure—can raise the risks and harms to people’s safety, health, livelihoods, local economies and critical ecosystems.

A wildfire-driven insurance crisis

Worsening wildfire seasons are also contributing to a growing challenge in the property insurance market, especially in California. Many residents in wildfire-prone areas—and even in areas with lower risk—can no longer find affordable insurance on the open market. Insurance companies have been raising rates, dropping policies, and even retreating from risk-prone areas.

An increasing number of homeowners have been forced to purchase “last resort” policies from California’s state FAIR plan, one indicator of the problem. These bare-bones policies provide limited, expensive coverage—and the premiums vary widely by zip code. Data show that the number of policies in force under the California FAIR plan has risen 146% between 2022 and the end of 2025. The FAIR plan, which is under financial strain, is now seeking to raise its rates and is asking for a 35.8% average rate hike this spring.

The insurance market is in a precarious state and, were California to experience another costly fire season, things could get even more dire for homeowners. Despite all of this, insurance companies are continuing to insure fossil fuel projects and infrastructure—which are the underlying cause of the climate crisis! As UCS research shows, major fossil fuel producers bear a huge responsibility for the emissions that are fueling worsening western wildfire seasons—and it’s only fair that they should pay for their share of the impacts and costs.

Policy responses (or lack thereof)

Even as the nation faces another potentially dangerous fire season, the US Forest Service (USFS)—which plays a major role in managing wildland fires—is undergoing a chaotic and disruptive reorganization by the Trump administration. Separately, last year, President Trump issued an executive order directing a consolidation of federal firefighting resources across the Department of the Interior and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA, within which USFS sits) and other changes to limit and respond to wildfires. The DOI has published a plan to establish a joint US Wildland Fire Service.

While consolidation could have benefits, there are good reasons to be skeptical about the Trump administration’s approach and actual intentions. For example, a recent report from the USDA Office of the Inspector General shows that the USFS lost 16% of its staff (5,860 employees) since the end of 2024—which is largely due to Trump administration actions. And among the moves announced last week is a closure of research stations that study wildfire risk. 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.

All these changes are happening against a backdrop of a broadside assault by the Trump administration against federal agencies. Staff and budget cuts, dismantling of programs that serve the public, and politicization of disaster aid have been an ongoing challenge with this administration. All while spreading disinformation about climate science. Moreover, the administration is gutting climate and clean energy policies that could help curtail the heat-trapping emissions driving climate change and help communities build resilience to climate-fueled disasters.

Congress must ensure that crucial public priorities—including support for the science, staffing and resources needed to understand and address the growing threats and impacts of wildfires—are robustly funded in the next appropriations cycle. Investments in community resilience and risk mitigation measures to protect against wildfires, as well as for the management and protection of healthy forest ecosystems, are also vital.

At the same time, policymakers and regulators at the state and federal level must seriously grapple with the spiraling insurance crisis which is also contributing to the housing affordability crisis affecting millions of people. Data transparency and better oversight and regulation of the insurance market are urgently needed to better understand where, why and by how much insurers are raising rates (and if they are using discriminatory metrics like people’s credit scores to do so). Consumers need regulators and policymakers to help ensure they are treated fairly, especially in their worst moments after disaster strikes.

Catastrophic wildfires are now a reality for all too many communities. As a nation, we have to do much more to help people prepare, withstand and recover from these fires, while also sharply cutting the heat-trapping emissions that are burning up our world.

On the contrary, California is more resilient to global price shocks due to strong programs like Cap and Invest and the prudent spending of the revenues it generates.  California has made strides in reducing fossil fuel demand over the past few decades as our grid, homes and cars are increasingly powered by domestic, clean electricity.

Continuing ambitious climate and clean energy policies, like Cap and Invest, is critical to protecting the lives—and pocketbooks—of Californians.

Global events, local impact

The Iran war is occurring far from California, but it is undoubtedly a primary cause of the recent gas price spikes that are hitting drivers close to home.

Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that the largest component of gasoline prices and the main source of price volatility is the price of crude oil, which made up 55% of the cost of a gallon of gas over the last decade.

California gets about a quarter of its crude oil from the Middle East, which is obviously being impacted by multiple wars. And while the US is a net exporter of petroleum, because crude oil prices are set on a global market, prices for oil and petroleum products are spiking dramatically everywhere, regardless of where they come from.

The extreme volatility of crude oil globally is why gas prices are, well, extremely volatile.  

What else determines the price of gasoline?

If the price of crude is responsible for more than half of the cost of a gallon of gasoline, what makes up the other half? The answer is straightforward…to a point.

In January, when gasoline in the state was $4.01 per gallon, the price of crude oil accounted for $1.60, refining and distribution margins were $1.09, state and federal taxes and fees were $0.90 and environmental programs were $0.42. The math is simple, but there is a mystery hiding in the refining and distribution margins.

Since 2015, California consumers have also been saddled with what Berkeley Professor Severin Borenstein has described as the Mystery Gas Surcharge (MGS).

The MGS is the difference between California and rest of US retail price after removing taxes and other cost differences.  Professor Borenstein’s recent post notes the MGS was “about $0.57 in Feb, before attack on Iran. Based on AAA info, today it’s just over $1.”

Oil companies love to complain about the 42-cent environmental programs, but the MGS is a bigger, non-transparent part of the cost of California gasoline that you don’t hear the oil companies talk about.

California’s rules protect air breathers and consumers

Decades ago, toxic air pollution—largely from cars and trucks—was causing smog and driving a public health crisis in California. Concerns about this pollution led Governor Ronald Reagan to successfully advocate that President Richard Nixon allow California to regulate vehicles more stringently than the federal government.

This authority was the basis of countless life-saving regulations that made cars and trucks in California cleaner, more fuel-efficient, and, ultimately, zero-emission. These safeguards reduced toxic air pollution and heat-trapping emissions and also had the significant co-benefit of decreasing the state’s reliance on gasoline.

California’s protections have resulted in California’s gasoline demand dropping about 15 percent since its peak in 2005. In addition to the clear pollution and public health benefit of reduced reliance on gasoline, this reduced demand protects consumers from the likely price volatility caused by global events like war and extreme weather events.

The state has gone from a maximum of 15.6 billion gallons used in 2017 to 13.2 billion gallons in 2025. That’s over 2 billion gallons in reduced gasoline use and $14 billion per year in avoided spending at the current price of $5.82 per gallon. On average, that breaks down to about 60 fewer gallons of gasoline per Californian and more than $350 extra in each of their wallets.

And while the state reduced its gasoline consumption by 2 billion gallons, California’s economy grew substantially, becoming the world’s fourth largest economy last year.

Keep capping and investing

You wouldn’t know it from the billboards the oil industry is plastering around Sacramento, but in stark contrast to the major, volatile, and mysterious costs associated with crude oil and industry profits, California’s Cap and Invest program accounts for only 25 cents to the overall price of gas. And unlike crude oil prices and refiner margins, it remains a small, stable and predictable cost that improves the lives of Californians.

Like setting up an automatic 401k contribution, Cap and Invest is a reasonable investment that funds cleaner vehicles and related infrastructure, reduces electricity prices, and advances climate solutions. All these investments work together to make California and its residents more resilient in the face of local, state, national and global events.

Conversely, skyrocketing crude prices and refiner margins line the oil industry’s pockets and help fund misinformation campaigns against the state’s critical climate programs.

Updates to the Cap and Invest program are in the midst of being finalized by the California Air Resources Board. This process must move forward without delay to provide the state the resilience it needs to weather the storm of global supply constraints, hostile federal administrations, and disingenuous polluters.  

We are members of the research collaborative the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI), and the analyses we’re discussing include EDGI’s report on the EPA’s 2025 enforcement track record and annotation of EPA’s announcement of its fiscal year report.

Bedrock environmental pollution laws in the United States like the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts received bipartisan support when they were established in the late 20th century—but these laws only work if they’re enforced. Enforcement involves detecting violations (typically through inspections), adjudicating them administratively or judicially, and resolving cases through remedies (to ensure compliance) and penalties (to deter future violations). Vigorous, effective enforcement is crucial to protecting human and environmental health. 

Why the discrepancy in the agency’s claims? There are two reasons. First, many of the actions highlighted by EPA’s press office were actually initiated under the Biden administration. And second, the agency’s comparisons rely on unusually weak enforcement numbers in recent years, masking the fact that federal environmental enforcement has been in serious decline since the first Trump administration. 

EPA’s enforcement record under the second Trump administration

The EPA claims that its strong enforcement results “have taken place since President Trump was sworn back into office.” But this is highly misleading because EPA’s numbers are based on fiscal year 2025, which runs from October 1, 2024, to September 30, 2025. Trump’s first full day in office, however, was not until January 21, 2025, which means that 112 days (or 30%) of the fiscal year already passed before he could have had any effect on the EPA. 

While federal agencies typically report by fiscal year, attributing all of this last fiscal year’s actions to Trump is misleading, as many initiatives began under the Biden administration. For example, the EPA claims it closed 2,300 civil enforcement cases (or 2,137—it provides both numbers in a press release), representing an increase over the previous administration. Yet many of the cases closed in 2025, including 87% of air pollution cases, were initiated before Trump took office.

This is like comparing Michael Jordan and Lebron James’ NBA seasons, but using part of Jordan’s season for James’ statistics. In our analysis, we eliminated this misleading and muddled approach by using the EPA’s own raw enforcement data, and comparing periods from January 21 to November 30 over the past 20 years. Our findings do not support the claim that the second Trump administration is stronger on enforcement than Biden. And on many measures, the opposite is true.

For example, the agency conducted fewer facility inspections compared to 2024 across the board—including for toxic, air, and water pollution—with inspections for toxic substances dropping the most sharply, with at 36% decrease. Civil judicial cases, which try the most serious offenders of civil laws, declined in terms of both cases initiated and cases concluded, and the number of these cases that were concluded with zero dollars in both penalties and compliance costs was higher than in any year of the Biden administration. While this EPA did initiate and conclude more administrative cases, penalties for these cases were much lighter.

We considered the question of whether an incoming administration might face unique challenges that would make its enforcement record weaker in the first year. But the data doesn’t suggest that is a major barrier. The Trump 2.0 EPA hit historic lows in civil judicial cases concluded—just one of many measures it was historically low on as we discuss below—but one of the top years of judicial cases concluded was Barack Obama’s first year in office, 2009. 

Annual number of civil judicial cases concluded from 2005-2025, with cases tracked from January 21 through November 30 each year and data from EPA ECHO. Image shows Figure 31 in the report Making America Polluted Again: The Trump EPA’s 2025 Enforcement Record. 

Enforcement in historic decline

Perhaps most misleading in the EPA’s framing of its 2025 record is its reliance on what analysts call the “low base effect,” which essentially measures progress from the bottom of a deep hole. For example, say it’s 1934 and you claim that the unemployment rate is “great” because it is better than it was the previous year. It’s true that unemployment was better in 1934 than 1933. But 1933 was the worst year of the Great Depression, and unemployment in 1934 was still over 20%—hardly worth celebrating! 

We are currently in the Great Depression of EPA enforcement, ushered in by the first Trump administration in 2017. As EDGI documented at that time, the Trump administration drove EPA enforcement to historic lows across the board. Likely hampered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration did not return the EPA to its previous level of enforcement activity, though it did make strides toward this end in some categories of enforcement inspection activities, including for lead paint as well as activities conducted under the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts. 

Thus, when we compare the current Trump EPA’s enforcement actions to historic levels, we find that we are still in a period of deep retrenchment against strong enforcement. Our analysis looked at 24 measures of enforcement, including inspections, case initiations, case conclusions, penalties, and compliance costs. In seven of these categories, EPA performance in 2025 was the weakest it has been in 20 years. In another seven, it was second weakest (second only to the first year of COVID-19). That’s 58% of enforcement activities in historic decline under this EPA, broadly contradicting Administrator Zeldin’s claim that the agency is bringing the “rule of law back to environmental enforcement and compliance.” The courtroom is where the nation’s worst polluters are held accountable, and EPA’s low rate of case initiation in 2025 suggests fewer polluters will be held accountable in the years to come.

We can neither accept the misleading claims of the current EPA about its enforcement record, nor accept this Great Depression of EPA enforcement as a new normal. By retreating from its enforcement responsibilities, this EPA is bypassing Congress and the Supreme Court to undermine the laws that keep our air and water cleaner, and help keep toxic substances out of our bodies.

Between January 20^th, 2025 and March 6^th, 2026, we have tracked and categorized 562 unique attacks on science. Some of the most common types of attacks we’ve documented include:

• Numerous anti-science rules or regulations and the rescinding of rules or regulations based in science—to take one example, the administration’s efforts to demolish the Endangerment Finding.
• The Trump administration withholding or dictating federal funding for research based on political ideology including halting federal research and knowledge development on LGBTQ+ health, climate science, and vaccine efficacy.
• The gutting of scientific capacity in federal agencies, threatening the ability of federal agencies to inform the public of dangerous weather patterns and toxic chemicals in the environment and respond quickly.

These are just a few of the tactics we’ve seen deployed so far, and we are still counting.

We now have 15 months’ worth of data to document patterns and to call out the harms of these attacks. I use the data below to highlight how the huge influx of targeted attacks early on in President Trump’s second administration has enabled subsequent attacks and harmful downstream effects over time.

A word before we get there: this content can understandably be difficult to read, because these are attacks on our democracy, minoritized groups, and systems built to facilitate environmental and public health. But to echo recent sentiments from my colleagues Gretchen Goldman and Rachel Cleetus, it’s critical to document these harms, not only to acknowledge what’s been destroyed and the work it took to build it, but also to galvanize those who want to protect what’s left and build better institutions and policies for the future.

When it all began

Visualizing how the number of attacks on science have increased and changed each month reveals the Trump administration’s strategy. The first few months were an onslaught of anti-science actions that made targeting, attacking, and dismantling inconvenient federal systems and safeguards easier. In practice, this has expanded the Trump administration’s power, advanced the interests of its powerful allies at the expense of everyone else, and constrained our ability to express dissent and seek accountability.

What I want you to take away from this graphic, showing the huge initial push of attacks on science at the outset of the second Trump administration, is not that the danger is fading, but that these attacks were designed to set up the Trump administration to act with impunity. These attacks laid the groundwork so that the administration could more easily make decisions based on ideology rather than evidence; remove staff, scientific findings, and regulations that could have been roadblocks to its agenda; and escalate its authoritarian tactics later on. By knocking out the scientific foundations from government, the Trump administration made it easier to carry out short-sighted and unjust actions like those outlined in Project 2025. And these first few months were a period of intense upheaval for federal scientific systems, the people that worked within them, and those they protected.

An eleven-day catalyst

Throughout January of 2025, President Trump and his staff were busy with this dismantling effort. The President signed multiple anti-science executive orders (EOs), including the EO that directed the erasure of gender identity from all spaces in the government’s influence, and limited recognized sex at birth to male and female. With it, he directed the erasure of the acknowledgement of intersex, transgender, and nonbinary people. He also rescinded previous orders that were backed by science, including the EOs that sought to provide fair access to historically underrepresented groups in government decision-making. To staff his administration, President Trump nominated people with a history of anti-science positions or decisions to lead multiple federal agencies (like Lee Zeldin, Sean Duffy, and Doug Burgum). With Project 2025 and the wish lists of industry allies as a guide, the Trump administration started from day one and did an enormous amount of damage by the end of January.

More than anything, these early days provided some of the initial foundation for the Trump administration to go on a year-long spree of tearing down the many protective systems that have underpinned our government and democracy.

The pattern continued in the following months, building on this foundation. The administration imposed freezes on grant reviews at the National Science Foundation due to President Trump’s executive orders aimed at diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) principles. These freezes were only the start of a series of chaotic events that unfolded across federal agencies. Research funding fluctuated between being paused, unfrozen, terminated, and forced back open in the courts.

As a result, new research couldn’t begin; ongoing research stopped in its tracks; data and resources were wasted and lost; universities cut enrollment and personnel. This translates to less innovation that could inform the best next cancer treatment, a better way to track hurricanes and severe weather events, or how best to protect people from exposure to toxicants like mercury. These deliberately destructive actions all fit within the ideological and political agendas that drive the administration, staffed by people deeply opposed to vaccines, environmental justice, and LGBTQ+ health, to name a few examples.

Fired scientists, fewer services

In February 2025, the administration began to threaten massive layoffs of federal staff. The deceptively-named Department of Government Efficiency started pressuring federal employees in February, and appointees announced plans to “restructure” their agencies in ways that undermined the agencies’ missions. Federal scientists and workers across the board lived in tangible fear that their programs, their departments, their projects, their life’s work and their livelihoods could be shut down or completely derailed.

But losing an immense amount of scientific capacity, expertise, and institutional knowledge in this first year didn’t just happen in isolation. The job instability and losses, both immediately and as more time passed, impacted the ability and the timeliness with which the federal government could track infectious disease spread, investigate and prevent lead poisoning, understand grade school enrollment and financial aid need in universities, or compile and use food quality/safety data or data on injuries or accidents. These aren’t just individuals losing their jobs—this is all of us in the US losing services established by law and paid for with our taxes.

Integrity at risk

The attacks continued in March, with agency scientific advisory boards high among the targets. But the end of March was also when the National Institutes of Health (NIH) rescinded its scientific integrity (SI) policy, a policy renowned for its transparency and public participation. Agency SI policies were created (and recently improved upon) with the intention of protecting federal scientists and their work from political interference. This rescission was the first SI domino that fell, effectively weakening safeguards against undue influence, censorship, and retaliation.

After the rescission of NIH’s policy, President Trump signed an EO directing agencies to revert all SI policies to what they were at the end of his first term, which weakened these safeguards and, in some cases, outright removed them. It also directed agencies replace them with new policies to enforce deceptively titled “gold standard science” (GSS) principles, instructing agencies to explicitly put scientists under the control of political appointees and constrain them to the President’s political agenda. As a result, more agency policies were reverted back or rescinded in the weeks that followed.

At his request, The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released recommendations to agencies for how they can prioritize “GSS” tenets in their new SI policies that they’re supposed to eventually release. In the meantime, agencies were told to publish interim documents explaining what they already do in alignment with these principles and how they plan to implement them moving forward.

Some of the ideas and principles alluded to in these GSS tenets are well-established norms and practices in the scientific community. The administration pays lip service to ideas like minimizing conflicts of interest, encouraging transparency, and communicating methodological limitations. But its actual approach to science  flies in the face of all the practices it claims to support.

Nowhere in this guidance does the administration acknowledge importance of keeping science independent from influence or maintaining safeguards and protections to facilitate scientific freedom. There’s no effort made to prevent scientists from being retaliated against for denouncing unethical practices or sharing information that counters the administration’s preferred narratives. Everything is seemingly secondary to the President’s priorities.

Since OSTP’s August 22^nd deadline, federal agencies have started rolling out their GSS implementation plans, with a few publishing new SI policies. We’ll continue to monitor this situation as it unfolds.

It doesn’t stop there

Here at the Union of Concerned Scientists, we were expecting this presidency to be marked by a high number of attacks on science. For one thing, we have the whole first term as an example—the first Trump administration launched an unprecedented number of attacks against science. And, despite the occasional denial by candidate Trump on the campaign trail, the administration already showed us their playbook in Project 2025. But even judged against those bleak standards, the Trump administration has escalated its campaign against science. This is a systematic, strategic attack on our federal scientific systems, on the notion of shared truth and a commitment to the public good, and on participatory democracy itself. We expect these attacks to continue.

By stopping at March, I don’t want to give the impression that the attacks that occurred since then are any less impactful, devastating, or important to review. But it shows us the pattern and offers a preview of what’s to come.

My colleagues and I have been hard at work to make the way we collect and tabulate attacks on science more efficient and standardized. And very soon, we’ll be able to share with you how we’ve made tracking and documenting different patterns of harm even easier and more accessible.

In the meantime, UCS will continue to be here to call out the harms and to advocate for evidence-based policy, especially with your support:

• You can join the fight by contacting your Senators and Representatives and urging them to co-sponsor the Scientific Integrity Act. This law would codify scientific integrity protections across federal agencies, making it much more difficult to politically interfere in scientific decisions.
• You can stay up to date on other scientific integrity related actions by using this link.
• You can follow the hard work of my UCS colleagues in calling out the Trump administration’s unjust and authoritarian actions. They often offer other ways that you can help and get involved.
• By signing up for email updates, you can stay updated on what we’re seeing.

The road ahead of us is challenging, but we need to stay aware and engaged. Together, we can contain the harm and make the case for science that works for all of us.

With climate change, the potential for winters with low- to no-snow is substantial. These profound shifts jeopardize water supply reliability across the West and are forcing us to adapt our water infrastructure to prepare for a future that doesn’t look like the past.

Western states are entering Spring 2026 in a snow drought, with near-record low to record-low snowpack amid unprecedented heat, scarily setting the stage for the possibilities of drought, water shortages and heightened wildfire risk in the coming months.

In California, where I live, the Sierra Nevada snowpack provides nearly a third of the state’s annual water supply. Following an unusually warm winter and an extreme March heatwave, water managers will likely find very little snow remaining when they conduct this week’s April 1 snow survey—the historic peak of our snowpack. I expect we’ll be left with significantly below-average snowpack—consistent with what climate science has been warning us for years will happen with higher global temperatures. What little is left of the snow is disappearing quickly.

What is a snow drought?

While early winter storms brought more than 90 inches of snow to parts of the Sierra over the holiday, that was short lived. The unusually warm winter left many states with serious snow deficits even before the unprecedented, early-season heatwave in March that brought temperatures 20⁰F to 40⁰F above normal. This abnormally low snowpack is what’s called a warm snow drought—meaning that, even with a normal or average amount of precipitation as we’ve had this year, more rain falls than snow. Recent research shows that the Western US has emerged as a global snow drought “hotspot,” with snow droughts more prevalent, intense and longer in the last two decades, compared with 1980-2000.

By early January, one indicator of snowpack—the snow water equivalent (SWE, or amount of water stored in the snowpack) was below the 20th percentile across the western US. This was the lowest recorded level in 25 years (since 2001, when the MODIS satellite record starts). Not much has improved by late March 2026. For example, in Colorado, the SWE across 115 stations was 38% of average, the lowest in more than four decades.

In a semi-arid state like California, a robust Sierra Nevada snowpack is essential for sustaining the state through the dry and hot summer season, which is why it’s often referred to as the state’s “frozen reservoir.” Cities, farmers and ecosystems historically rely on predictable mountain snowmelt in late spring, running off into rivers and streams to be stored in network of surface water reservoirs—essential for balancing availability of summer water supply with mitigating spring flood risk. Historically, the largest snow-producing months in Sierra Nevada are December through March. That’s why April 1 is typically the peak of snow accumulation. That window is narrowing with climate change.

Unrivaled: Snow is no match for winter heat

An extreme, early-season heatwave like the one experienced across the Western North America in March was “virtually impossible without human-induced climate change” according to a World Weather Attribution study. The record-breaking heat came on the heels of an unusually warm winter across the West, with temperatures breaking records in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming. That warmth caused more rain than snow to fall, even at some high elevations, with dire consequences for communities reliant on winter tourism dollars.  While a hotter than usual winter gifted us with one form of Heated Rivalry—the type that kept many of us indoors and glue to our TVs—outside, ski resorts across the region ended their seasons early.

In other regions, record breaking winter warming threatens outdoor hockey and skating culture, with groups like Save Pond Hockey rallying around climate change. A recent World Economic Forum report warned that just 10 countries will have the winter weather suitable to host the Winter Olympics by 2040, with billions in anticipated losses to the sports economy.

“Every major river basin in the West experienced its first or second warmest winter (December, January, and February) on record”

Who’s the game changer? Climate change

My colleague Dr. Pablo Ortiz previously wrote about the many reasons that snow matters in California, noting that it is an “indicator of climate change” and calling the state’s winter snow surveys “a health check-up for our water system.”

Since California started its snow survey at Phillips Station in 1942, the lowest measured value was in 2015, when statewide snowpack was 5% of the historic average. That remarkably warm winter, attributed in part to anthropogenic warming, prevented snow accumulation and contributed to the broader context for one of the worst droughts on record.

That’s why I am closely tracking the 2026 levels. The year began on a promising note with the California snowpack measuring 89% of average statewide in early January after a series of atmospheric rivers. Following a dry January, which is historically the wettest month of the year in California, that statewide average dropped to 59% of average by late January.

In the Northern Sierra, where several of the state’s largest major water supply reservoirs are located, water managers measured the snowpack at a dismal 46% of normal in late February. In the weeks that followed, and before temperatures started shattering records, dry and warm conditions were melting the California snowpack an average of 1% per day, according to data from a network of sensors that weigh overlying snow. The heatwave further accelerated that premature melting, further eroding the snowpack, with estimates that nearly 20% of peak snowpack melted between late Feb and early March.

The rapidly melting snowpack presents a problem in California where winter precipitation filled major reservoirs that are now 122% of average statewide. That means they have limited space to accommodate the additional early runoff from melting mountain snowpack and any additional precipitation from a late-season storms e.g. from this week’s expected weather.

Smaller snowpack may mean bigger wildfire risks

The record-high temperatures are drying out vegetation while reduced snowpack and early-season melt in the Western US deprives the soil of prolonged moisture, posing a heightened risk for wildfires. New research warns that declining snowpack and earlier snowmelt may “prime forested watersheds to dry, burn, and experience high severity fire,” particularly concerning where snowpack “historically buffered fire risk,” and instead may result in more areas burned by severe fires.  Earlier snowmelt can also lengthen the fire season by allowing a longer period for vegetation to dry out and become more flammable.

Changes to snowpack and timing of melt are just some of the many ways that climate change is supercharging wildfire activity in the West, driving a near doubling of forest burned area between 1984 and 2015.

Contagious dry spells: Snow to hydrologic droughts

Parts of the Western US have been navigating through the driest two-plus decades in the last 1200 years. The region expects a not-infrequent amount of drought years, but this particular mega-drought is exacerbated by and attributable to anthropogenic warming. Winter snow droughts can progress into a hydrologic drought characterized by observed deficits in water supply (stream flow, reservoir levels, and ground water table declines); or a agricultural or ecological drought where crops and/or ecosystems are impacted by a drought, respectively.

The Colorado River Basin, where snow cover is the lowest level on record, is the water supply for 40 million people. Concerns are growing beyond water supply availability to hydro electricity generation. The Glen Canyon Dam, which sits above Lake Powell and provides electricity to more than 5 million people in six different states, may become inoperable by December 2026 if the minimum water level for power generation is breached, as government projections suggest.  In states like Colorado, this winter’s snow drought led water users to pursue water-use restrictions earlier than usual: Denver Water asked its residents to help meet a 20% conservation target with other towns declaring water shortage emergencies—a “harbinger of what’s to come.”

The consequences of the snow drought go beyond hydrologic droughts to water rights as well. The Colorado River basin is already over-allocated (to put it mildly), and this winter’s snowpack will likely only exacerbate the ongoing water rights tensions, especially for Tribal Nations with uncertain access and unresolved water rights claims.

A common goal: Drought resilience is a long game

While California managed to be briefly “100% drought free” for the first time in 25 years after an exceptionally wet start to the winter, the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center is forecasting that drought will expand to the US West this spring with worsening drought conditions for both the Western US and the South-Central Plains, according to NOAA.

To meet the challenge of a hotter and drier climate, we need to more quickly learn from recent dry periods about how and where our adaptive approaches remain insufficient. For example, after the dry period in 2021-2022, the state had to fundamentally overhaul the way they consider the relationship between snowpack, spring runoff and reservoir storage to better account for how climate driven warming altered runoff regimes. At that time, failure to adequately account for climate change led to overestimating runoff by 68% for the Sacramento River watersheds and by 45%+ for southern watersheds.

Since then, California has made forecasting improvements that could better position the state to adapt to this year’s snow drought, but it doesn’t change the physical limitations and challenges of balancing summer supply and spring flooding.

Whether it’s deciding who gets rights to limited water or what we do with irrigated agricultural land when water runs out, results from this week’s snow survey can inform how California rethinks how it manages water in the face of climate change.

In our Western States program, we are committed to a just land transition in California which may facilitate long-term drought and climate resilience. Just land transition solutions are informed by, and responsive to, the realities of our changing climate.

What can we do?

Until your community is “officially” in a drought and you’re asked to pay close attention to your household water use—like folks are in Denver—at minimum, all of us can work to hold our elected officials accountable for 1) protecting and preserving the critical climate services provided by U.S. government from institutions like the National Center for Atmospheric Research and 2) protecting democracy. As outlined by my colleague Dr. Jennifer Jones in her recent blog post, “A shared commitment to knowledge and facts, produced independently from political interference, is critical to maintain democratic decisionmaking, sustain public trust in institutions, and enable society to make progress on the world’s biggest challenges, including climate change and public health.” Democracy depends on science, and and UCS has outlined five ways that scientists can stand up to authoritarianism.

 Hageman— who represents one of the top oil-producing states—said in February that she was writing legislation that would give the oil industry immunity from the dozens of lawsuits it currently faces. “Clearly, this is an area in which Congress has a role to play,” she blustered.

But is it? More importantly, should politicians be allowed to wipe away the rights of those suffering the consequences of oil companies’ decades-long deception about how their products would change the earth’s climate? Should they prevent future generations living with drought, disease, and incessant wildfires from seeking redress?

The answer is, unequivocally, no. That’s a position held by over 200 organizations, including the National Association of Counties which represents some 3,000 Counties in the United States. Our justice system is built to address wrongful actions, whether by an individual or corporation.

A quick review of previous attempts at corporate immunity provides insight into what’s currently at stake, why granting immunity to polluters puts us in danger, and why such decisions should be made by the courts rather than politicians.

Tobacco industry: No waiver, $260 billion settlement

Smoking has long been the leading cause of preventable deaths in the United States, costing hundreds of billions each year in health costs and lost productivity. Lawsuits against tobacco companies began emerging in the 1950s, but the industry successfully quashed them for decades by arguing that package warning labels transferred responsibility to the consumer.

A turning point came in the 1990s when state attorneys general launched dozens of suits seeking to recover medical costs from smoking-related illnesses borne by state taxpayers who had not chosen to smoke. These cases were strengthened by documentation, revealed through legal discovery, showing tobacco companies had known for years about the damage caused by their product and not only suppressed the information but spread disinformation to counter it. This approach turned the legal debate from one about individual responsibility to public harm.

In 1997, several tobacco companies proposed that Congress introduce legislation that would provide immunity from these class-action suits in exchange for a multi-billion-dollar fine and stronger warning labels, among other concessions. Sponsored by Senator John McCain, the bill’s penalties stiffened as it wound its way through the congressional process and the tobacco industry ultimately lobbied to kill it.

With that avenue closed, the industry settled the remaining lawsuits via the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement (MSA). The MSA required the four largest tobacco companies to pay $260 billion to the states in annual installments, along with actions such as dramatically reducing advertising and dissolving trade associations that spread disinformation. It was the largest civil litigation agreement in US history, and provided many lessons to another industry facing similar lawsuits.

Firearms industry: Won a waiver, $0 settlement

Around the same time of the MSA, dozens of cities were filing suits against the gun industry, seeking redress for lives lost to an epidemic of gun violence. Murder deaths by gun had risen steadily since the 1960s and jumped sharply in the mid-90s due primarily to the handguns flooding into cities.

To head off the lawsuits, the main firearms trade associations—the National Rifle Association and the National Shooting Sports Foundation—lobbied sympathetic lawmakers for immunity legislation. In early 2005 Senator Larry Craig  and Rep. Cliff Stearns  introduced the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which shielded the industry from liability even in cases where guns were used illegally or to commit a crime. President George W Bush signed the bill the following October, handing the industry the most sweeping legal protection ever afforded by the federal government.

Prior to the bill’s passage, lawsuits that made it to trial often resulted in punishment for bad actors whose negligence resulted in death. One example is the lawsuit brought by the families of victims of the “Beltway Snipers,” who went on a shooting spree in 2002 that killed 17 and injured 9 people. The suit named both the gun manufacturer and the dealer, who had failed to keep legally mandated records and could not account for hundreds of guns in his inventory. The result was a loss of the dealer’s license and a pledge from Bushmaster to change its distribution practices. Since PLCAA’s passage, however, not a single negligence case against a gun manufacturer has gone to trial.

Pesticides industry: Lobbying for waiver, avoiding damages

Ever since the World Health Organization classified glyphosate—the active ingredient in a widely-used pesticide sold under the name Roundup—as a probable human carcinogen in 2015, the pesticide industry has struggled to fight its way out of a litigation pit. In 2020, glyphosate manufacturer Bayer, which acquired the pesticide’s developer Monsanto in 2018, paid more than $10 billion to settle tens of thousands of lawsuits linked to glyphosate and other pesticides.

Thousands of lawsuits remain, however, compelling Bayer to simultaneously pursue immunity through the courts, Congress, state legislatures, and the Executive Branch. The Trump administration abetted the effort with a February 2026 executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to “ensure a continued and adequate supply” of glyphosate-based herbicides.

On the Congressional front, industry allies in the House of Representatives inserted language into a recent appropriations bill that would prevent states from restricting the use of chemicals or requiring manufacturers to include carcinogen warnings on packaging. It was ultimately stripped from the bill after pushback from health advocates. Bayer founded the Modern Ag Alliance  to push for immunity legislation at the state level, and nine states are currently considering bills.

Finally, the US Supreme Court will hear a case next month filed by a man who sued Monsanto after his exposure to Roundup led to a 2018 diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The Supreme Court’s ruling will have major ramifications for whether the federal law regulating pesticide label warnings can preempt state lawsuits.

Suppressing rights to escape accountability

The fossil fuel industry has shrewdly applied the lessons from these precedents to its own pursuit of legal immunity, lobbying the White House, Congress, and state political leaders for protection. The Trump administration acquiesced with an April 2025 executive order and preemptive lawsuits against states suing fossil fuel companies. Attorneys general from 16 states with oil-centric economies also chipped in with a letter to asking the Department of Justice to create a “liability shield.” And lawmakers in four states have introduced immunity bills, following one in Utah which was signed into law this week.

Abetting the oil industry this way may undermine our foundational rights. The federalist concept set out in the US Constitution gives states primary responsibility for tort law, which addresses harm caused by wrongful or injurious actions. In addition to compensating victims, tort law also deters future harms by establishing consequences for injuring others. Tort-based litigation against automotive manufacturers led to safety innovations such as seat belts and airbags, for example.  Immunity legislation undermines those state rights.

The tension between state versus federal law can be seen in the perpetual battle for court venues in which corporate lawyers push to move cases into federal courts where they believe they will find more sympathetic juries and judges. The oil industry has attempted similar maneuvers but was foiled by judges in lower courts as well as the Supreme Court, which declined to hear state-based climate suits. However, the recent Supreme Court decision to hear a 2018 case in which the city of Boulder, CO, sued oil companies for misleading the public about the damaging impact of their products could upend that precedent, ultimately weakening climate accountability.

Don’t let Big Oil beat the rap

At the heart of the dozens of lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry, which now represent one in four US residents, are the harms that climate change is imposing on people now and into the foreseeable future. These harms include billions of dollars in damages from climate-related extreme weather events, many of which can be linked to carbon emissions from fossil fuel companies, such as heat waves that will exponentially increase deaths as well as labor costs, and rising sea levels that will wipe out public infrastructure and real estate value.

The case against the companies also rests on the documented fact that the industry knew for decades their products could lead to these catastrophes but chose to not only continue business as usual but fight to obstruct any attempts at accountability.

Giving those experiencing the impacts of climate change  (which includes you, reader) their day in court is a fundamental constitutional right. Reviewing recent history clearly shows that granting fossil fuel companies legal immunity would repeat dangerous mistakes, distorting justice and privileging corporate power over democratic accountability. It would also undermine citizens’ confidence in the ability of government and the legal system to protect them from harm.

Take 90 seconds right now to demand your Member of Congress reject the push for immunity for Big Oil’s devastating climate harms.

Among its many components, conservation policy has become one of the most important pillars of the farm bill since its inception. Farmers and ranchers are not only producers of food and fiber, but are also stewards of the nation’s soil, water, land, and natural resources. Conservation programs have become central tools for supporting both environmental management and farm viability—especially as unpredictable and extreme weather patterns intensify, land degradation increases, and rural communities face mounting economic challenges.

Yet farm conservation policy did not emerge overnight. It was shaped through decades of economic crises, environmental disasters, and political compromise. It is essential to understand where conservation policy came from, and its farm bill evolution, to evaluate the strengths and shortcomings of the current iteration that recently passed out of the House Agriculture Committee and now sits before Congress.

A brief history of conservation policy

In 1933, during the height of the Great Depression when the unemployment rate was at 25 percent, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed, and Congress passed, the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), which would pay farmers subsidies to not overplant. Subsequently, in 1935, Congress passed the Soil Conservation Act to mitigate the environmental degradation that led to the environmental crisis known as the Dust Bowl.

However, the Supreme Court found a new tax on processors that would pay for the subsidies in the AAA to be unconstitutional. In response, Congress passed a new law, the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936, that combined agricultural production management with soil conservation by providing direct payments to farmers who would reduce their planting of crops that were depleting the soil of its vital nutrients.

Throughout the next 20 years, conservation priorities were sidelined, first to increase production to meet the needs of World War II. Then, even though conservation programs were created as a part of the Agricultural Act of 1956, the USDA once again emphasized increased production to meet alleged demand. Such expanded production led to the 1980s farm crisis but brought a renewed spotlight on conservation policies.

Subsequently, the 1985 farm bill not only included new programs such as the Conservation Reserve Program but also established conservation compliance standards under new provisions known as Swampbuster and Sodsaver that addressed draining wetlands and the plowing of native sod, respectively. This farm bill was the first to include a dedicated section specifically for conservation purposes. The most notable programs today are the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), which help incentivize farmers to adopt conservation practices by underwriting some of their up-front costs, but both are oversubscribed and underfunded.

Despite decades of conservation policy, many of the same challenges persist: Soil erosion continues to degrade farmland and contribute to dangerous dust storms at nearly twice the intensity of the peak Dust Bowl era, agricultural runoff fuels the Gulf of Mexico’s annual dead zone, and excess fertilizer contaminates drinking water and contributes to the climate crisis.

What’s in the proposed farm bill?

In February, the House Agriculture Committee passed the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 (FFNSA) with a 34-17 vote. The proposed legislation does provide needed updates and policy changes, but sadly, it fails to make the changes needed to address the crisis farmers—and the food supply chain—have felt over the past eight years since the last farm bill was passed in 2018.

The Good: The FFNSA provides many environmentally beneficial provisions that would expand and prioritize nutrient management and soil health in agricultural research, and it includes practices related to soil health, heat-trapping emissions, and carbon sequestration. Specifically, the FFNSA would also allow states to select 10 priority practices that would be reimbursed up to 90%, but only if each practice “increases carbon sequestration or reduces greenhouse gas emissions, including emissions of methane and nitrous oxide.”

The Bad: Precision agriculture—the use of technology such as GPS, sensors, and drones to tailor how fertilizers and other inputs are applied on farms—can be effective at addressing conservation through innovation that makes farms more efficient. The FFNSA allows increased payments for up to 90% of the costs of adopting precision agriculture practices and acquiring the technology. At face value, this addition has positive environmental benefits such as increased profits and reduced application of crop inputs like fertilizer, herbicide, fuel, and water. However, it presents various barriers to conservation programs.

While large farms benefit from economies of scale, with savings on fuel, labor, and inputs, small farms can experience higher per-acre costs for precision technology. Innovations in seeds and precision agriculture have improved efficiency and yields, but they have also contributed to rising production costs and structural pressures that can favor larger-scale operations over smaller and midsize farms.

The costs of precision agriculture would likely increase demand for EQIP and CSP. These programs have thousands of farmers willing to adopt conservation practices but are turned away each year due to insufficient funding. If Congress decides to keep precision agriculture in the farm bill, it needs to ensure there is targeted support for small-scale, socially disadvantaged, and limited-resource farmers. Mandatory funding must be increased to provide these farmers with reliable profitability, and the funding must not be at the discretion of appropriators.

The Ugly: The FFNSA claims that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the federal government should have the sole authority to create uniformity in EPA-approved pesticides labeling using their rigorous, science-based review process. However, this would take away state governments’ authority to regulate additional pesticides that the federal government has not yet regulated or is not willing to regulate, even if the pesticides contain carcinogens.

The implications of this provision extend far beyond labeling. For decades, states have often stepped in when federal regulation lagged behind emerging science or public health concerns. Preempting state authority could limit the ability of states to respond to new research on pesticide exposure, environmental contamination, and farmworker safety.

Envisioning a better farm bill

Beyond the good, bad, and ugly, the broader concern with this farm bill iteration is that it largely preserves the status quo. Farmers across the country have experienced a multitude of disruptions since the last farm bill was passed, including supply chain breakdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, increased input costs, extreme weather and natural disasters, consolidation in private land ownership, and increased food prices and hunger resulting from geopolitical conflicts. Yet the FFNSA does little to fundamentally restructure the policy framework that shapes how federal resources reach farmers and communities.

At a moment when many producers—especially beginning farmers, small and midsize limited-resource producers, and socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers—are struggling to remain viable, the farm bill should be an opportunity to rethink how federal programs support regeneration and resilience. Though the proposed legislation includes marker bills that would strengthen local and regional food systems and continues authorization of many programs, the funding streams for these programs are not mandatory, putting their authorizations at the whim of the appropriations committee. It also completely fails to include any support for, or even the recognition of, food and farm workers.

The next farm bill must recognize that conservation and economic viability are not competing goals but are mutually beneficial. Healthy soils improve productivity, reduce input costs, increase water retention, and help farmers withstand droughts and floods. Policies that support regenerative practices, diversified cropping systems, and conservation for small-scale farming can simultaneously improve farms’ economic viability and environmental outcomes.

Ultimately, the farm bill is more than a piece of agricultural legislation. It is the single largest food and agriculture policy framework in the United States, shaping everything from what farmers grow to what families eat and how land is managed for future generations. A truly forward-looking farm bill would invest in farmers as stewards of the land, strengthen rural economies, expand opportunity for the next generation of producers, and ensure that conservation remains at the heart of US agriculture.

As Congress debates the FFNSA, the challenge is clear: to move beyond incremental changes and build a transformational farm bill that reflects the realities farmers face today and are likely to face in the future, creating true food and farm security.

As families and communities mourned the loss of loved ones in a mid-air plane collision in Washington, DC, and the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Maryland in early 2025, the president and some of his supporters blamed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

The wand had been pointed and disinformation sprung to life.

As he gutted legal protections civil rights laws afforded historically marginalized people, and that were gained through the blood and tears of pioneers like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., historical monuments honoring the achievements of Black achievers have come under attack. President Trump’s executive orders unleashed a forceful new discriminatory mandate; he commanded federal workers to point out policies, handbooks, and emails so that offending words like “inclusion” or “women” could be identified and eliminated. Federal workers were even encouraged to point their tool at the presence of colleagues, people they deem offensive simply because of who they are. Why? In his view, hardworking people, finally using their talents in positions they were shut out of for decades because of harmful hiring practices, were evidence of “illegal DEI,” and they should be purged. Cleared for re-institution were discriminatory practices, such as those revealed in an experiment where resumes of people with names that sounded Black were 50% less likely to get a call-back interview than white-sounding counterparts with identical resumes.

Trailblazing Black officials, like Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, were gone in a “poof,” with shameless, inaccurate reasons given. In Hayden’s case, it was that she was supposedly “putting inappropriate books in the library for children,” never mind that children are not the Library of Congress’ main audience. No need for facts if you have your magic wand.

Fearing the president’s ire, many businesses quickly capitulated. Banks and financial institutions rushed to strip mention of Diversity and Inclusion from their corporate reporting and board requirements. Tech and retail giants—Google, Meta, Amazon, and many more—fell into line. No less egregious, the media conglomerates that play a critical role in safeguarding our democracy—CBS, Disney, Conde Nast, and Paramount Skydance—laid off or reassigned journalists of color who brought fresh perspectives to the stories they wrote. The Guardian quoted one Black journalist who said, “It so happens that part of their agenda is to, let’s be real, not just get rid of DEI initiatives, but to get rid of diversity in and of itself.”

All these simultaneous actions encourage and enable a glidepath into a future of brazen discrimination and incivility where stereotypes and tropes of presumed incompetence and lack of intelligence of Black people are re-elevated.

For many who study Black women in the workplace, it is no surprise that President Trump’s biggest victories are in opportunity reversals for Black women who have suffered disproportionately under the kind of unfair labor practices that he is looking to reinvigorate. These women, persisting despite inequity across every industry, face the largest uphill struggles in the job market. A 2020 report by Lean In, titled The State of Black Women in Corporate America, examined this, and a 2026 Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) report showed that “Black women lost a net total of 113,000 jobs between January and December 2025. At the height of the summer volatility, Black women accounted for 54.7% of all female job losses, despite making up only 14.1% of the female workforce.”

We were on a different path

The murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the national racial reckoning it accelerated introduced so many business leaders to how the existence of racism can appear in the form of lethal and professional barriers that even well-meaning “good people” can have an inadvertent hand in. In those post-pandemic years, the business community began to pay attention to how these factors contributed to greater systemic truths, such as this country’s highly disparate racial wealth gap, poorer health outcomes, and fewer opportunities for Black people. Corporate leaders’ willingness to try to remedy this systemic inequity at work signaled new hope as organizations hired justice and equity professionals to lead meaningful strategic equity and inclusion advances. This type of change was the intentionality working Black women needed.

Employees, customers, and advocates alike pushed for dedicated equity work and for these new justice and equity leaders to have meaningful executive roles with sufficient authority and support that matched the stated commitments of the organizations rushing to hire them. They should have been set up for success. These requests are widely recognized as imperative by those in the practice of organizational development (like SHRM, a top human resources organization), by those who monitor this field (like McKinsey), and by talent agencies (like Russell Reynolds). Like others, UCS’s Chief Justice and Equity Officer role, my current role, was created in response to the collective push, led largely by staff of color whose requests tracked this prevailing guidance.

It seemed that a critical gain for Black women was underway.

By 2021, chief equity officers tripled as companies hastened to perform social justice commitments while cashing in on the profits their declarations yielded. But by the time the second administration turned its executive orders into weapons and attacked equity work throughout the entire federal enterprise, the follow-on capitulation of business leaders helped guide the aim of President Trump’s rampage directly at the roles created to combat regression.

Some CEOs had already grown tired of the vigilance, investment, and upskilling required to sustain equity gains. They had begun to sag under the weight of responsibilities and truths they could previously choose to ignore in days with little pressure to take non-majority perspectives seriously. And so, anticipating threats of another four years of this administration, poof! Chief equity officer roles were slashed or muzzled within multi-priority departments, leaving them with diminished support, authority, and smaller budgets. Black women’s chances of workplace parity again felt the blows.

Where we stand today

Some businesses and organizations remain committed to the equity goals of the early 2020s, but they lack the privilege of doing so publicly if they wish to remain financially viable. These groups did not retract support or authority from their equity officers but found creative pivots to carry on. Other organizations, like UCS, that have the privilege to proudly stand our ground in the face of this administration’s threats, have not altered our course.

However, championing Black women’s workplace advancement has never and can never be solely the responsibility of chief equity officers. Black women bring a wealth of talent and experience to any workplace. To cut them out of your workforce means depriving your organization of a significant pool of talented individuals who have experience overcoming obstacles to achieve success. The sustained practice of inclusion benefits not only Black women, veterans, and people with disabilities; it benefits the business and ultimately, everyone.

At this crucial time, those of us determined to stay the course must continue to fight for justice, equity, and inclusion, and continue to fight authoritarianism no matter our expertise. We must educate ourselves about Black women’s contributions throughout history and the experiences of Black women whose work has always been an integral part of this nation’s success.

Find ways you can resist Black women’s erasure in the workplace and in society. Highlight any excellent achievements of your Black women colleagues, as they often go unnoticed or see their efforts credited to others. Spend your valuable dollars with businesses that are resisting. Contribute to as many of the legal fights as you can.

Like never before, affirm the love in our local communities by participating in joyful gatherings or other forms of strength and community uplift, which can sustain us for the long haul. Take up the mantle where those hit hardest may not be able to right now. We must keep our sights fixed on the brighter, safer, more just, and equitable world we are working to inhabit, which cannot be a world where Black women are targeted.

Together we are stronger than the hate that tries to divide us.

As the United States slides into competitive authoritarianism, control over scientific data has become an important lever of power.  Authoritarians manipulate, censor, and cease collection of data to control the public narrative, suppress dissent, and advance propaganda in support of their self-serving policy goals. A functioning democracy, however, depends on the ability of its citizens to make informed decisions. A shared commitment to knowledge and facts, produced independently from political interference, is critical to maintain democratic decisionmaking, sustain public trust in institutions, and enable society to make progress on the world’s biggest challenges, including climate change and public health. A shared reality, built on facts and evidence, helps people evaluate policies and hold leaders accountable for the results. Reliable data is foundational for informed policy-making and countries with the best official statistical systems have been found to be the most democratic. Without transparency and accountability, public trust is eroded and government decisions lose legitimacy. And without a commitment to the truth and the public good, government decisions are made based on ideology or the demands of powerful interests allied with the regime, empowering a few wealthy insiders at the expense of the rest of us.

Since the Trump administration took power on January 20^th, 2025, the president and his appointees have launched at least 536 attacks on science. This litany of assaults includes terminating or freezing 7,800 research grants, cutting or forcing out tens of thousands of federal scientists, proposing science budget cuts of 35%, endorsing conspiracy theories, using fear and intimidation to stop scientists from speaking to the public, and publicly extorting universities whose work ran counter to the Trump political agenda. They have also used disinformation to weaponize bigotry against immigrants, transgender people and other vulnerable communities to justify their extreme agenda, with a severe cost to the rule of law and to human lives here and abroad. These are classic techniques authoritarian regimes use to maintain their grip on power.

Scientists and their work are at risk from the administration’s actions—but they also have the standing to push back against these abuses of power. The vast majority of Americans—77%—trust scientists to act in the public’s best interests, according to a poll released in January 2026. Scientists as a group have higher levels of public confidence than many other groups, including business leaders and elected officials. Scientists can and should leverage this unique trust to help defend democracy.

In just the first two months of 2026, President Trump and his allies have distorted facts and silenced the best available science in ways that threaten democracy and make all of us less safe. They have discarded the best-available evidence by repealing EPA’s endangerment finding; elevated vaccine pseudoscience as national policy; and politicized voter data to unfairly influence future elections.

Climate-change denial

Their repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Endangerment Finding, which legally established that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, is a particularly egregious case in point. This finding has been a key scientific basis for climate regulation and supported by decades of scientific consensus and a Supreme Court ruling.  While the White House trumpeted it as the largest deregulatory action in American history, many scientists recognize it for what it is: a handout to the oil and gas industry and billionaire polluters at the expense of public health. Trump’s EPA used legal contortions to repeal the endangerment finding, wrongly suggesting the EPA lacks statutory authority to regulate climate change under the Clean Air Act. We at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) have joined a lawsuit against the EPA and their complete dereliction of the agency’s mission to protect people’s health and its legal obligation under the Clean Air Act.

This repeal came after a January 2026 ruling by the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts that the Department of Energy under Trump violated federal law by convening a secret meeting of climate change contrarians (UCS was also part of that litigation). The secret group was tasked with developing a slanted report on climate science as a way to target the endangerment finding.  This secret group was hand-picked by the Trump administration to explicitly manufacture “scientific” justification for EPA’s actions. Members included a former BP Chief scientist with a public record of diverging from scientific consensus. While the oil and gas industry has spent decades repeatedly using pseudoscientific arguments, selective uncertainty, and manufactured doubt to undermine public understanding of climate change and delay regulatory action, the current Trump administration has essentially elevated these tactics to official government policy. The court ruled the secret group functioned like a federal advisory committee but did not adhere to the legal requirements of the Federal Advisory Committees Act.

In January 2026, the EPA departed from scientific precedent by stating they will no longer include the impact of pollution on people when they conduct cost-benefit assessment for pollution standards. Decades of scientific data has shown the irrefutable health benefits of reducing pollution, but the new EPA regulatory method stopped putting a dollar amount on the value of human lives saved from reduced pollution and will only quantify the economic cost to the polluter, thereby favoring the interests of polluters over people. This mimics patterns seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, when authoritarian regimes were found to manipulate, suppress, distort, and avoid collecting health data that challenged their rule.

Sowing distrust on public health

Trump and his allies are also manufacturing and elevating health pseudoscience to serve their political goals. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), led in this administration by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Jr., has distorted scientific evidence, cited non-existent studies, misrepresented research, and elevated politically predetermined conclusions in ways that violated principles of scientific integrity. A letter issued by the American Academy of Pediatricians and signed onto by five organizations noted that HHS misrepresented scientific consensus and prioritized opinion over evidence about care for transgender and gender-diverse youth. One analysis for HHS’s so-called ‘Make America Healthy Again’ agenda cited fabricated studies and drew incorrect conclusions. Some of the most high-profile pseudoscience under RFK Jr.’s HHS has related to vaccines. HHS political leaders canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in mRNA vaccine R&D funding and publicly (and falsely) claimed mRNA vaccines were “under‑tested” and associated with “mounting adverse events.” RFK Jr. has installed prominent vaccine skeptics in roles meant to protect human health. Additionally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), charged with keeping the public safe from epidemics, has inexplicably stopped updating vaccine databases,  which can undermine evidence-based medicine and public trust. Removal of vaccine recommendations under RFK Jr. echoes “soft eugenics”: the idea that there should be limits to what health services should be provided by the government, that nature should be allowed to take its course, and the strong and most deserving will survive. This attitude showed up in the “herd immunity” theory put forth by opponents of COVID public health protections. These sorts of actions by HHS under Trump and his enablers have led more than 1,000 current and former HHS staff to demand RFK Jr.’s resignation.

Targeting elections and the right to vote

The Department of Justice (DOJ) under Trump has also weaponized science and data against democracy. Since mid-2025, DOJ Attorney General Pam Bondi has demanded that Minnesota turn over highly sensitive unredacted voter data, including voter lists with dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, and partial social security numbers. After federal immigration officers shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January 2026, Bondi sent a letter suggesting that the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees immigration agencies, could reduce their operations in the state in exchange for the voter data, in addition to other demands. The federal government has demanded voter records from 44 states even though they have no legal authority to do so.

In January 2026, federal agents seized voter records, ballots, and election materials from Fulton County, Georgia, related to the 2020 election. The government’s stated reasons for the investigation and seizure of voting materials have been debunked by dozens of courts. The timing of the seizure of voter materials in the months before the 2026 midterms is another example of using voter data to impact public confidence in elections and justify restrictive voting policies. The physical presence of Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), during the search and seizure at the Fulton County Elections Hub and Operations Center also caused serious alarm among election officials. The DNI oversees foreign intelligence agencies, not the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that conducted the search warrant. Gabbard’s visit created bipartisan concern regarding the rule-of-law and the security of elections data. Election experts note that, in the context of the Trump administration’s rhetoric and actions, this visit can be seen as a visible federal presence meant to intimidate or chill participation. These events demonstrate how data can be used to manufacture doubt in future elections, give election deniers ‘data’ to push false claims, justify large-scale removal of voters from voter rolls, intimidate  election officials, and chill voter participation through fear and confusion. Such tactics are hallmarks of how authoritarians seek to corrupt elections.

We can take action

If you have ever taken a first aid course, you know the idea that the first step to responding to an emergency is to recognize there is an emergency. To prevent further democratic backsliding, scientists can help the public and major institutions recognize the threat to democracy, a tactic proven to stopping dictators in South Korea, Brazil, and Poland. While resistance to authoritarianism in the United States must include the courts, Congress, defending elections, and independent media, collective action is critical. Mass protests “call the bluff” of authoritarian’s fear-based narrative and they demonstrate the breadth of opposition to Trump and his political enablers, including corporations. People showing up has already worked in the past year, from the Tesla Takedown to the anti-ICE activism that helped end the federal assault on Minneapolis.

Science keeps us healthy and safe, powers our economy, and advances collective knowledge as a public good. And democracy cannot function without a shared commitment to the facts and the public good. Scientists must show up to oppose authoritarian actions and protect democratic norms by safely joining their local non-violent No Kings activities. For those of us who cannot physically show up on March 28^th, you can still defend democracy with a host of other actions such as mutual aid and protecting elections. Each of us matters and can make a difference. This is what democracy looks like.

In many trials and appeals related to climate change, lawyers must effectively present factual evidence and analyses through climate scientists, ecosystem scientists, physicians, engineers, and other experts.  For example, in Held vs. Montana, in which youth sued their state government for violating their constitutional rights, the plaintiffs’ lawyers presented testimony of  two climate scientists, two ecologists, two environmental policy leaders, one pediatrician, one psychiatrist, one energy engineer, and one tribal leader.  Aside from standard witness training on courtroom procedures and cross-examination, this litigation required effective lawyer-scientist communication and coordination on highly technical concepts like scientific consensus, anthropogenic climate change, and greenhouse gas emissions and atmospheric carbon dioxide, to name a few.

What a downpour of new, nuanced vocabulary for participants in climate change litigation!  Enter: this timely, much needed UCS glossary.

Vocabulary challenges in two prominent court proceedings

This UCS glossary can help people in multiple disciplines communicate for stronger outcomes in climate change litigation.  Consider some definitional issues which arose in two recent, prominent court proceedings.

1. The 2025 ICJ Opinion:  The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the 2025 Advisory Opinion on climate change interpreted the “1.5°C above pre-industrial levels” provision in Article 2 of the Paris Agreement adopted under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.  The ICJ sought to apply the “best available science” as directed in the Paris Agreement. 

For a leading international organization with members including scientists and other experts, I served on a team of environmental lawyers drafting one of the many briefs filed with the ICJ.  Several lawyers proposed to characterize this provision as a “threshold” and “tipping point” for the global climate system.  Recognizing that the ICJ would apply science and that the brief should reflect the organization’s scientific expertise, I asked these lawyers to consider that atmospheric scientists model the impacts of average global warming at a range of temperatures; these scientists view the effects of any such temperature increase as a continuum of harmful effects extending below and above 1.5°C.  Furthermore, climate and ecosystem scientists analyze the occurrence of physical, biological, and geological thresholds or tipping points for various natural systems at various temperatures. 

The legal team revised the brief to make the terms and arguments more aligned with climate science. This UCS glossary’s information on “best available science,” “1.5° Celsius,” “threshold,” and “tipping point” would have facilitated the lawyers’ work.

The UCS glossary would have also served as a valuable reference for the judges and their clerks.  The ICJ’s interpretation drew on climate science and employed the terms of “scientific consensus,” “target,” “threshold,” and “goal.”  The ICJ concluded: “1.5°C has become the scientifically based consensus target under the Paris Agreement…. Accordingly, the Court considers the 1.5°C threshold to be the parties’ agreed primary temperature goal for limiting the global average temperature increase under the Paris Agreement.”

2. Held v. Montana Case: Sixteen plaintiffs between the ages of 2 and 18 called on Montana courts to determine whether a statute limiting the scope of an agency’s environmental reviews for permits violated residents’ state constitutional right to a “clean and healthful environment.”  The plaintiffs’ witnesses and lawyers drew on a large literature of scientific analyses of climate systems applying various methodologies.  The UCS glossary, including sections on climate models, public health, and cultural heritage, would have been helpful throughout the litigation for the expert witnesses, litigators, and judges.

The judge’s findings included:

1. “There is overwhelming scientific consensus that Earth is warming as a direct result of human GHG emissions, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels,” and
2. “Children are uniquely vulnerable to the consequences of climate change, which harms their physical and psychological health and safety, interferes with family and cultural foundations and integrity, and causes economic deprivations.” 

In 2024, the Montana Supreme Court affirmed the trial court’s findings.  “Overwhelming scientific consensus” was not a standard for constitutional interpretation in the relevant laws and judicial decisions.  The Court’s conclusion on what environmental conditions and causal linkages are protected by the right to a “clean and healthful environment” used different, non-scientific vocabulary and analysis: “Montana’s right to a clean and healthful environment and environmental life support system includes a stable climate system, which is clearly within the object and true principles of the Framers[‘] inclusion of the right to a clean and healthful environment.”  The Court crossed scientific and legal disciplines with the terms “environmental life support system,” “stable climate system,” and “within the object and true principles of the Framers.”  

The courts’ opinions reflected the judges’ strong understanding of the climate science vocabulary and analysis, which was aided by the scientific experts’ strong understanding of the legal terms and issues.  Multidisciplinary decisions can be achieved, and the UCS glossary makes this feat more obtainable.

From glossary to actions

By helping lawyers navigate scientific concepts that frequently arise in climate litigation, UCS intends that the glossary will aid litigators in assessing expert evidence and avoiding misinterpretations of science in the courtroom.  Let’s also use this glossary to talk about the bigger picture for climate change litigation.

For example, the glossary defines “attribution science” and addresses why it matters.  No doubt, lawyers should gain a better understanding of these tools that have been developed and are being advanced by scientists through complex climate models and statistical analyses. But what will lawyers’ understanding of this topic mean for the effectiveness of climate change litigation in promoting justice and reshaping human behaviors? 

Legislators may try to shield polluters from liability for causing harms identified through attribution science.  This depends in part on the public’s understanding of this topic and campaigns to turn this science into votes and policies.  Additionally, will judges find standing in cases brought against polluters, allow in and give substantial weight to experts’ evidence based on attribution science, and order remedies commensurate with the scientific evidence?  This depends in part on the training courses and materials offered for judges, similar to resources in forensics, artificial intelligence, and genomics, as well as reports by expert bodies such as the current National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Consensus/Advisory Activity on Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and their Impacts.  Despite this need, the Federal Judicial Center in 2026 removed a draft chapter on climate change from the fourth edition of its reference manual on scientific evidence.

As another illustration, the glossary defines “vulnerability,” a key concept in the successful climate change litigation brought by Montanan youths and by Swiss elderly women before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).  Lawyers for these plaintiffs, through testimony from physicians and other experts, showed that these groups are particularly vulnerable to adverse physical and mental health impacts from higher heat and other climatic changes. In response, however, Montana promptly enacted a law that excludes certain fossil fuel projects from environmental reviews.  Similarly, the Swiss parliament rejected the ECHR’s ruling that the nation should take stronger actions on climate change, and the Council of Europe’s committee of ministers issued a weak review of Switzerland’s compliance with the court order.  Again, facilitating greater understanding by lawyers in climate change litigation is important but implementing changes that protect the health of Montanan youth, Swiss elderly women, and all people remain critical for the pursuit of climate justice.

Multidisciplinary thinking in education and litigation

I welcome the UCS glossary as a tool for furthering my interdisciplinary approach in teaching environmental law, policies, and impacts as well as in environmental litigation, legislation and regulations. 

As an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois (holding graduate degrees in law, applied mathematics and economics), I teach students in law, environmental sciences, medicine, public health, molecular and cellular biology, and European studies.  These students come to see sustainability as dependent on a core of interrelated social, economic, and environmental systems surrounded by science and law.  They regularly draw on unfamiliar fields of evidence, analysis and recommendations, often with new vocabulary or different definitions for terms.  They are asked to engage in collective action by contributing their own expertise and interests in developing and implementing multidisciplinary sustainability solutions. 

There should be more education for multidisciplinary actions on climate change and sustainability, which requires spanning multiple vocabularies and better understanding of terms.  Universities must develop graduates in all fields of study who not only understand and want to act on sustainability challenges, but also apply their expertise collaboratively and contribute meaningfully to multidisciplinary solutions.

Collaborating and communicating across disciplines is also essential for climate change and other environmental lawyering.  I worked with scientists, engineers, physicians, economists, and local organizers on litigation and regulatory proceedings for UCS and other US organizations, the World Commission on Environmental Law, and community groups in Spain and Portugal before the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee. 

Although the glossary will be helpful in education and legal work for me and many others, there are deeper challenges.  These include intense political attacks on science (particularly climate change) and the rule of law, along with disinformation efforts that mischaracterize or ignore scientific findings and methods.  The federal EPA’s February 2026 recission of the endangerment finding illustrates the need for effective climate litigation.  These cases range from appellate review of agency actions, to state cases based on public nuisance and consumer fraud, to human rights and constitutional claims, and more.  While many lawyers shy away from science and quantitative analysis, and many scientists and physicians may view policies and advocacy as outside their lane, climate litigation like the Montana decisions show that science-informed actions are achievable.   More work for UCS and others.

UCS’s glossary is needed, timely, and helpful.  This good work is one step on a long, arduous journey to greater multidisciplinary understanding, addressing climate change, and sustainability.

Put another way, a scientist’s role in the courtroom is to translate—to turn complex findings into something that can be understood, trusted, and used to serve justice. The courtroom can be a high-stakes space, where decisions can change lives, redistribute resources, and determine accountability. And while judges and juries are smart, they’re probably not climate modelers, sociologists, economists, or statisticians. That’s where we come in.

Translation is no easy task and increasingly experts who translate their knowledge to advance decision-making in the courts are under attack, but I think it is important to remember that:

1. Science belongs in the courts. There is a long history of using science in the courtroom;
2. Facts belong in the courts. Despite an onslaught of attacks, climate science is robust and can inform important decision making; and
3. Experts belong in the courts. As experts we can learn how to accurately communicate in the courts to ensure that decision makers have access to the best available information.

Science has been used in the courts for centuries

Science didn’t always have a seat at the legal table. Courts traditionally relied on eyewitnesses, assumptions, and arguments about how things work. The idea that someone could testify about something they didn’t directly observe was far from commonplace until the 18^th Century.

This changed in 1782 during a British case,Folkes v. Chadd. The case was assessing if a man-made structure had disrupted a harbor’s natural flow. The court called on John Smeaton, a leading engineer of his time, to explain the science of tides and hydraulics. The defense objected because Smeaton hadn’t seen the harbor himself. But, in appeal, the judge made a landmark call that on matters beyond common understanding, the opinions of experts are not just admissible, but essential.

That opened the door, and over the next two centuries, expert testimony has become routine, especially in the United States. But with that change came some challenges. By the late 20th Century, courts were flooded with conflicting experts, often hired to support a side rather than the truth.

In 1993, the US Supreme Court stepped in with Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals. The ruling gave judges a new role as the gatekeepers of scientific evidence. Judges are now asked to apply the Daubert test to assess if the methods used are testable, peer-reviewed, reliable, and widely acceptable in the scientific community. This was a win for rigor and requires that, as scientists, we can make our methods, and their limits, clear to non-scientists.

Attacks on climate science in the courts

While science has a clear and long history of use in the courtroom, the Trump administration opened the door for the fossil fuel industry to advance its long-standing agenda to undermine climate science. During this administration, there have been numerous attacks that serve to limit the use of climate science to inform legal cases.

The Trump administration’s war on climate science continues to unfold in a calculated sequence, each step deepening the erosion of scientific integrity just when it is needed most in the courts. At a high level, the administration withdrew the United States from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), severing our nation’s formal ties to the world’s most trusted source of climate science.

The administration attempted to replace consensus science with a Department of Energy report that was politically driven and authored by climate skeptics. This report was not peer-reviewed science; it was a weapon, designed to create manufactured doubt and provide cover for regulatory rollbacks. After the Union of Concerned Scientists filed suit over the formation of the report working group, the group was disbanded—but a federal court still ruled the group violated federal law. Last month, Trump’s EPA moved to repeal the 2009 Endangerment Finding, a cornerstone of federal climate policy that used robust science to protect communities. As these attacks weakened the executive branch’s scientific foundation, opponents turned their sights on the judiciary.

Senator Ted Cruz launched a congressional hearing targeting the Environmental Law Institute’s judicial education programs in an attempt to prevent judges from having access to scientific classes to better understand the science of climate change. These probes continue. Republican attorneys general continued this political pressure campaign, culminating in the Federal Judicial Center’s (FJC) decision to remove a comprehensive climate science chapter from its Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, a critical resource for judges evaluating complex scientific testimony. The removal leaves judges without authoritative guidance at a time when climate litigation is surging. While the FJC removed the chapter, it’s still available through the National Academies.

These actions, taken together, work to delegitimize climate science at every level of government, creating barriers for communities who seek justice through the court.

Clear communication isn’t optional

Science is central to cases on climate liability, environmental justice, and public health. But arguably, its value depends entirely on how it’s communicated. When science communication fails, justice fails. So, what can we, as scientists, do? While there is a lot to learn, here are five tips to help share your science in a legal setting:

1. Speak like a human, not a journal article. As academics, we’re trained to write for peer-reviewed journals that are dense, cautious, and full of caveats. That doesn’t work in court. You need to be clear, concise, and relatable. Replace jargon with plain language. Use analogies—carefully. For example, instead of saying “the anthropogenic signal exceeds the 95% confidence interval,” try “our analysis shows it’s extremely unlikely this warming happened by natural causes alone, like flipping a coin and getting heads 19 times out of 20.” It’s the same concept, but the second is far easier to understand.

2. Be thoughtful about communicating uncertainty. For researchers, expressing uncertainty is a sign of credibility that shows we’ve tested our results, accounted for error, and understand the limits of our data. But in the courtroom, the word “uncertain” often corresponds to doubt, hesitation, or unreliability. Be honest and explain your findings in terms the court can use, emphasizing confidence, consistency, and the weight of evidence. Also, know the standard of evidence required in the case and how your uncertainty measures relate to that. You can’t just share your results: You need to translate them for a legal audience, and help them see that uncertainty is part of good science, not a reason to dismiss it.

3. Prepare to be challenged—because you will. Legal settings are adversarial. Opposing counsel will test you, sometimes aggressively. They’ll look for inconsistencies, gaps, or moments of confusion. Preparation is everything. Practice explaining your work under pressure. Anticipate tough questions. Know the limits of your expertise. And if you don’t know an answer, say so. Every PhD has gone through an oral defense. If your dissertation defense was anything like mine, you can handle a courtroom.

4. Be accurate but concise. Scientists are trained to lecture, to unpack every nuance, to write like we’re defending a thesis. But in court, clarity beats comprehensiveness. If you attempt to deliver an entire thesis on the stand, you’ll lose everyone’s attention. Judges and juries need the core of what you know, not the full arc of how you got there. Focus on the key findings, deliver them plainly, and stop when you’ve made the point. Brevity isn’t dumbing down, it’s respect for the listener.

5. Understand why your science is relevant. Before you testify, ask the lawyer: What specific question does the court need answered? Your job isn’t to broadly teach your science, it’s to address the issue at hand. Stay focused. Everything you say should connect back to the legal question. It’s helpful to think about why a scientific concept is relevant to the court, like we did in our glossary of scientific terms for a legal audience.

Be ready when science is called to the stand

Science has a critical role to play in the courtroom. As climate litigation continues to grow, the need for well-prepared, clear, and credible scientific voices has never been greater. The challenges are real, but so are the opportunities. By improving how we communicate experts can help ensure that courts have access to the best available science, presented in a way that’s both accurate and understandable.

If you’re interested in stepping into this space or strengthening your skills, consider connecting with the Science Hub for Climate Litigation. Through skill shares, resources, and community, the Science Hub helps experts like you engage effectively in legal settings so that when science is called to testify, you are ready and the facts are heard.

Unfortunately, if I were to return today, I wouldn’t be able to see any such signage describing climate science and impacts. The Trump administration has removed critical scientific and historical information from US national parks—and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) is suing to stop this censorship.

Like Glacier National Park, numerous iconic US landscapes are at risk due to climate change. These are places worth saving and fighting for, ensuring our grandchildren can also experience such awe and wonder, and that’s what I’m doing at UCS.

Shared beauty and shared history

National parks are America’s largest classroom. Those quintessential landscapes – like the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Great Smoky Mountains – provide us space to recreate, learn about our nation’s natural and cultural history, and connect with nature. In addition, national parks (and other cultural heritage sites) play a critical role in science communication, such as depictions of the climate change impacts on ecosystems and parks themselves. It’s a lot easier to understand scientific concepts like the water cycle when you’re walking through the humid swampy marshes of the Everglades, for example.

National parks and other public lands, monuments, and cultural heritage sites managed or administered by the Department of the Interior and other federal agencies also provide opportunities for the public to access scientific information, hunt and fish, and enjoy pristine landmarks that showcase American values and ethos.

I confess I have a biased viewpoint of our nation’s geologic wonders and unique natural resources, having worked for several years at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Bureau of Land Management within the Department of the Interior. But you don’t have to be a federal employee to love and appreciate our nation’s protected spaces.

Climate change affects our national parks and public lands

Many landmarks and landscapes are at risk, experiencing worsening climate change impacts. For example, rising sea levels are an existential threat for the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument, located on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Thousands of artifacts and ancient ruins of the Pueblo people’s ancestors at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado are at risk, given more frequent and intense wildfires and more intense drought.

As the nation’s largest landlord managing almost one-third of all US land, the federal government is charged to preserve and conserve unique landscapes, as well as sustain the land for use and enjoyment for current and future generations.

Connecting communities and natural resource managers with climate information

At the USDA, I helped connect farmers, ranchers, and forest managers with relevant climate data and science. During a drought workshop for ranchers in Clovis, New Mexico, I grew to deeply appreciate the role of our nation’s lands and waters, which drive agricultural production to feed and clothe us, and also sustain communities dependent on these natural resources. I learned to better connect climate change and its impacts with people’s livelihoods and values.

Later, at the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), I helped integrate climate science into decision-making processes and programs at an agency that manages nearly 10%, or 245 million acres, of surface land in the US. I also partnered with the US Geological Survey Climate Adaptation Science Centers and the NPS Climate Change Response Program to share resources on future climate scenarios and adaptation strategies. My role at BLM gave me a deep appreciation for the role of the federal government in stewardship of public lands, and how climate change is already affecting these fragile yet beautiful landscapes.

Censorship of climate science and US history at national parks

Accurate scientific and historical information is paramount at national parks. Millions who visit US national parks learn about the people and places that made this country what it is today. This includes critical moments in US history, and climate change impacts on the environment. For example, educational signs at Glacier National Park show viewers what glaciers used to look like prior to their accelerated pace of melting. At coastal national parks, visitor centers display how physical infrastructure has been moved due to sea level rise.

Yet, the Trump administration has removed information about our history and our changing climate from our national parks. As a former federal climate scientist having directly worked with natural resource managers, this is both sad and enraging.

Removing this context robs visitors of the trustworthy information they have come to expect from experts at federal agencies, and deprives all of us of a key opportunity to expand a shared understanding of our natural and cultural heritage in the US.

It can be difficult to connect climate change to our daily lives. But national parks have documented such changes as part of their mission to educate us about our shared history, and how climate change is impacting the places we love and care about.

UCS files suit to protect national parks and advance climate literacy

UCS is fighting back to demand that our national parks continue to provide accurate climate and historical information to the public. UCS has filed a lawsuit as part of a coalition of conservation organizations represented by the Democracy Forward Foundation to protect our national parks, preserve and share history, promote scientific literacy and access, and ensure high-quality, science-based interpretive materials. The effects of climate change on our nation’s beloved landscapes and sensitive natural resources are real; simply deleting references to climate science ignores the profound changes we are already seeing.

Our national parks, cultural heritage sites, and public lands belong to all Americans—current and future generations. Frankly, it is deeply un-American to undermine the shared history, truth, and science that we collectively experience at national parks. UCS and our co-plaintiffs are fighting back, and I won’t stay on the sidelines as this administration tramples upon our most cherished cultural treasures and iconic landscapes.

You can join us: by calling on US Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to stop erasing science and history from our national parks.

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) recently agreed to hear arguments in Boulder v. Exxon and Suncor a case that could decide whether communities harmed by climate change can hold polluters accountable in state court.

Originally brought against the fossil fuel giants in 2018 for their decades of disinformation and other contributions to the climate crisis, the case points to a wide range of challenges the Boulder community is facing due to a changing climate, including unprecedented flooding, prolonged drought, extreme heat conditions, unreliable snowpack and worsening air quality. In 2021, the Marshall Fire underscored the urgency of the case as Colorado’s costliest wildfire in history, destroying over a thousand homes in Boulder County and causing approximately $2 billion in damages.

Lower courts have consistently recognized that state courts are the appropriate venue for state-law claims about deception and local damages. However, this decision could impact whether the dozens of other climate accountability lawsuits filed by states and municipalities across the country can move forward in state courtrooms.

While scientific evidence clearly shows that fossil fuel emissions are the primary driver of climate change and that industry actions, including a well-documented decades-long campaign of deception, have delayed climate action, this decision jeopardizes the possibility of that sound science being heard in court. 

What is SCOTUS debating?

The legal question under consideration, whether such lawsuits belong in federal or state court, could shape the future of dozens of science-backed cases brought by U.S. cities, counties, and states that argue the industry long knew their products were driving climate change while they deliberately misled the public to boost their profits. 

SCOTUS is no stranger to this question, having declined to intervene at least four times in previous, similar cases instead allowing them to play out in state courts. The facts in these cases haven’t changed, nor have Justice Samuel Alito’s documented conflicts of interest. What has changed, however, is the identity of the plaintiffs. In this case, his former recusals have been preempted on a technicality and as a result, the court is now willing to reconsider a long-standing request for a federal accountability escape hatch. 

Such procedural jousting and legal gamesmanship obscures Big Oil’s end game: to evade accountability by ensuring the scientific evidence in these cases never has its day in court.

Attacks on science extend across all three branches  

Attacks on science during the Trump administration are nothing new—from withdrawing from the International Panel on Climate Change and promoting a sham report  commissioned by the Department of Energy to repealing the Endangerment Finding, trying to discredit attribution science, and undermining judicial education—but this recent decision clarified precisely what’s at stake in the ongoing battle for a livable climate. The science underpinning these cases is clear, robust and consistent. Yet the fossil fuel industry and its political allies are doing everything in their power to neutralize threats by neutering science, even as communities face the costly and sometimes deadly consequences of industry products.

The fossil fuel industry and their trade groups are also lobbying to escape legal liability through the introduction of state immunity legislation and congressional intimations of a federal liability waiver  should this procedural maneuver fail. These waivers, if signed into law, would grant fossil fuel companies immunity from both existing and future lawsuits, effectively eliminating access to justice and accountability for communities across the country.  

If litigation does move forward in state court, attempts by industry allies to delegitimize science itself are already obstructing judicial access to robust scientific information and riding the wave of Big Oil’s decades-long disinformation campaign. One of the most flagrant examples of this strategy took place last month, when the Federal Judicial Center—the independent research arm of the federal counts, responsible for educating judges on complex scientific issues—removed its entire chapter on climate science from its Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence in response to pressure from attorneys general aligned with industry interests. 

Evading accountability through all means necessary

This is not about judicial neutrality or substantive debate over research methods that have been developed over decades and reviewed and revised by countless scientists. Rather, these attacks on science function as another layer of Big Oil’s already comprehensive insurance policy to protect their profits and power at the expense of people already reeling from the impacts of their products.  

The broader goal of a multipronged approach to change venues, legislate immunity and erase access to scientific information isn’t to win on the merits, but to ensure no merits are ever considered. No trial. No day in court. No consideration of the scientific facts that Big Oil knew about the severe harm its products would cause and chose to lie at the expense of global climate stability and local communities’ lives and livelihoods. 

Should their attempts to legislate immunity flounder and their procedural maneuvering fail to yield dismissal or relocation to federal court, they will nonetheless have obstructed access to reliable, scientific information through decades of their own disinformation.

Courts and legislatures need access to the best available evidence. Obstructing facts limits pathways to justice and only serves the interests of the powerful, polluting few. 

Climate science is not on trial, but it is under siege. As long as Big Oil can delay, distort, and deny, they win—no matter what the evidence shows. The public deserves well informed judges to make decisions grounded in data—preserving access to science preserves access to justice.

In what might be a first, I agree with Rollins . . . in a way. I think it’s a good idea to connect these disparate subsidy programs, currently run by different agencies within the USDA and tracked using separate systems. But while it may be true that the IT systems are clunky and redundant, a much bigger problem is that the aims of the programs are so disconnected that they often work at cross purposes and fail to deliver lasting benefits to farmers, farm economies, taxpayers, and the public. Rather than just a superficial linking of farmer data and application forms, we need true synergy of program goals and outcomes, and Rollins’ plan won’t do anything about that.

Moreover, I’m deeply concerned about how this administration is going about overhauling these information systems in the name of efficiency—in particular, contracting with Palantir Technologies, one of today’s most notorious and antidemocratic corporations, to do the work (more on that later).

US agriculture depends heavily on taxpayer support

First, let’s back up and take a look at what the USDA programs in question have in common: distributing public money to farm operations. While many farmers and observers like to think of agriculture as a free-market system, that is far from the truth. Farming is heavily subsidized—based on USDA data, USAFacts estimates that federal agricultural subsidies since 1933 have averaged 13.5 percent of net farm income.

The USDA administers a wide variety of farm payment programs, but they generally fall into three major categories:

• Crop insurance and disaster assistance. The USDA’s Risk Management Agency (RMA) oversees the Federal Crop Insurance Program, which insures farm operations against crop losses and underwrites the cost of insurance premiums. The RMA also operates programs including the Supplemental Disaster Relief Program, which provides additional compensation to crop insurance policyholders for losses related to qualifying natural disasters.
•  Commodity price supports. The Farm Service Agency (FSA) administers programs including Agriculture Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage, which provide payments when farm revenue or covered commodity prices fall below set levels. These outcomes can be spurred by all kinds of economic forces and events, including some we’re seeing today: tariffs and trade wars, for example, and rippling disruption from a literal war.
• Conservation incentives. The largest voluntary programs that compensate farmers for undertaking conservation and pollution reduction practices on working farms are operated by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). These include the Environmental Quality Incentives Program and the Conservation Stewardship Program.

In 2024, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reviewed all the programs that distribute taxpayer dollars to farmers and ranchers and tallied a total of $161 billion over the prior five years—an annual average of $32 billion.

Recent crises have spurred more farm payments, but distribution has been unequal

The GAO report found that more than 40 percent of farmer payments during fiscal years 2019 through 2023 addressed damage to farm income due to international trade disruptions, the COVID-19 pandemic, and natural disasters. In 2018 and 2019, for example, the USDA distributed some $28 billion through a new Market Facilitation Program (MFP) to bail out farmers hit by retaliatory tariffs on soybeans, pork, and other agricultural commodities in the wake of the first Trump administration’s ill-conceived trade war with China.

The largest farm subsidies have disproportionately gone to the largest, most industrial operations. As the libertarian Cato Institute put it recently, “Most welfare programs are for low-income families, but farm welfare is for high-income families.” This was borne out starkly during the first Trump administration: A 2020 analysis of USDA data by the Environmental Working Group showed that more than half of all MFP payments went to the top 10 percent of farms by income. Similarly, the USDA directed nearly a quarter of payments from the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program, created by Congress in 2020 to help farmers struggling during the pandemic, to just the top 1 percent of farm operations.

By the end of 2020, nearly all of the US Treasury’s gain from tariffs on China went to farmer payments. Yet despite all that spending, farm bankruptcies spiked 20 percent in 2019 and stayed high through 2020.

USDA payments to farmers are skyrocketing

Recently, the USDA’s Economic Research Service tallied annual direct payments to farmers from all programs since 2022 and forecast the trajectory of spending through 2026. As illustrated in the graph below, conservation payments have remained flat, while price support payments and all other payments, after declining somewhat since the pandemic’s effects eased, are expected to balloon this year.

Linking subsidies to pollution prevention would have wide-ranging benefits

This brings me back to the USDA’s One Farmer, One File initiative. In a recent interview (paywalled), a USDA undersecretary said the effort seeks to streamline paperwork such as program application forms and eligibility documents across agencies and update internal software and data collection systems. The initiative, which is expected to be fully implemented by 2028, aims to reduce administrative time spent by both farmers and USDA staff.

That’s good, but what would be revolutionary is if the missions of the programs themselves were linked and their dollars collectively created lasting value and sustainability for farmers. That’s not happening today, and it’s not going to result from just an overhaul of data systems.

Take the interplay of the NRCS’s farm conservation programs and the RMA’s crop insurance. Science has shown that conservation practices that work with nature rather than against it—including planting cover crops and perennial crops, expanding crop rotations, and producing a wider array of crops and livestock on a farm—create healthy, spongy soils and buffer farmers from flooding, drought, and other events that commonly lead to insurance payouts and drive up premiums. A January 2023 GAO report examined options to link conservation, climate resilience, and crop insurance policy incentives, and later that year the Biden administration’s USDA took steps to make crop insurance rules work better for farmers using resilience-building practices.

But much more action is needed to bring about a fully integrated and self-reinforcing policy framework that requires higher levels of soil, water, and climate stewardship by all producers as a condition of receiving farm subsidies (as I proposed in this blog post in 2024). Such an integrated policy should also expand existing technical and financial support to ease the transition for farmers who have been locked out of conservation programs or have been reluctant to try them.

If we did this, it would be good for farmers of all kinds, who would begin to see the benefits of reduced reliance (and spending) on fertilizers and other inputs, greater flood and drought resilience from healthier soil, and more profitability. (See, for example, the story of an Iowa farmer who voluntarily adopted conservation practices and documented benefits that added up to an improved bottom line.)

Benefits would also accrue to taxpayers (decreased crop insurance costs from extreme weather), local water utilities and their customers (lower costs for removing agricultural pollution from drinking water, and better health outcomes), commercial fisheries (smaller dead zones), hunters and outdoor enthusiasts (cleaner rivers and streams for swimming and fishing, more waterfowl habitat), and consumers (better food access from diversified farms).

But . . . the USDA’s contractor raises the specter of authoritarian surveillance

Fundamentally linking farmer assistance programs in the way I’ve described is a long-term goal. In the meantime, streamlining these programs’ IT systems must be done carefully and with attention to participant privacy and data security. As much as Secretary Rollins talks about “putting farmers first,” I was surprised (okay, not really) to hear that the USDA had contracted with Palantir—an AI-based company that has been called “the most dangerous corporation in America”—to develop the One Farmer, One File system.

Palantir’s founder is Peter Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist, Trump donor, and Jeffrey Epstein correspondent who has frequently expressed anti-democratic ideas and decried diversity. And Palantir is at the center of the Trump administration’s highest-profile and most controversial data-gathering and surveillance efforts—from its contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to its work with the Internal Revenue Service and the Pentagon. Many observers have expressed alarm about Thiel’s and Palantir’s role in the rise of an authoritarian surveillance state and threats to human rights worldwide.

So now Palantir is being handed the keys to USDA farmer data. What could possibly go wrong?