A neon pink sign flashes these words—part of an installation by artist Alicia Eggert—at a DC museum just steps from the White House. Until a year ago, I often used an image of this art installation in my work presentations, to illustrate a particular point.

Among my responsibilities at the White House and then at the US Department of Transportation was working on the implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the CHIPS and Science Act, as a means of tackling the climate crisis. This trifecta of legislative victories represented more climate progress than I could have imagined in ten years of prior advocacy at UCS. I used that presentation slide to help the public, universities, and state and local decision makers see that a brighter future was possible because of the ambitious investments being made by the federal government towards climate and clean energy goals.

Unfortunately, there is also a flip side to those words. In the year since I’ve returned to UCS, we’ve seen a different unimaginable future unfold, in which the Trump administration has worked to destroy all of that climate and clean energy progress; disrupt longstanding government programs and processes; and disregard the rule of law. The administration has clawed back funding that was agreed on by Congress and promised to scientific institutions, illegally fired federal employees, and gutted congressionally mandated programs. President Trump and his administration have rolled back policies protecting our health, safety, and environment; set new policies with no regard for data and evidence; silenced people’s voices on issues that affect them; given polluting industries free rein; denied climate science; and taken step after step towards authoritarianism. There is no recent precedent for all of this; even for those of us who read each page of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” this present moment was unimaginable.

The scope, severity, and speed of attacks on science have been dizzying. But if the past year has taught us anything, it’s that we are not powerless to stop them. Across the country, scientists and science supporters have organized and fought back in response to the Trump administration’s actions, and UCS has embraced our role in leading the charge.

Early in the new term, UCS led an effort to unify the scientific community with a sign-on letter boasting signatories from 56 scientific societies representing more than 100,000 scientists. We took our defense of science to the courts, filing lawsuits focused on the administration’s illegal actions: against the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for acting beyond their power to cut funding and fire federal employees; against administration officials for trying to base policy off of an unlawfully created report from a secretly convened group of climate contrarians; and challenging the Trump administration’s removal of public information from climate and environmental justice federal agency websites. After the first 100 days of the administration, UCS launched the “You Need Science. Science Needs You” campaign, connecting supporters to their elected officials to demand that funding for US science be preserved.

As the administration disbanded and weakened scientific advisory committees that provide analyses for important decisions about our health, UCS provided guidance for experts to launch their own independent committees, and supported many such efforts—which represent a huge contribution of time and expertise in the name of ensuring science reaches those who need it.

Throughout the year, we helped organize and turned out for mass mobilizations across the country, including the Stand up for Science rally, and sponsoring the most recent No Kings protest last October. I co-authored an editorial in Science magazine that provides a roadmap to resistance specifically for scientists—because I truly believe we were made for this moment. We armed our supporters, including our growing Science Network of experts, with a toolkit for engaging their elected officials during the August Congressional recess.

We’ve sent our experts to testify against dangerous policy proposals, brought widespread media attention to the communities facing the greatest risks to their health and safety because of the administration’s actions, and rallied the scientific community to fight together. And all year long, the scientific community published op-eds, attended Congressional meetings, and organized across the country: making it loud and clear that the anti-science actions of the Trump administration are unacceptable.

I’m heartened by the moral clarity and persistence of those around me who remain committed to science and its role in informing decisions that affect us all. Let’s be real: the consequences of standing up to this administration can be scary. Plenty of people have lost their jobs, their funding, their life’s work (and even their homes, loved ones, and lives) to its capricious cruelty. Because of that, we might not have anticipated such a strong response. It’s not easy to resist an authoritarian regime—or even a wannabe authoritarian regime.

But. We. Showed. Up. And we’re not going anywhere. 

As we enter 2026, we’re going to build on our achievements and doggedly continue doing the work we know is right, and necessary. This includes making more progress on climate and clean energy at the state level, carrying on momentum from last year’s huge wins in California, Maine, and Illinois. We’ll keep shining a light on the administration’s attacks on science, for accountability and to publicize the human toll these policy decisions exact. We’ll be releasing more groundbreaking scientific research into quantifying the climate harms caused by massive tech companies and industrial agriculture, tracking the implications of two major international court decisions last year, and supporting existing cases against Big Oil with our expertise and advocacy. We’ll be calling out bad actors from Big Ag to the federal government. And most importantly, we’ll be doing this in partnership with the scientific community at large, offering many opportunities for scientists and science supporters to get involved and speak up for what matters.

We must set our eyes on a different kind of unimaginable future—one where our hard work in the trenches defending our progress and advancing our goals pays off. A future in which we fully realize a safer, healthier, and more equitable world because of our steadfast commitment to science for the people. Let’s build it together.

We knew this would be hard on our new family in its early days. But as scientists working on tackling the climate crisis, we decided together it was important for him to be there, as this gathering would potentially yield climate action (or lack thereof) that would significantly affect our new son’s life—and this was an important chance to contribute to preserving a more livable planet for his future.

I followed the news from that conference as best as I could with my newborn, including getting dispatches from my UCS colleagues who were also participating (as we have since the very first such conferences). I was overjoyed when the most significant global climate commitment taken by that point in history was announced by its leadership. The Paris Agreement, as it’s now known, set in motion actions in countries around the world to reduce global warming emissions.

Over the subsequent years, global temperatures have risen as wealthier countries stall on climate action and the fossil fuel industry rakes in profits. My family has grown, and with it, my unwavering dedication to fighting for their future and the future of kids like them all over the world.

Six years after that historic Paris summit, I went into public service, working for the government first at the White House, and then to launch a climate research program at the US Department of Transportation. From there, I cheered on the legislative victories that were a game-changer for climate action: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (aka the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act) and the Inflation Reduction Act. These represented more progress in just a few years than I ever could have imagined in my decade previous as a scientist and advocate with the Union of Concerned Scientists (who were working hard for these and other legislative wins). We fought for and won the biggest opportunity yet to meet those Paris climate commitments. This convinced me to stay in government and focus on tackling the climate crisis.

Last year, it was my turn to say goodbye to my kids and fly around the world, to Baku, Azerbaijan, where I represented the US government at COP29, days after the presidential election. It was clear then that our hard-won climate progress at the federal level would face significant roadblocks under the incoming Trump administration. But I knew it was important to go: to show the world that many states, organizations, and people in the US were still committed to honoring the Paris Agreement and doing everything in our power to make climate progress. And it was important for me to show up for the next generation.

A full ten years post-Paris Agreement, the Trump administration is working to reverse the progress we’ve made—steps backward that we can ill afford right now, as global emissions reached new highs last year, and are on track to contribute to overshooting the Paris goal of limiting warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, and as close to 1.5 degrees Celsius as possible. As my colleagues have bid farewell to their families and loved ones to journey to Belém, Brazil, for COP30, they will be there this year without an official US government delegation, under the shadow of President’s Trump’s intentions to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.    

When I saw this quote from UN Secretary-General António Guterres:

“One thing is already clear: we will not be able to contain global warming below 1.5 degrees in the next few years.”

…I thought about the sacrifices so many of us have made to help the country and world make much needed climate progress. I thought of how UCS is doggedly working to inform equitable policies to prevent further warming and reduce pollution for all of us. I thought of a few of our recent wins, about how the choices we make now can still save lives, and how much it matters that we keep working to limit every tenth of a degree of warming.  

And as COP30 is set to kick off Monday, I think of the blood, sweat, and tears that negotiators, scientists, advocates have put into driving progress at these conferences for decades. I think of the communities around the world—many who have contributed the least to climate emissions—now watching their homelands threatened by rising seas, more intense storms, drought, or fire. The injustice is cruel and palpable; the grief for what we have lost and will lose is real.

So: why keep fighting? Why attend COP30 at all? Why do my colleagues, peers, and I persist, despite the crushing setbacks?  

My colleagues and I do this work because we must. We are motivated by the dire consequences we know are ahead for frontline communities. We are driven by the responsibility we have for all children’s present and future. We know what a better world could look like, free from the influence of Big Oil and its endless greed, and with principled leadership who put our health and safety ahead of special interests. Scientists have been raising the alarm on the dire consequences of burning fossil fuels for decades. Our coalition has only grown and become more powerful and determined. Why would we stop now?

I think about what I will one day say to my kids about this moment in our history. I want them to know we never gave up.

My NICU baby is now a nine-year-old with big ideas about the future. I want the world for him, and every child everywhere discovering the joy and potential of this planet. The work we do is for them; their future is worth the fight.

After the Trump administration dismissed the Census Scientific Advisory Committee (CSAC), this group of experts, each of whom had served on CSAC, formed the all-volunteer Independent Census Scientific Advisory Committee. Its members are giving their time and expertise to ensure that they can inform decisionmakers—including submitting their recommendations to the US Census Bureau—and counter disinformation in the public sphere.

The disbanded Census committee is just one of many federal technical advisory committees gutted by the administration. In the wake of a Trump executive order, 51 (27%!) of almost 200 active science-focused Federal Advisory Committees have been shuttered, with more under review. This decision keeps science advice from reaching policymakers on real-world issues like vaccine effectiveness, air pollution protections, and food safety, and much more. Such committees play a huge role in driving government officials to make evidence-based policy decisions—and help hold them publicly accountable when they don’t.

Science won’t be silenced

Now scientists are stepping up to fill the void of science advice and scientific information being created by the Trump administration. The experts convening the Independent Census Scientific Advisory Committee this week are in good company:

• The University of Minnesota Vaccine Integrity Project will carry forward producing evidence-based childhood vaccination advice, in contrast to Secretary Kennedy’s now compromised Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
• The former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration leaders that ran the now-shuttered Climate.gov have launched Climate.us to ensure reliable climate information—including timely data on sea level rise and other effects of climate change—continues to reach the masses.  
• The National Academy of Sciences will fast track a study of climate impacts on public health in the wake of the administration’s attack on the Endangerment Finding and their bogus Department Of Energy’s “climate report.”   
• United by Nature will revive and reimagine the National Nature Assessment that was unceremoniously shuttered, producing the most comprehensive review to date of the importance of nature to humans.
• The American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society will publish papers on topics that would have been covered by dismissed authors of the National Climate Assessment. Historically, this report by the US government has served as a guidebook for decisionmakers, providing the best available science on climate change and how to protect people and public infrastructure from its impacts.
• Medical associations like The American Academy of Pediatrics are creating their own guidelines and advice on policies and decisions that would in normal times be issued from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to provide science-based information despite the documented conflicts of interest within HHS and its sub-agencies and several US states have committed to following evidence-based guidance.

As I wrote in an op-ed for Science magazine, efforts like these have many benefits for science and society at large. First, developing independent science advice preserves scientific truth in the public record, which can prove useful in legal and historical proceedings. It can also effectively counter disinformation coming from government officials and helps hold them accountable. Finally, independent science infrastructure provides reliable science advice for all levels of government and for future decisionmakers, who can move faster on the policy decisions when the groundwork of scientific advice and assessment has already been developed.

Importantly, history and evidence clearly show that the building of alternative institutions—such as independent scientific bodies and activities—is an effective tactic for fighting the rise of authoritarianism. The process democratizes access to scientific information, ensuring that everyone from decisionmakers to the broader public has the best available science and evidence about their health, safety, and security. Importantly, this tactic also lessens the power of an authoritarian regime by limiting its ability it to control the narrative and use lies and disinformation to justify and advance its agenda.

The value of this is evident, no matter what the future holds. If science-supporting federal leadership is restored, then independent science activities can be a short-term effort. If it takes longer for federal science to revive, the activities can continue to fulfill key science advice for the public and decisionmakers at other levels of government. To be clear, independent scientific committees and panels cannot fully replace federally funded and commissioned scientific activities, which have until now benefitted from the scale, stability, transparency, and authority of the federal government. But they are an important strategy to implement now.

Let’s scale this

The scientific community now has the chance to apply this strategy at scale. Because the dismantling of the federal scientific advice apparatus has been so severe and wide-ranging, there are ample opportunities for the scientific community to step up—and we must.

The first Trump administration disbanded an EPA scien­tific panel charged with advising on air pollution standards. In response, the disbanded panel convened independently, hosted by UCS, to review the evi­dence and advise the agency on the science of the health effects of particulate matter pollution. The independent panel deliberated pub­licly and submitted their recommendations as a public comment, so it became part of the administrative public record. The panel’s ac­tions later supported successful legal challenges to the EPA’s choice to decline tightening the pollution standards.

Like the air quality scientists and the US Census experts, scientists everywhere can step up to help us ensure that science can prevail. UCS has developed a toolkit and hosted a webinar to get you started. It is easy to feel powerless in this moment, but scientists are giving me courage. I hope you’ll join us.

It’s hard to overstate the profound impact of such a shake-up on public health across the country. While the CDC, like other federal science agencies, has experienced its share of scientific integrity issues over the years, the agency has largely stayed intact across administrations. Its functions of providing funding and public health guidance to state health agencies, its critical research investments, vital health communications, and technical assistance for communities across the country on issues from extreme heat preparedness to infectious disease crisis management have persisted unaltered.

As a result, the CDC has enjoyed a high degree of public trust across communities of different demographics. Through hard work, thoughtful communication, and strategic outreach over decades, the agency has ensured that people across the country can reliably expect to receive scientifically robust guidance for their families and communities. This is important for fighting disinformation and ensuring people are armed with the best available information to protect their health, and that of their families.

But now the agency’s expertise, and that hard-earned public trust, is under dire threat thanks to the Trump administration and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Secretary Kennedy has diligently worked to ignore the agency’s own experts, withhold critical dollars for state health agencies, and perpetuate disinformation on vaccines, LGBTQIA+ health, and more. The disrespect toward and dismissal of CDC workers who have devoted years of their lives to public service—including in the wake of a tragic and targeted shooting—are especially offensive.

I have studied and tracked scientific integrity violations at the federal level for more than a decade, including during the first Trump administration. I didn’t think I could be shocked anymore. But these efforts are egregious even to me. They reflect an unthinkable level of disregard for science, public health, and the rule of law. This is why we cannot allow this to stand. Instead of firing the scientists who keep us safe, Secretary Kennedy should be fired, and the Trump administration must reverse course. Congress must immediately conduct oversight of Secretary Kennedy and his incompetent, harmful, and anti-science management of the Health and Human Services Department.

Systematic silencing of science

It’s critical that we recognize the situation at HHS as part of a broader pattern: the Trump administration is systematically removing independent scientific voices in order to advance an anti-science agenda. And they’re rewriting the policies that helped to protect federal workers and scientists from this type of retaliation and political interference. We saw it earlier this month with the firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We saw it with the firing of the 400+ authors of the National Climate Assessment and the shuttering of the US Global Change Research Program. We saw it with the dismissal of the Census Scientific Advisory Committee earlier this year.

Will the public know about misinformation, if there isn’t a scientist there to call it out? The Trump administration is hoping you won’t.

Suppressing, dismissing, and ignoring the scientists at CDC contrast with the very principles that the administration advocates for in its so-called “Gold Standard Science” executive order. Encouraging agencies to be free from conflicts of interest, and transparent in their research and communication are noble goals. But the administration is not following its own advice. Silencing dissent among scientists who disagree with the interests of those in the administration is a prime example of conflicts of interest.

We cannot allow science to be suppressed or interfered with. We have said it from the beginning: RFK, Jr. is unfit to lead HHS. President Trump should fire him and appoint a qualified scientist to lead the agency entrusted to keep us all safe and healthy.

Additionally, efforts to rebuild scientific infrastructure outside of government are critical in this moment. We must ensure that the public and decisionmakers get the data and evidence they need in the absence of federal leadership. This helps us preserve public trust in science, allows our society to continue to make science-based decisions, and provides an important counterweight to the misinformation coming out of the federal government under the Trump administration.

Thank you to (former) CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez and all federal workers doing what they can from the inside. Our Members of Congress have a role to play in keeping the CDC informed by science and staffed by experts. For those of us on the outside, we must do everything in our power to ensure science and the truth persist. Let’s get to work.

The United States’ democratic leadership, commitment to freedom of expression, and investment in the pursuit of knowledge have enabled its leadership in science and technology. Yet today we are witnessing what happens to a nation’s science and technology enterprise when democratic principles and the rule of law are ignored.  The rise of authoritarian actors and democratic backsliding in the US are driving this destruction of the federal science apparatus. Drawing from historical approaches that have been effective in pushing back against authoritarianism, the US scientific community is well-suited to play a leading role in a key strategy: Building alternative institutions outside of government that reduce reliance on the authoritarian regime, thus lessening its power and relevance over day to day life, and preserving sites of independent thought.

Despite court orders and Congressional mandates, federal science agencies are being hollowed out, scientific research grants are being severed, and public scientific resources—such as websites containing public health information—have been removed. During President Trump’s first term, his administration took similar aim at science and scientists. Now in his second term, the people and processes that had previously provided a check on those attacks—federal scientific integrity policies, inspectors general, and Congress, for example—are now severely diminished, or complicit in the actions the executive branch is pursuing.

We know from other countries and contexts that authoritarians often target the intellectual class in order to elevate loyalists, and suppress or sideline any who might have the knowledge, expertise, or power to challenge government transgressions. In response to such threats, the US scientific community can work to rebuild critical elements of the federal science enterprise now being dismantled or compromised, including science advisory committees and scientific assessments which for decades have helped ensure the best available science informs policy decisions. For instance, the administration has replaced Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine advisory committee members; disbanded key Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) advisory bodies on science, environmental justice, and pollution standards; and dismissed the 400+ authors of the congressionally mandated 6^th National Climate Assessment. This is a classic tool in the authoritarian playbook: By squashing the science, the government seeks to avoid blowback for failing to make science-based policy decisions.

The US science community can build independent alternatives to these institutions, with several promising models for success. For example, when the first Trump administration disbanded an EPA scien­tific panel charged with advising on air pollution standards, the disbanded panel convened independently to review the evi­dence and advise the agency on the science of the health effects of particulate matter. This work supported successful legal challenges and faster progress when the next administration arrived. Following this model, fired federal science advisors are organizing an alternative version of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and the Union of Concerned Scientists has released a toolkit providing guidance on independent science committees.

These efforts to develop independent science advice are beneficial regardless of future administration priorities.  While they may not match the reach and respect of a formal government body, they preserve scientific truth in the public record, which can prove useful in legal proceedings. They can effectively counter misinformation coming from government officials and help hold them accountable. Moreover, even if the federal context doesn’t improve in the coming years,  independent science infrastructure provides reliable science advice for other levels of government and for the public. The US scientific community now has the chance to apply this strategy at scale.

The ability to tell the truth, even (or especially) when it does not suit any particularly partisan aims, is an essential prerequisite for a free society. Scientists can leverage their substantial social standing and trustworthiness to preserve this vital ingredient. Under authoritarian conditions in the Soviet Union, many dissident leaders were prominent scientists, circulating underground writings that criticized the pseudo-science that the communist state approved and promoted. These materials helped to break through the wall of invincibility that the government tried to create—even when the dissidents themselves paid a price. While every would-be dissident has a different tolerance for risk, and while such efforts can’t fully recreate the the US science apparatus now being dismantled, it offers a proven pathway for preserving an essential role of science in society and those in the science community who are willing and able to be more visible can step up. And we must.

You can find a detailed accounting of the past six months of Trump administration attacks on and abuses of science in our new report, Science and Democracy Under Siege. We’re clear-eyed about what we’re up against: the dismantling of federal agencies whose work protects the public, widespread rollbacks of health and safety protections, political cronyism, illegal power grabs, and withholding federal funds, among many other attacks.

The good news is that we have a blueprint for fighting back, which has guided our battles against the dangerously anti-science and anti-democratic actions of the Trump administration. I’m proud of how we’ve deployed it successfully to protect people, even in the face of a relentless assault on our work and values. With the goals of minimizing the damage done, continuing to make progress on our issues in the near term, and creating the conditions for progress in the years and decades ahead, UCS is fighting smart. 

Uniting the scientific community

Among our strengths as an organization is our ability to amplify the political power of the scientific community. Over the past months, we’ve welcomed hundreds of new members into our Science Network, a group of nearly 20,000 scientists and technical experts ready to act on opportunities to push back against the administration.

Weeks after the inauguration, UCS organized a sign-on letter to Congress demanding that federal science be protected, signed by 56 scientific societies representing more than 100,000 scientists across disciplines. And as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) faced unprecedented budget cuts and mass firings that hindered their crucial work keeping the public safe from extreme weather events, UCS helped organize and send a letter to Congress signed by over 3,300 scientists from around the world in defense of the agency. The letter has been cited in the media and used by members of Congress. To challenge cuts at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development, we organized a letter to Congress signed by more than 120 environmental, public health, science and community organizations, and businesses.

UCS also created a video campaign highlighting the importance of a robust scientific enterprise in our society, along with a tool to contact members of Congress. Several scientific societies, including 500 Women Scientists, and UCS National Advisory Board member Bill Nye shared the video on their social media.

We’ve also been at the forefront of a wave of rallies and mass mobilization events, beginning with the Stand Up for Science flagship rally in Washington, DC, where I spoke to the crowd about the importance of federal science. UCS staff have supported and participated in the Hands Off! and No Kings rallies and marches. And as Trump administration officials filed into NOAA offices for an annual fish fry last month, I was outside loudly addressing a rally of supporters, pointing out how cuts to NOAA were hurting people.

Driving the narrative

Early on, we knew that we couldn’t let the Trump administration’s false claims about federal science and its funding dominate news cycles. Instead, we’ve made it clear to our supporters and the national media that the anti-science actions of the Trump administration are causing direct harm to people and communities—and are further evidence of the administration’s incompetent and illegal behavior

We’re focused on a core message: that when science is sidelined, people get hurt. In addition to our new report Science and Democracy Under Siege, we release regular updates of attacks on science to make sense of this harmful and chaotic news environment and to highlight examples of specific communities that are affected. We must drive home the point that real people are at risk. UCS experts are in the New York Times, on Instagram, featured on NPR and in local news outlets across the country explaining why budget cuts, mass firings, and anti-science policies are bad for our health and safety. With more than 4,000 mentions of UCS work citing the Trump administration and its destructive actions in national media outlets in a four-month period from January to April 2025, people are listening.

Pushing our lawmakers

Beyond the Trump administration, members of Congress are still responsible for managing federal budgets and passing legislation that will help their constituents. UCS works directly with members of Congress on both sides of the aisle on our priorities, and encourages our members and supporters to contact their elected officials to protect science.

For example, UCS played a key role in securing a major bipartisan victory this month. We worked to cultivate bipartisan support for extending and expanding the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) for years. RECA provides support to people and communities exposed to radiation from US nuclear weapons activities. The legislation expired last year, leaving thousands wondering how to pay their healthcare bills. UCS staff helped bring organizers from these affected communities to meet with their members of Congress to ask them to revive and expand RECA. This summer, Congress passed the largest RECA expansion in history—not just reinstating the law, but expanding it to cover more survivors.

UCS has also organized in-district meetings for our supporters, and provided resources to show the local economic impacts of federal attacks on science. And for UCS supporters who plan to attend town hall-style meetings hosted by their members of Congress, we created a toolkit and offered virtual trainings to help them engage on the issues they care about.

Holding the line

UCS is operating defensively against the Trump administration’s assaults, with the intention of stopping, slowing, and derailing its efforts to dismantle federal science agencies and cut their funding. The alarms we’ve raised over potential cuts and proposals to radically restructure agencies like NOAA, its National Weather Service, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency have had an effect, with some of the worst effects paused or on hold. And we’re using our public profile to raise concerns with the current nomination of Neil Jacobs—who was found to be in violation of NOAA’s scientific integrity policy for his role in ‘Sharpiegate’ during the first Trump administration, politicizing data on Hurricane Dorian and throwing his own scientists under the bus. We’re continuing to fight for NOAA, including hosting a day of meetings with lawmakers this week, and a virtual “action hour” training for scientists and experts July 29.

UCS has also been working to mobilize the scientific community against President Trump’s decree on science-based decisionmaking in government, the deceptively named “Gold Standard Science” executive order. Under this order, political appointees could use these standards to choose what science (including pseudoscience) their agencies are allowed to consider when setting policies. My colleague Jules Barbati-Dajches and I published an opinion piece in The BMJ rallying scientists to disrupt this attack on independent science, and we’re keeping up a drumbeat in the media and among our supporters.

We’ve also gone on the offense: UCS filed a lawsuit via the Campaign Legal Center against the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for acting beyond its constitutional power to slash federal funding, dismantle federal agencies, and fire federal employees. Our suit was combined with a similar case filed by 14 states, and in May, a federal judge ruled that it can proceed in court. We joined another suit challenging the Trump administration’s removal of public information from climate and environmental justice federal agency websites—some of whose data we’re hosting on our own site, so it won’t disappear.

And for federal scientists—those who have been forced out of their positions, and those who remain—we’re providing support, connections, and resources.

Making progress where possible

Let’s be clear: progress on UCS issues is still possible—and it’s happening. The state of Maine just provided a great example, as its legislature and governor approved a bill requiring the state’s power to come from 100% carbon-free electricity sources by 2040, saving ratepayers money and cleaning up polluting and heat-trapping emissions from power generation. UCS staff rallied support for the law by testifying at hearings, promoting a lobby day, and working with local partners.

Across the country, we have strong working relationships with state agencies and legislatures that help us make similar progress on our issues, including in California, where we’re working to strengthen policies around electric vehicle adoption, and in the Midwest, where we work with electrical grid operators and consumers to help boost renewable energy use.

And as the Trump administration disbands crucial scientific advisory committees whose members provide expert advice on federal protections and safeguards, we’ve released a toolkit to help any interested experts convene their own independent science advisory committees. In the absence of federal leadership, independent committees can create an opportunity for public input on critical scientific topics, help counter misinformation in the public sphere, and allow scientific progress and consensus building to continue. These committees can also provide scientific advice for decisionmakers at other levels of government, including in states, and prepare recommendations for future decisions when the opportunity arises.

While we lay the groundwork for future progress, we’re working to garner support for a law that will protect scientific integrity across the federal government, ensuring that federal science and scientists are properly protected from inappropriate political influence in current and future presidential administrations. Indeed, we’re hosting events with members of Congress and UCS supporters this week to advocate for the Scientific Integrity Act’s passage.

Staying in the fight

For those of us who care about a functional democracy, the preservation of human rights, fighting climate change, environmental justice, protecting public health, and our environment, the past six months have been hellish. If you’re tired, overwhelmed, drained, dispirited by the torrent of bad news and worse policy announcements, depressed, angry, or some combination of all of these—I’m right there with you, and so are my colleagues at UCS. Our six-month report thoroughly lays out the brutal toll this administration’s actions have taken on the issues we care most about.

But what we’re fighting for is worth the effort. UCS is staying in the ring, tracking and resisting the Trump administration’s worst attacks with every tool in our arsenal, and making all the progress toward our goals that we can. And as a parent who (like all parents) is deeply invested in my children’s safe and healthy future, I can promise you that we will never stop imagining and fighting for the better world we know is possible.

In the editorial, Mr. Kratsios claims to be addressing longstanding issues in the scientific community around strengthening scientific rigor, reproducibility, and integrity. I can assure him that I—and many in the scientific community—would love to have that conversation. But this ain’t it. 

The executive order, and the White House’s messaging, are couched in rhetoric that the scientific community will find familiar and resonant. In fact, much of the new guidance is remarkably UNremarkable, in that it restates many of the goals that the scientific community has for increasing the rigor, accessibility, and transparency of science produced and used in federal contexts.

But behind this facade is concerning language that sets the stage for the administration to undermine science-based policy—the same playbook followed by the first Trump administration (and Congress before that, and the tobacco industry before that). 

A golden opportunity, tarnished

I would be delighted to work across political aisles, scientific disciplines, and public and private sectors to tackle these challenges in science. Indeed, this was part of my job when I worked in the White House. Directed by an executive order in the first week, the Biden-Harris White House set out to improve public trust in science by strengthening scientific integrity across the government. Over the subsequent years, we made important progress on this goal: expanding comprehensive scientific integrity policies and officers to some 30 federal agencies, creating better processes, and installing scientific integrity infrastructure to empower science and scientists to be protected in government activities.

This is simply good policy no matter which party is in power. Science has been politicized by both major political parties; there is nothing inherently partisan about protecting the people and processes that ensure accurate information and scientific advice inform government decisions.

I’m immensely proud of what we accomplished—AND there was much more left to be done. When they took office, the Trump administration had the opportunity to carry on this effort. They could have continued this work across agencies by developing more detailed processes, conducting surveys on implementation, tackling nuanced emerging issues like other modes of science including community-engaged research, and integrating new technologies into existing policies and practices—activities that would have brought the federal science enterprise to new heights.

Wouldn’t the Science Advisor to the President, who wishes to “reinforce scientific rigor and excellence,” consider it a gift to inherit such a project to improve upon? This was a golden opportunity to improve federal science. Instead, we got a golden facade, behind which lurk threats to the production and use of science in federal spaces altogether. 

Playing politics with federal science

If there were any doubts about the political nature of this effort, we can look to the executive order itself, which explicitly and specifically directs agencies to kill the policies they developed during the years of the Biden-Harris administration. This suggests to me that the order is less about improving science, and more about politics. 

Leaving aside the bizarre tone of Mr. Kratsios’ editorial in which he complains that the scientific community didn’t react the way he wanted to the executive order, the content of his editorial and the guidance released by his office reveal several new concerning elements. Most alarmingly, the guidance includes, “support for adversarial collaborations where teams with differing hypotheses design studies to rigorously test results, minimizing confirmation bias.”  This is a nod to the climate science “red team blue team” exercise, in which “climate skeptics” are given equal standing to climate scientists as they unnecessarily debate. This is a tactic for undermining climate science in policy settings that received widespread pushback from the scientific community in the first Trump administration.

Actual paths to more rigorous, independent science

I desperately wish we were talking about improving the production and use of science in federal decisions. There is so much legitimate work to be done collectively among leaders in the scientific community. We could draw lessons from different sectors and levels of government. We could incorporate the latest social science research on how best science can inform policy decisions. We could create bespoke policies and procedures for the many unique government contexts in which scientific information informs decisions.

Instead, we’ve gotten high-level rhetoric that conflates science and policy, paints a broad brush of platitudes without the policy progress to match, and threatens to weaken federal science.

We must instead strive to have the tough conversations that are needed to improve science in federal policy settings. Let’s get to that hard and necessary work.

This past week has been brutal for federal workers of all kinds, scientists included. There was a complete bloodbath at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), with huge layoffs across the National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among other divisions. It has been heart-wrenching to see who has been ousted. Experts who devoted their lives to research and public health pursuits for the nation. Scientists and other public servants working on innovative new therapies for debilitating diseases, critical cancer research, and promising drug trials. Unmatched programs for supporting community preparedness for climate change. Key staff focused on food safety and drug development. Entire teams focused on sharing health information with the public. And this is all only what happened at HHS this week. Across science agencies, we’ve seen other major blows to scientific staffing with more reductions in force planned in the future.

We are now watching in real time as our nation shoots itself in the foot when it comes to our leadership in science. The United States has long been a leader in science, technology, and medicine. That prominence is due in no small part to federal investment in science and scientists: both federally funded research to universities, hospitals, and other institutions, and research conducted within government agencies.

With respect to federally funded research outside government, people come from around the world for an opportunity to study and advance scientific pursuits in the US, even if it’s only for a few months, or a degree program. It is worth it to many to move their lives across the world, even temporarily, to have access to the expertise and scientific enterprise we have here.

Within government, federal experts have worked tirelessly to advance the science and technology missions of the agencies they serve. The benefits and stability of a federal job, combined with access to federal government resources, has meant a large and reliable cohort of talent from the scientific community chooses to go into government and chooses to stay, year after year. This has yielded tremendous benefits for our nation. Federal scientists ensure consistent progress on medical advances and drug development, keep our air and water clean, and make sure our workplaces, roadways, food, drugs, and baby products are safe.

For the last few years, I had the privilege to see this amazing federal science enterprise up close. What I saw on the inside was a huge pool of talented people of all walks of life working hard within the federal system to serve the American people. Most would never get public credit for the long hours and hard work they put into their days serving our nation. As writer Jeff Nesbitt recently wrote with respect to the HHS cuts, the nature of public service is such that “it works in silence and disappears at great cost.” Importantly I got to appreciate my colleagues’ dedication to following law and process, their commitment to scientific integrity, and their careful operations that, for decades, have ensured that the U.S. government acted deliberately, and decisions were evidence-based.

Now, the Trump administration is doing everything it can to destroy the U.S. science leadership that other nations have only dreamed of. In the short term, this indiscriminate smashing of agency science infrastructure disrupts the pipeline of the scientific workforce and derails the careers of thousands of federal scientists. In the long term, it threatens the future of scientific progress in the United States. What the hell for?

To all the federal scientists being cast aside by this administration, know that you didn’t deserve this. Know that your work is valued, needed, and saves lives. Know that there are people across the country and world thankful for your years of public service to deliver a healthier and safer world for everyone. We will do everything we can to repair the harm of this moment. And I’ll continue to proudly raise a sign and speak up for you, rain or shine.

But my summer with the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development in North Carolina opened my eyes. The smart, thoughtful federal scientists I worked with were using their scientific expertise to serve the public good. It was a revelation for a student who wanted to choose a path that positively impacted the world.

Over the summer, I learned from a team of hard-working people about everything from pesticide research to health effects of air pollution to detecting water quality contamination. In my mentors, I saw their pride in being federal scientists, part of a robust scientific enterprise, and in advancing the public health and environmental mission of the EPA. I observed the tremendous impact they had improving environmental conditions for the nation, all because they chose to devote their expertise to federal service.

And after that experience, and throughout the years of my career at the Union of Concerned Scientists and in government, I continued to witness firsthand the incredible impact of the EPA Office of Research and Development in Washington, DC, and across the country.

What does the office do?

The Research and Development Office is the scientific research arm of the EPA. Its scientists research and communicate the science that serves as the foundation for public health protections for the nation. The office’s work informs decisions on issues that affect our health: from groundbreaking work on the cumulative impacts of pollution our bodies, to advancing detection and prevention of water and soil pollution, to air quality monitoring and modeling advances, and the integration of climate change and its effects across disciplines.

Despite a long record of world-class research and demonstrated success in its mission , the Trump Administration has indicated plans to close the Research and Development Office. But the scientific community won’t stand by while this critical office is at risk of being dismantled.

Earlier this spring, UCS organized and delivered a sign-on letter from 54 scientific societies representing more than 100,000 scientists, demanding that Congress protect and restore life-saving and essential scientific research that benefits families and communities in the US—including the research done by the Research and Development Office.

US science is in danger

The threats to this specific office join a growing list of attacks on federal research activities at large. At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which conducts medical research and funds such projects at other institutions, measures implemented by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are hindering federal scientists’ ability to do their jobs within the agency. Cuts to NIH funding for more than 2,500 universities, medical schools, and other research institutions across the country have resulted in canceled clinical trials and studies on diseases, job losses for promising young researchers, and an abrupt end to any research that doesn’t align with the Trump administration’s incoherent preferences.

Cuts to federal funding of academic research are threatening to upend the US university research enterprise and set back the infrastructure and people supporting US-produced science and research by decades. Already, the global reputation of the United States as a scientific powerhouse, where scientists from countries around the world come to learn and make discoveries freely, is in tatters.

Shutting down the research operations of the federal government means closing the door on bright-eyed students like me and other early career researchers, limiting their options in this country (and in many cases, driving them to work abroad). It means missed opportunities to bring young talented scientists into government, creating a brain drain with lasting effects. Shutting down research means chipping away at the scaffolding that upholds federal policy decisions across issue areas, and threatening our ability to make evidence-based policy choices as a nation. And that’s why we cannot allow this to happen.

For policy decisions today and scientific progress tomorrow

As an intern with the EPA Research and Development Office, my project that summer was to analyze air pollution measurements collected in Detroit neighborhoods. The study was intended to help us better understand people’s exposure to air pollution—near roads, in their homes, in the central city, and everywhere in between. How amazing, I thought, to be the first to look at a dataset like that, and to have the potential to discover something new that might help us better protect people from harmful pollution. The sense of wonder I experienced in that lab sparked a personal mission to apply science to help people that has carried me throughout my career.

I think of the wealth of science that’s been produced, the many evidence-based environmental policy decisions made, and the lives saved from air pollution standards in the years since that summer. We’ve come a long way since I was an ambitious young researcher on that tree-covered campus. We can’t give up now. Join us in fighting against these attacks with our Save Science, Save Lives campaign.

On Monday, a whopping 48 scientific societies, associations, and organizations—representing almost 100,000 scientists from diverse disciplines—sent a letter, organized by UCS, to members of Congress demanding they protect federally funded scientific research and federal scientists. Anyone who’s worked with any scientific organization on a collective effort knows it is quite the feat to get such incredible unity in the scientific community.

On Thursday, the Campaign Legal Center filed suit on behalf of UCS and other groups against Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for acting beyond their power to slash federal funding, dismantle federal agencies, and fire federal employees.

On Friday, UCS staff and members rallied with thousands of others at the Stand Up for Science 2025 events in cities and towns across the country. I spoke at the DC rally, and I was impressed to see the turnout and energy of the scientists and science supporters who trekked to the National Mall to tell the world in a unified voice that the administration’s attacks on science are unacceptable and the scientific community will not be silent.  

That night, I shared my rally message on MSBNC “Prime.” Here is the full segment on how the Trump administration’s all-out assaults on science and scientists are harming real people’s health and safety.

This has been a challenging month. Many in the scientific community—and in the general population—have been unclear about what to do in response to the Trump administration’s aggressive and unlawful disruptions to the federal government. The speed and scale at which the Trump Administration has taken a sledgehammer to federal science agencies and the dedicated experts within them has been alarming and disorienting. With limited levers of power across the government to stop these actions, and a complete disregard for policy, process, and law by Trump Administration officials, it is no surprise that people feel disillusioned and powerless.

But we mustn’t. The scientific community has never been one to walk away from a challenging problem. In fact, we pursue them. We undoubtedly face an uphill battle in our current environment, but there is a path forward. We must preserve as much as we can in the federal government, prevent new damages from happening, and rebuild from outside the government when necessary.

In my conversation with MSNBC host and White House veteran Symone Sanders Townsend, she noted that no savior is coming to save us, that we need to lead ourselves out of this, and it is the scientists who are now stepping into the streets.

I felt that on Friday as I spoke to a sea of science supporters overlooking the Reflecting Pool. It is us, as the scientific community, who now have the chance to lead, to be brave, and to do everything in our power to insist on an administration and a world that uses science for good.

I’m determined to face the wind and I hope you are, too.

We’re in a pivotal moment for the nation and the world, and UCS has a critical role to play. In our more than 50-year history, UCS has led through challenging times, navigating thorny science policy issues, sounding the alarm on threats to people and the planet, and winning victories that ensure science supports everyone.

UCS was founded in similarly turbulent times, when it was clear that the scientific community could no longer sit on the sidelines as science was being misused, and people harmed. While the world has changed significantly since then, the need for the scientific community and its supporters to be engaged remains. We must now apply our values, our expertise, and our skills to the challenges at hand today. What I’ve always found appealing about UCS is that we hold true to the science, we don’t pull our punches when science is under attack, and we speak truth to power. If ever there was a time for us to recommit to those principles, it is now.

We must be clear-eyed about the uphill road ahead. These are challenging times. The first two weeks of the Trump Administration have already demonstrated a devastating disregard for science and scientists. The administrations’ early executive actions have sought to disrupt the critical work done by thousands of experts in the federal government to advance public health, safety, security, and equity across the nation and the world. Pushing federal scientists to quit, asking them to remove diversity, equity, inclusion, race, and gender references from their work, and persecuting immigrants are just a few of the horrifying new attacks we’re seeing come out of the Trump White House. There is undoubtedly more to come.

We are also facing an alarming erosion of independent checks and balances on presidential power that threaten our nation’s ability to use science for good. Among these actions: removing inspectors general charged with ferreting out waste, fraud and abuse in federal agencies, appropriating Congressional authority to control federal spending, and disregarding longstanding federal processes and norms. These actions are creating an environment where science and scientists are vulnerable to political interference. We are already seeing independent scientific institutions and other external voices bow to the administration’s whims, or quietly and preemptively acquiesce to the administration’s preferences against values they’ve long held. These trends make it all the more important that UCS remain a powerful, independent, and unapologetic force in a world where others are unwilling or unable to hold their ground.  

UCS is ready. While this is certainly an administration on steroids compared to the first Trump term, many of these attacks are coming from the same playbook we’ve seen before, and we know how to fight back. We have the tools, we have the expertise, and we have mobilized and coordinated networks to push back, to stand up, and to navigate this new environment. Our Save Science, Save Lives campaign is underway and working full speed. We’re in an environment where a lot will change quickly, but we must hold true to our values and remain focused on where we can be most impactful in protecting people and securing wins. Specifically, we must keep in mind the following:

• Hold the line. We’ve made significant progress in the past years on many of our issues—an emerging clean energy economy, major wins in decarbonizing the transportation sector, reduced climate and air pollution, a strengthened federal scientific integrity landscape, new efforts to provide oversight on new nuclear weapons development, advances in holding fossil fuel companies accountable for climate impacts, new protections from harmful pollutants for environmental justice communities, and new scrutiny on pollution from big agriculture. These gains are now facing threats by an administration dead-set on destroying all of it no matter the cost to people and the planet. We must preserve everything we can. We must make it as difficult and as painful as possible for them to dismantle these hard-fought victories. And we have the tools to do it. In the first Trump administration, a lot of damage to science and science-based policy was avoided because UCS and others fought back, stood our ground, and insisted on the critical importance of science and scientists to the nation. In the coming months and years, we’ll have ample opportunity to deploy these tactics and fight back at every turn, preserving as much as possible for the future. We mustn’t give up. This work is hugely important and can be hugely impactful in protecting what we’ve built.
• Keep the vision. We must hold true to our values. As the administration seeks to erase race, gender, trans rights, and other important elements of identity from federal activities and otherwise works to tamper with the full scope of federal scientific work, including cross-agency environmental justice and climate activities, we must not cede any ground. We cannot dampen, self-censor, or otherwise walk away from the critical work they seek to erase. As the scientific community, we know that working to address inequities, focusing on environmental justice, and including diverse perspectives are all critical components of the pursuit of science and science-based policy that we cannot simply delete out of existence. We must hold true to our values and keep top of mind the vision and the world that we’re working towards: where science works to improve health, safety, security, and equity for everyone.
• Innovate and strategize. At the same time, we must be clear about what we’re up against. This is an uphill battle. We must leverage our expertise, our communities, and our resources to evolve our strategies and be smart about where we focus. This will mean rebuilding infrastructure, communities, and networks from outside government to preserve what’s being bulldozed within government. It will mean carrying water on important issues to preserve critical progress made in recent years. This will require trying new tactics, getting creative, avoiding distraction, and standing tall in the face of new threats that might not have been conceived yet.

It’s a challenge we’re prepared to take on. We’ve faced big obstacles before. In our organization’s history, UCS has stood tall and won against seemingly insurmountable forces time and time again. From our roots fighting the military industrial complex to facing oil giants today, UCS has always insisted on and worked towards a world that better served people.

We owe it to everyone who came before us in this fight to keep going.

We owe it to everyone in and outside of government, who are now watching their work be unraveled before their eyes.

We owe it to the thousands of federal employees being furloughed or fired because they dared to try to make our government work better everyone.

We owe it to the thousands of communities across the nation and world who deserve a safer, healthier, more secure, and more equitable world driven by facts and evidence.

This is our mandate. This is our moral imperative. And I’m ready to go.

Many federal scientific staff left since 2016, and the Biden White House now must carry out the critical public health and safety missions of federal science agencies with a deficit of scientific staff in some areas. This federal brain drain must be addressed, and there are many strategies that can be taken to build back up the federal scientific workforce. Rehiring also provides important opportunities to diversify the federal science workforce, which is currently disproportionately white, male, and older in many parts of the government. The National Academy of Sciences conversation discussed these challenges and opportunities for building back better. Below is the video of the session, and you can learn more about the Union of Concerned Scientists’ work on federal science capacity here, here, here, and here. A strong and vibrant federal science workforce is crucial to ensuring the nation can serve and protect the public. Let’s work together to strengthen and diversify the US federal science enterprise.

Trump’s unprecedented sidelining of science

Science suffered. Scientists were gagged. Facts were manipulated. This is the story of the Trump Administration. But, in part, we’ve seen this movie before. After the George W. Bush administration’s (then unheard of) attacks on science, the Obama Administration vowed to “restore science to its rightful place” and put in place policies to protect science and scientists, in case we ever got science-hostile administration again. And we all know what happened next.

The Trump Administration attacked science more than any other president in our nation’s history, averaging an attack on science per week by our count. Now, we are once again in the position of repairing the damage, but today we are armed with a wealth of information and tools to strengthen science across the government in bold new ways, and the Biden Administration has made clear it means business. On day one, the administration elevated the presidential science adviser to a Cabinet-level position—a move that the Union of Concerned Scientists has advocated for at least since 2008.

Laying the foundation for building up science

Today’s Presidential Memorandum contains many positive steps for rebuilding and strengthening science across the government. It directs agencies to make evidence-based decisions guided by the best available science and data. Here’s some key components where I’ll be tracking the administration’s progress.

1. Expanding science leadership!

Every science agency (broadly defined) must assign a Chief Science Officer and a scientific integrity official. This move helps ensure that every agency has clear science leadership—a factor that we know improves scientific integrity at agencies, based on analysis of surveys of federal scientists and comparing progress across agencies (see our 2018 PLoS One paper).

2. Improving scientific integrity policies!

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), working with a newly formed Taskforce on Scientific Integrity (a recommendation of UCS), will lead a continuous review of the effectiveness of federal agency scientific integrity policies. This is a key step that will help ensure that existing gaps in policy provisions are filled. Most agency policies were developed under the Obama administration and there remains wide variability across agencies in the strength of the policy provisions (see our recent assessment of current federal agency scientific integrity policies, chart p. 3).

Importantly, the review will also look at implementation of the policies, providing a key opportunity to learn more about how science was sidelined under the Trump administration, even at agencies with strong polices in place. This will allow the Biden administration to improve policy provisions and scientific integrity leadership structures at agencies in ways that directly prevent the kinds of interference in science we experienced under Trump. This is a huge opportunity for progress and it is the part of today’s memo that I am most excited about.

3. Increasing public participation!

The OSTP review of scientific integrity processes will include a public input and consultation process. This is a rare opportunity for the public to weigh in directly on the White House’s approach to improving science across the government. I am excited for this huge opportunity for the policies and practices around scientific integrity to be enriched and improved in new ways from the input of diverse perspectives.

4. Restoring science advice!

Federal science advisory committees will undergo a review to ensure they are restored, operating effectively, and include greater diversity of members. This is an important first step for rebuilding independent science advice from top experts across the country and ensuring Black, Indigenous, and people of color experts, along with early career researchers, and diversity of disciplines, are represented when appropriate. Such a move is welcome after the Trump administration froze some science advisory committees, disbanded others, and tried to arbitrarily slash a whopping third of them.

The road ahead

These are important first steps. Importantly, we can’t stop here. Our nation knows all too well now that simply electing a president that accepts science is not enough. We must put additional safeguards in place to ensure that science and scientists are protected even when a future administration or other actors are hostile to the very idea of science-based decisions. Today’s move starts us down a path to hard but great things to improve government science. But we have a roadmap and I’m ready for the journey.

In many ways, strengthening science lifts all boats. If science and evidence are prioritized and government experts are supported, our nation is better positioned to tackle all its most pressing problems, from COVID-19 to climate change to endangered species protection. There are many key issues that need attention right away, but here are the top ways the Biden administration can be more effective on all issues by strengthening the United States as a science-driven nation.

Appoint qualified leaders to science agencies

We know from years of federal scientist surveys that leadership matters. Federal employees must trust their agency leaders to make good decisions and back them up, even when the science is inconvenient. Those federal employees are now coming out of four years where they were ignored, restricted, and even thrown under the bus by their own agency heads. The Biden administration must take steps to rebuild that trust. They can start by appointing science agency heads with relevant expertise and solid experience, who are free from conflicts of interest.

Boost government science capacity and morale

To do anything, the Biden administration must ensure agencies have the staff to meet their missions. Under the Trump administration, many federal scientists retired, took buyouts, or otherwise left, rather than work under Trump’s leadership, leaving some agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), severely understaffed. This deficit of expertise came on top of existing issues of many federal scientists approaching retirement age. To ensure federal science agencies can continue to be places of scientific excellence, the Biden administration must prioritize recruitment and retention of scientific staff at agencies.

Strengthen scientific integrity everywhere

Scientific integrity has come a long way in the federal government. More than 28 federal agencies now have scientific integrity policies, officers, and trainings. But the Trump administration has demonstrated that challenges remain, even with robust scientific integrity policies and infrastructure in place. We must do more. Policies, processes, and practices can be improved to better ensure that federal science and scientists are shielded from interference and free to do their work. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy can play a key role in leading and coordinating scientific integrity efforts across the government, and federal science agencies can do their part as well. Armed with lots of data on how to strengthen scientific integrity, the Biden White House can hit the ground running.

Prioritize those harmed or neglected by federal science

Headlines over the past four years highlighted many harmful moves taken by the Trump administration on science, climate, and health. It is equally important to focus on all the things that didn’t happen. Federal science agencies are charged with protecting public health and safety, but Trump officials at these agencies failed to do their jobs time and time again on everything from air pollution standards to endangered species protection to keeping unsafe baby products off the market. We now have a backlog of public safeguards at federal agencies and this lack of action has worsened longstanding inequities that the government should be mitigating. Given its stated priority of racial equity, the Biden administration should center equity and environmental justice at agencies and prioritize helping communities who were disproportionately harmed by Trump actions and inactions.

Build back science advice

Each year, thousands of scientists donate their time and expertise to inform the government on everything from drug approvals to public land management to worker safety. Under the Trump administration, this impressive network of science advice was neglected, ignored, and abandoned. In several instances, conflicted and unqualified individuals were appointed. The Biden administration should revitalize the federal science advisory committee system, remove illegitimate individuals on committees, and restore the role of independent science advice to government decisionmaking.

“Americans have called on us to marshal the forces of science”

Tellingly, both President-Elect Joe Biden and Vice-President-Elect Kamala Harris mentioned science in their victory speeches last Saturday, even though science will be one of many, many issues they must prioritize as they take the reins during a challenging time in our nation’s history. Strengthening science across the government can give us the best shot at tackling these challenges. And I think they know it too.

To put these allegations in context and learn more about the role of scientists and medical experts in perpetuating harm to Black and Brown communities, especially when it comes to reproductive rights, I interviewed Guttmacher Institute Senior Research Scientist Liza Fuentes. Dr Fuentes holds a doctorate in public health and has more than a decade of experience in reproductive health research.

GG: What was your initial reaction when you heard about these allegations? 

LF: I was horrified and really devastated. At the same time, this news comes as no particular surprise when you understand the repeated times in which basic reproductive rights have been violated, primarily in women and primarily in Black and Brown people. In recent history, ICE has been responsible for multiple violations of reproductive rights. For example, the separation of children from parents arriving at the border was often framed as a policy choice but we know that this decision was made purposefully to terrorize immigrants, even those asking for asylum. We know that this violates reproductive and human rights. And immigrant adolescents who arrived at the border pregnant have been prevented from seeking abortion care, and the ACLU had to litigate the right of a young woman to obtain an abortion. So unfortunately, it is in the realm of possibility that hysterectomies would be performed on people who did not request them, for which it’s not even clear they were medically necessary.

GG: What are the systemic problems that create conditions for such atrocities to occur?

LF: One element I’m interested in is the conditions more broadly that allow these types of things to happen. There’s no policy that allows a person to perform hysterectomies on someone against their will. And yet how do we end up here? How do we end up in a place, for example, where people are put into clinical trials in Puerto Rico in the 1950s and 60s without their consent? Where Black folks and folks who were deemed intellectually challenged were sterilized against their will in dozens of states throughout the 20th century? The through-line is that these things end up happening whether they are official policy or not.

Starting with the history of slavery, part of American culture is to frame stories about some groups of people as being social problems in and of themselves, instead of figuring out the way that social policy and communities can lift up the dignity of all people. Dorothy Roberts brilliantly documented this in all of her work, but seminally in Killing the Black Body. Elena Gutiérrez, a sociological historian, documented the coerced and forced sterilization of Mexican-American women in California in the 1970s. In these cases, people living, working, and raising families here are framed as the problem, not part of a community in need of solutions, governments, and communities that support all health. So it’s not a far walk from understanding those cases to see how do we get to a place where people are coerced into sterilization. It is made possible because of the ways in which immigrants and Black and Brown people are talked about. That has a very real effect on how they are valued.

We know that science and scientists have long been complicit in harm to Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) communities, particularly when it comes to issues of reproductive health and justice. In what ways do you see science and medical expertise being exploited for harm in this case?

I want to acknowledge that this feels like a sensitive question because for many of us in the scientific community, our training and our work is so connected to the positive impact that we want to have on the world; however, science and medicine are not free from the entire context of human culture. Science is a way of knowing. It is an institution. It is part of our culture and it has not escaped the systems of oppression and constructs that are used to value some people over others. It is claimed that science is objective but that’s not true. Science has a point of view.

When we design our studies, there are values embedded in those study designs. Whether or not we interrogate them is another question, but they are there.  Anne Fausto-Sterling wrote on how gender stereotypes were deeply embedded in medical textbooks and in some cases still are. It is so important for those of us who are scientists to interrogate and help each other understand how that happens by looking at specific examples and then applying that to our work.

One example is looking at research and development on contraception. When researchers were running the first clinical trials on the pill, participants were having distressing side effects and some 50% of people who were enrolled eventually dropped out. Yet,  data on those participants were still included in analyses assessing the pill’s effectiveness in preventing pregnancy, even though the side effects were so severe that many people could not stay on it. Even if this approach demonstrated that the pill could prevent pregnancy while it was being used, it completely disregarded whether this is a contraception that a whole human woman can practically use to plan if, when, and how to become pregnant.

Fast forward 60 years, something that comes up now in my work as a researcher in family planning is the perceived need to balance individual autonomy (i.e. people using the form of birth control they prefer) and the public health need to improve the uptake of IUDs and Nexplanon because they’re more effective at preventing pregnancy. We are still living with that legacy of focusing on the biological elements and not the needs and preferences of the individual. That’s the through-line to how we get to forced hysterectomies at an ICE facility.

Many of us in science dedicate our lives to something called increasing access to care. But the procedures and technologies that we provide in medical settings are also being used in other settings with different goals. We see these as amazing tools to help people with bodily autonomy but they can be used for the opposite. For example, it was recently discovered that judges in Tennessee were offering people time off their sentence if they use Nexplanon. Similarly, California previously had a welfare family cap. If you were receiving public assistance and subsequently have another child, you wouldn’t get additional funds for that child from the state – unless you were using an IUD or Nexplanon when you became pregnant. These policies are inherently coercive. They represent a powerful narrative for who we value and under what circumstances, in ways that are so disturbing and not okay.

GG: What do you think the scientific community can do to better ensure that scientific and medical knowledge are not misused like this?

LF: We in the scientific and medical community should be incredibly active and vocal in saying that for any technology or procedure that we would use to improve people’s lives, it is an unacceptable, perverse use of those technologies to use them coercively where people’s rights are being violated. We have the obligation to condemn it in these cases. If, for example, you are an OB/GYN who performs hysterectomies when they are medically needed, you should be outraged that the procedure is being done on people are in detention when not medically necessary.

For scientists in academia, it feels very theoretical to think about these issues, and yet examining where we’ve embedded values and assumptions about who is valued and who isn’t in our work is crucial. If we don’t do that, we cannot have the impact on policy that we think we can. We have to make time to have these conversations with our peers.

These issues also arise in very different STEM field. Take, the engineering field. Robert Moses was a city planner who advocated for building highways through neighborhoods. He was a values-driven person and he valued mobility. This didn’t seem to be political but it absolutely was.

People think that if they take a moral, ethical, or political stance that it compromises the integrity of their science, but if we are really clear about what it means to do science and analyzing and presenting bias and being transparent to the best of our abilities, then this becomes an obligation. We are in charge of the standards in our field and we must uphold those.

GG: Where should people start if they want to learn more on this topic?

LF: If you don’t know where to start this conversation with yourself or with others, I’d recommend reading Killing the Black Body, by Dorothy Roberts. As scientists we were trained to learn and at some point we become experts. But to fight racial injustice and violations of reproductive autonomy, we must first do what we were trained to do and learn about our history.

David Legates has a long history of accepting fossil fuel industry funding and spreading misinformation about climate change. He does not accept long-established climate science and spends time sowing doubt about the science, even directly to Congress. This is not the kind of person that should be in a leadership position at NOAA—an agency that leads the world in conducting climate science and communicating climate information to the public.

First and foremost, we shouldn’t overlook the absurdity of appointing a climate denier to federal leadership at the exact moment that climate-fueled wildfires are ravaging the West and a(nother) hurricane is about to slam into the Gulf Coast on top of higher seas, driven by climate change. We need government leaders ready to address these huge threats, not deny their very existence.

The presence of a climate denier in the senior ranks of a federal agency can have devastating impacts on scientific integrity across the agency. With climate deniers at the helm, the US Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of the Interior have seen climate science and climate scientists sidelined left and right since 2017—with entire webpages removed, climate communications altered, and scientists blocked from speaking publicly.  Such losses of scientific integrity at agencies harm the ability of our government to inform and protect the public from the threats of climate change. Even before Legates, dozens of NOAA scientists reported, in a 2018 survey conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists and Iowa State University, being told not to use the term “climate change” in their work. Leadership hostile to climate science is likely to worsen this censorship.

Below the overt tampering with climate science we’ve seen in recent years, climate-denying leadership at agencies can also lead to harmful self-censorship. On that 2018 survey, scientists at agencies with climate deniers in leadership, such as the EPA and the US Geological Survey, reported higher numbers of scientists choosing to avoid use of the term “climate change” or doing climate-related work even though they weren’t explicitly directed to. A reason for this effect is that a climate-denying leadership creates a culture of fear that threatens federal scientists’ ability to freely conduct and communicate scientific work.

The good news is that we can expect NOAA employees to resist any attempts to suppress science. Scientific integrity policies and practices are especially strong at NOAA, and as we learned during the SharpieGate fiasco, NOAA scientists are ready to push back if their work is challenged. But importantly, they shouldn’t have to. We deserve federal science leadership that’s competent, credentialed and fit to lead.

Last year, the California Supreme Court ruled that workers in many industries, including ridehailing, needed to be treated as employees rather than independent contractors. The California legislature then followed up with a law to codify the ruling and clarify which employers must comply. In response, Uber, Lyft and DoorDash are advancing a ballot initiative, Proposition 22, which would exempt app-based rideshare and delivery companies from a range of protections under California labor law. The companies are aggressively supporting the proposal and squashing dissent. A target has been UC Hastings researcher Veena Dubal, whose work has shown the importance of providing workers with rights and the harms of the gig economy. Rather than engage on the policy and substance, the Yes on Proposition 22 campaign—funded predominantly by Uber and Lyft—has targeted Dubal on Twitter and encouraged trolls to attack her as well. An open records request filed by a consultant for the campaign demanded years’ worth of her emails and text messages, and her address has been published online. A driver even filed an official complaint accusing her of violating lobbying laws (she’s since been cleared).

To be a woman on the Internet is to have trolls attack you but for such behavior to be actively encouraged and directly funded by companies who expect to be able to operate in our society is inexcusable and reprehensible.

Dr. Dubal now has the unfortunate honor of joining the ranks of climate scientists, food and agricultural researchers, environmental health scientists, and drug researchers, who have all faced bullying from entities opposed to their work. The Union of Concerned Scientists documented the pervasiveness of this problem through many of these cases in our Freedom to Bully report. The use of open records requests has been a well-documented tactic of intimidating scientists in recent years. Laws vary by state, but researchers at public universities can be hit harder, with far-reaching and overly broad open records requests that clearly serve only as a form of harassment. Open records laws are designed to ensure the public has access to decisions being made with public dollars, but requests like those for Dubal’s communications are not in good faith and clearly don’t serve the public.

Of note, UCS supported a bill last year in the California legislature aimed at protecting researchers like Dubal from such harassment. The bill did not pass and this case shows how much we still need it.

The targeting of researchers has been such a problem that the Union of Concerned Scientists developed an entire guide to help scientists deal with harassment, especially in an online world. This week, we updated and re-released Science in the Age of Scrutiny. I knew we would unfortunately need the guide again as researchers continue to find inconvenient truths and defend their work in public spaces. I did not anticipate, however, that we would need to defend researchers from companies like Uber and Lyft, who are simultaneously making public  commitments to clean up their climate emissions. It is a shameful act that these companies are involved in such damaging and dirty political tactics that cause direct harm to researchers working to share their findings and keep decisionmakers informed. We should expect better.

A science-based law and the challenge of protecting at-risk populations

To be clear, we’ve made remarkable gains in clearing the air since 1970, due in no small part to the architects of the original law and its 1990 amendments, who enshrined the law with teeth—scientific teeth, that is. Several parts of the law, most notably the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS), require that decisions on air quality be based on science and science alone. And they built in mechanisms by which the agency solicits external science advice and synthesizes new science on a regular basis. This process has allowed the agency to set health-protective and science-based standards for decades—even under tremendous pressure from political leaders and industries to set weaker ones.

The Clean Air Act also provides mechanisms for addressing disproportionate impacts and protecting vulnerable populations, but those parts of the Clean Air Act have decidedly fewer scientific teeth (if any). On hazardous air pollutants, for example, the EPA assesses and works to address any excessive (“residual”) risk that communities face after major pollution sources employ the best control technology available, but the agency is limited by capacity, by air quality monitoring and modeling capabilities, and by resources available. The result is that some communities still face greater hazardous air pollution exposure than others, and these are disproportionately communities of color.

Or let’s take the NAAQS. The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to set ambient air pollution standards “requisite to protect public health with an adequate margin of safety” every five years. That margin of safety is designed to ensure that more vulnerable populations are protected. Air pollutants, including ozone and particulate matter, tend to affect sensitive groups more. Thus, adequate margin of safety is designed to ensure that at-risk groups such as the elderly, children, and those with lung diseases are protected in addition to healthy adults. But while setting the ambient pollution standards must be based on science, the decision about what provides an adequate margin of safety is considered a policy decision left to the administrator. This arrangement means that sensitive populations haven’t always been protected by NAAQS standards—and the Trump Administration’s current ozone proposal proves it.

The Trump administration’s ozone draft rule

Ground-level ozone is a persistent and problematic pollutant. It forms in the atmosphere from natural and manmade sources in the presence of sunlight, making it harder to control than pollutants that come directly from a tailpipe or smokestack. Yet, we must control it because ozone exposure aggravates the respiratory system and causes thousands of asthma attacks, missed school days, and missed workdays every year in the US.

The Trump administration has issued a draft rule on ozone, based on a flawed and expediated process that EPA political leadership jammed through with only minimal scientific input. They failed to form an Ozone Review Panel—a group of some two dozen experts that historically have helped ensure a robust review of the science. The result is that the agency and the public missed out on the robust scientific discussion that we deserved to have on such a complex and harmful pollutant. We now have a draft ozone rule that retains the status quo. This, of course, is better than a weaker standard that the administration could have attempted (especially given former Administrator Pruitt’s attempt to delay implementation of the 2015 ozone standards based on “insufficient scientific evidence”). But here’s why retaining the standard is problematic for public health, especially for at-risk groups.

For the previous two cycles, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC)—the EPA’s primary source of science advice on NAAQS review—recommended a primary 8-hour maximum ozone standard of 60-70 ppb. In 2015, the science advisors noted in their final letter to the EPA administrator that a standard of 70 ppb might not be protective for sensitive groups, noting that a 70-ppb standard would still mean “substantial scientific evidence of adverse effects … including decrease in lung function, increase in respiratory symptoms, and increase in airway inflammation.” The standard was finalized at 70-ppb anyway.

When the next ozone standard review started in 2018, this should have been a primary point of discussion. Is 70 ppb protective of at-risk group? Is there new evidence to inform that question? Unfortunately, the Trump administration didn’t give us a chance to have that conversation, with no Ozone Review Panel (which undoubtedly would have included several ozone and health effects researchers), and lower scientific expertise on CASAC, we were deprived of what is normally a robust public peer review of the strength of the scientific literature. The lone CASAC member with direct expertise in this area acknowledged questions about whether a standard of 70 ppb would protect asthmatic children, for example. But here we are. We have a proposed rule that fails to consider this risk in any meaningful way and an administrator with a record of disregard for science, process, and protection of vulnerable groups.

Our air pollution policies must be better

The bottom line is that our laws are insufficient to protect vulnerable populations and address disparities in exposure to air pollution. The resulting health consequences are dire, with thousands sickened or killed each year. We must do better. We must protect those who need it most. We can’t depend on laws alone, and we certainly can’t depend on Administrator Wheeler.

The Trump administration’s draft ozone review is now out for public comment. Join me in telling the administration, in written or oral comments, that this rule was produced using an illegitimate process with inadequate scientific review. Communities everywhere deserve better.

A broken process and a flawed result

It has been a wild ride. In many ways, the process was doomed from the start. Early in the Trump Administration, EPA leaders began meddling with science advisory committees and indicated they were going to expedite the process for reviewing the particulate matter and ozone standards for no legitimate reason. It was clear the administration had no intention of considering the science when in October 2018, it disbanded the Particulate Matter Review Panel, a group of nearly two dozen of the nation’s top experts on particulate matter and health and welfare effects. It was the same kind of all-star lineup of experts that had informed EPA’s ambient air pollutant standards since they began decades ago.

At the same time, EPA leaders gutted the seven-member Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee and replaced its independent scientists, leaving only one academic scientist on a committee usually dominated by them and appointing an industry consultant with no experience as an EPA science advisor to lead the group.

The results were what you might expect. From its first meeting, it was clear the group was inadequate to advise the agency, and they knew it. To their credit, they told EPA they needed the Panel reinstated and that they didn’t have the adequate expertise to review the Particulate Matter Standards. But Administrator Wheeler didn’t listen, instead he made a half-hearted effort to throw some consultants into the process at the eleventh hour, presumably to create a façade of responsiveness to what was clearly a gaping hole in needed expertise.

In the end, the advisors—whose advice historically set the scientific basis for ambient air quality standards—couldn’t even come to agreement on the fundamental question of whether the current standards adequately protect public health and welfare, let alone provide a consensus range of standards backed by the scientific evidence.

Putting science back into the process…for it to be ignored

Meanwhile, the (now independent) Particulate Matter Review Panel met and advised the agency anyway, hosted by the Union of Concerned Scientists for an in-person meeting. The 20-person panel (which had more breadth, depth, and diversity of expertise on the particulate matter standards then the advisory committee, by a long shot) came to agreement that the standards were inadequate and recommended tighter standards for fine particulate matter, a pollutant that kills and sickens thousands in the US each year.

So what did EPA Administrator Wheeler do? Despite EPA staff and the Independent Particulate Matter Review Panel both concluding the standards need tightening, Wheeler instead chose to side with part of the seven-member Committee concluding that there is not sufficient evidence to justify tightening the standards, with only a vague commentary in the draft rule that essentially parrots the opinion of some CASAC members and barely delves into any scientific explanation for the decision.

The growing science of health effects of particulate matter

So where does the science lie? The science is always changing. That’s why the architects of the Clean Air Act mandated that the standards be revisited every five years to ensure they continue to protect public health. Since the Clean Air Act passed in 1970, this process has been remarkably successful, with air pollution levels dropping dramatically due in large part to this science-based law. Since the previous particulate matter standards update in 2012, more science now shows that fine particulate matter is harmful at lower levels. Several new epidemiologic studies show that even in places with average air quality at or below the current standards and in studies where those lower air pollution days are isolated, we still see evidence of health effects. Scientific evidence suggests there is no threshold below which fine particulate matter shows no health effects.

Because the science is changing so rapidly, and because the EPA review process takes many months, the agency typically updates discussion of the latest scientific studies at the end of the process to ensure that the rule is based on the latest science. This time, the EPA didn’t do that—and that choice is consequential. Several of the new studies showing harm at lower levels have emerged since EPA did its original literature review of the science. Thus, the advisory committee didn’t have the opportunity to review it. As a result, the draft rule hasn’t accounted for some of the latest and greatest science on particular matter and health effects.

Advocating for a science-based decision

The Union of Concerned Scientists has always advocated that the EPA follow science advice on the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. Historically, this meant advocating that the agency set ambient air quality standards within the range that CASAC recommended. But the current review of the particulate matter standards is atypical for all the reasons noted above. Given the flawed CASAC and the flawed process, and in light of the latest science showing compelling evidence of harm at levels below the current standards, it is clear that CASAC’s recommendations do not provide adequate science advice.

Instead, the EPA should follow the advice of the Independent Panel. It provided robust review of the science and policy considerations on particulate matter, even after the agency dismissed it. On the annual standard for fine particulate matter (PM_2.5), the Panel recommended a range of 8-10 µg/m³.  In light of new science released since the Panel met, the EPA should set the standard on the lower end of that range.

The reality is that the country should have gotten a thorough, science-based, and public-informed process to set national standards on a pollutant that causes sickness and early death in tens of thousands every year. But we didn’t. The Trump administration robbed us of that opportunity by gutting the process and removing key people that would have helped carry it out. We are now left with an imperfect process with which to make a decision that will affect the air we all breathe for years to come.  If we don’t attempt to make a science-based decision now, we are set back years before we again have the opportunity to set standards that protect public health.

These are unprecedented times, and this was an unprecedented process. In the end, despite EPA leadership, the work was done to ensure a science-informed standard. All Administrator Wheeler needs to do is listen.

The Trump administration has already made harmful picks for commissioners at the CPSC, and under this administration’s tenure, the agency has had the lowest number of child product recalls in more than a decade. Nancy Beck is more bad news. For the full scoop on the risks to public health imposed by Beck’s problematic and conflicted history of interfering in science, see my colleague Genna Reed’s posts here and here.

Yesterday, at a Senate briefing hosted by Senator Richard Blumenthal and Senator Tom Udall, I spoke alongside advocates and parents who told powerful stories about lost loved ones and the dangers of having someone like Nancy Beck in charge at the CPSC. You can watch the full recording of the event here, and my comments are below. Finally, please contact your Senators and tell them that Nancy Beck is a dangerous choice for the CPSC.

“I join you today as a scientist who has studied environmental threats for more than a decade and I can say with certainty that Dr. Nancy Beck is a bad choice to chair the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Her fringe scientific views and alarming record on public health make her wholly unqualified for the job.

While Dr Beck is a scientist, we need only take a brief look at her history to see clearly that her views are anything but mainstream science, and her actions anything but responsible. Instead, she has an extensive record of challenging scientific conclusions at every turn and interfering in science-based policymaking.

• While at the American Chemistry Council, Beck has consistently challenged the weight of the evidence demonstrating harm of chemicals, straying far from the conclusions of the broader scientific community in assessing dose-response models at low doses. By undermining these models, Beck undermines public health, opening the door to industry’s arguments that toxic chemicals aren’t all that bad—or that the science isn’t clear, even when it is.
• At the White House Office of Management and Budget, Beck’s team made direct, substantive edits to scientific research that falsely inflated uncertainty, and in several research papers  even directly cut out scientists’ mention of potential human health harms. This demonstrates Beck’s fine-tuned ability to cast unwarranted doubt on science by picking it apart sentence by sentence, and second, her willingness to do so while working as a political official at a political agency.
• At the Environmental Protection Agency, Beck has tried to limit how many uses of a chemical the EPA should consider when evaluating its harm to human health. In so doing, Beck abandoned EPA’s obligation to consider the many ways that people can be and are harmed by chemicals in consumer products.
• At the White House National Economic Council, where she’s currently detailed, Beck was likely responsible for rewriting an EPA evaluation on the dangerous chemical, TCE, to downplay its link to fetal heart defects.

I’m not alone in assessing Dr Beck’s views as fringe. Scientific and legal authorities have made clear that her views and work are too extreme to be implemented. In 2006, the National Academy of Sciences issued a public rebuke of Beck’s effort to alter the EPA’s assessment process, calling it “oversimplified” and “fundamentally flawed.” Three years later, a House oversight committee slammed Beck in a 2009 report, outlining her direct interference with science while at OMB. And the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals shot down her proposed changes, too. Throughout her career at OMB and at EPA, Beck’s scientific colleagues left a paper trail of dismay at Beck’s disregard for scientific independence.

Even looking only recently, it is clear that Beck’s work harms the public. Just this month, news broke that Beck worked to suppress guidance from CDC experts on COVID-19 from reaching the public. Days before the guidance was officially squashed, Beck gave false reassurance to a CDC official that the guidance would go public soon: “They need to be approved before they can move forward. WH principals are in touch with the task force so the task force should be aware of the status.” Turns out, the White House would not approve the document and make it public, despite clearance from CDC head Robert Redfield.

As a scientist, I’m concerned about the decisions Beck will make at the CPSC, but as a mom of two young children, I’m alarmed. At the CPSC, Beck will oversee science-based decisions that will affect your family and mine. She will have to make judgment calls about how safe a child stroller is, how many infant deaths is enough recall a crib, and how much lead is too much contamination for a child’s lunch box. How can I trust that she’ll choose to protect my children with her record of going against the science and failing to protect people time and time again? If her record is any indication of how she will act, we cannot trust her at all.”

Thank you for the opportunity to comment. I am the Research Director in the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. On behalf of more than half a million scientists and supporters, we advocate for the use of science for a healthy planet and a safer world.

“The EPA’s draft rule on the PM NAAQS is fundamentally flawed. This rule was developed through an illegitimate process, fails to follow the best available science advice, and fails to adequately protect public health.

First, the process was doomed from the start. The EPA failed to conduct a PM NAAQS review that would have led to a science-based proposal. The administration disbanded the Particulate Matter Review Panel, removed independent scientists from the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, eliminated drafts of scientific documents, cut out public comment opportunities, and recklessly expedited the entire review. As a consequence, this draft rule has not received the level of scientific review and public input that such an impactful rule warrants.

Notably, the administrator even ignored CASAC when the Committee formally acknowledged that it didn’t have the expertise to conduct an adequate scientific review. In the end, CASAC failed to reach consensus on the primary annual standard for PM2.5. And yet, despite this split advice and despite the committee’s own recognition of its inadequacy, Administrator Wheeler relies on CASAC as its sole backing of science advice for this ill-conceived rule.

Because this rule followed an illegitimate process with insufficient scientific review, the Administrator should abandon it. If the agency wants to ensure science-based and health-protective standards, the EPA should go back to the drawing board. However, if the administration insists on moving forward in this flawed process, the only scientifically defensible option is to heed the recommendations of the Independent Particulate Matter Review Panel.

Despite being disbanded by the Trump administration, the 20-member panel of top experts in particulate matter and health and welfare effects did its job anyway and assessed the science and policy options informing the standards. Of note, the panel contains more experts, more experience and more depth, breadth, and diversity of expertise relevant to the PM NAAQS review than the remaining seven-member CASAC informing the standards.

In its final report to Administrator Wheeler, the panel concludes that the current particulate matter standards are not adequate to protect public health with an adequate margin of safety, as the Clean Air Act requires. On PM_2.5, the panel found that new and consistent epidemiological findings, supported by human and animal studies and other studies with natural experiments, provide “clear and compelling scientific evidence” for tighter standards. Since the last particulate matter review, several new large-scale epidemiologic studies provide powerful evidence that particulate matter is causing adverse health outcomes, including early death, heart attacks, and respiratory stress, at locations and during time periods with concentrations at or below the level of the current standards.

The administrator, on the other hand, ignores this new evidence of health effects below the current PM_2.5 standards and provides no justification for why it does not find this new scientific evidence compelling. It is indeed a policy judgement of where to set the standards, but the Clean Air Act requires the administrator to include an adequate margin of safety for at-risk groups. Given the evidence and the advice of the Independent Panel, it is clear that the administration is not interested in protecting these groups.

Inexplicably, the administrator notes the lack of accountability studies as a reason to ignore the epidemiologic evidence that the panel found compelling.  Such an argument is is questionable because it is unethical and illegal in many study designs to expose study subjects, such as children or the elderly, to harmful levels of air pollution. Thus, it is unreasonable to expect clinical evidence of harm in the manner that would be necessary to meet the administrator’s criteria as laid out in the rule justification.

By ignoring the Independent Particulate Matter Review Panel, and the scientific community at large, the administration is putting the public at risk. I urge Administrator Wheeler to abandon this ill-conceived and dangerous proposal.”

Join me in asking Administrator Wheeler to set particulate matter standards that protect public health. Submit your own written comment to the EPA by June 29. 

Note: A public comment doesn’t have to be long! Everyone is spread thin these days so even a short comment is tremendously helpful. It is even helpful to note within the comment that you could have provided more analysis and detail if the comment period had been longer and not occurred during a pandemic with stay-at-home orders, childcare challenges, limited access to technology, and the other unique circumstances that are making it harder for all of us to devote full attention to agency rulemaking right now.

Retaining the current PM standards harms public health

EPA staff scientists and the Independent Particulate Matter Review Panel concluded that the current standards for particulate matter are inadequate to protect public health. Particulate matter is a microscopic mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets. Fine particulate matter, or PM_2.5, is especially harmful to our health because it gets deeper into the lungs and harms our respiratory and cardiovascular systems. Increasing evidence shows that people are experiencing sickness and death at fine particulate matter levels at or below the current standards. Evidence shows that some groups, such as the elderly and those with respiratory illnesses, are at greater risk of health harms from particulate matter. And research in several areas has shown that communities of color and low-income communities are exposed to greater levels of harmful particulate pollution than whiter, affluent areas (See Houston and Delaware examples). We need to remind Administrator Wheeler that maintaining the current standards ignores this science and will contribute to sickness and death for thousands of people in the US every year.

The process was rigged

Time and again, the Trump Administration unraveled the process that has ensured we have science-based and health-protective air pollution standards for decades. The administration disbanded the Particulate Matter Review Panel, removed independent scientists from the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, eliminated drafts of scientific documents, cut out public comment opportunities, and jammed the process through in half the time it normally takes to assess the science and policy issues of a national air quality standard. As a consequence, the administration is trying to get the result that they wanted: standards that fail to protect the public. We need to make clear that this was not a legitimate process and the EPA needs to listen to experts on particulate matter and health.

Listen to the Independent Particulate Matter Review Panel

Given the Administrator deprived the nation of a science-based process that would lead to health-protective standards, the administration should listen to the Independent Particulate Matter Review Panel. The 20-member group met and developed recommendations despite EPA leadership that didn’t want to hear from them. This is the last chance for the EPA to do the right thing in this process. Join me in asking the administration to set standards in line with the recommendations of the Independent Panel:

• A primary annual PM_2.5 standard between 8 µg/m³ and 10 µg/m³ (compared to the current standard of 12 µg/m³)
• A primary 24-hour PM_2.5 standard between 25 µg/m³ and 30 µg/m³ (compared to the current standard of 35 µg/m³)
• A primary PM₁₀ that is tightened in line with PM_2.5 standards and addressing several research and monitoring areas needs.
• Secondary standards tightened to address visibility concerns and other welfare effects.

This issue is urgent

Particulate matter is associated with tens of thousands of deaths in the US every single year. The same conditions that make people more vulnerable to health harms from particulate matter also make COVID riskier for people. Further, emerging evidence suggests a link between air pollution exposure and the likelihood of death from COVID-19. But we can take steps now to help protect people from the air pollution that worsens the impact of other illnesses. We need Administrator Wheeler to set particulate matter standards that follow the science and protect public health. Importantly, it is not simply a policy delay if Administrator Wheeler keeps the current standard. Failing to take action now locks the US into weaker air pollution protections for years to come. Because National Ambient Air Quality Standards set deadlines and obligations for cities, states, and companies years in advance, kicking the can down the road has public health consequences far into the future.

Now is the time to listen to independent scientists and protect the public. Join me in submitting your own public comment, as a scientist or concerned member of the public, by June 29. The nation’s health depends on it.

A new study was made public yesterday that sheds light on the connection between COVID-19 health impacts and air pollution. I sat down (virtually of course) with Dr. Francesca Dominici, author and Director of the Data Science Initiative at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, to learn more about the study’s findings, which focused on fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) and what researchers plan to do next to further our understanding of air pollution’s impact on coronavirus health outcomes.

Dr. Gretchen Goldman: These are groundbreaking new findings on the relationship between PM_2.5 air pollution and COVID-19. What are the key findings?

Dr. Francesca Dominici: To our knowledge, this is the first study that quantifies on a national scale the potential increase in COVID mortality rate that is associated with long-term exposure to air pollution. We use data from counties that account for 90% of the COVID-19 deaths in the US as of April 4, 2020.

The most important result is that we found that people living in counties in the US that have experienced a higher level of air pollution over the past 15-17 years have a substantially higher COVID-19 mortality rate. To quantify, we found that a one unit increase in long-term average exposure to fine particulate matter is associated with a 15% increase in COVID-19 mortality rate on average in the analysis. This increase accounts for adjustments for any systematic differences between county level characteristics [such as population density or smoking rates].

We also wanted to put into perspective this 15% increase in mortality rate for COVID with all the other evidence we have produced in the past for the long-term effect of fine particulate matter on all-cause mortality. This is important to report: A one unit increase in long-term exposure to PM_2.5 leads to a 15% increase in COVID-19 mortality rate with a magnitude that is 20 times that of PM_2.5 and all-cause mortality (which is 0.7%). So in the Medicare study [Di et al, 2017], we report that a one unit increase in long-term exposure to PM_2.5 is associated with a 0.7% increase in all-cause mortality. In this study, we have that one unit associated with a 15% increase in COVID-19 mortality so the relationship between PM_2.5 and COVID mortality is 20 times stronger than the relationship between PM_2.5 and all-cause mortality.

GG: These are notable findings. Did they surprise you?

FD: I was expecting a statistically significant association. At the beginning, I was surprised at how strong the association is but then as I was thinking more about it, I was less surprised because as we are learning more and more about COVID-19, we are also learning that all the diseases that are affected by fine particulate matter are all of the disease that make the outcomes for COVID-19 much worse.

So basically, this is like adding gasoline to the fire. People that have been breathing polluted air for a long time, we know that long-term exposure to fine particulate matter increases inflammation in the lungs and potentially in the cardiovascular system. If on top of that, these individuals are affected by COVID-19, then it’s not surprising given that they’ve already been impacted by fine particulate matter, that they might respond with much worse health outcomes than someone who lives in a clean air county.

GG: We know that some groups (such as the elderly and those with lung diseases) are at higher risk of adverse health effects from PM_2.5 exposure, and that some populations (such as environmental justice communities) have higher burdens of air pollution. How do these new findings inform how we think about who is most vulnerable to severe outcomes from COVID-19?

FD: To be rigorous, we have to consider that this is early data. For now, we have just looked at the relationship between county level exposure to PM_2.5 and COVID-19 mortality. Unfortunately, the mortality data is not currently available by age and race and so on. From the data in this particular study, I don’t think we can characterize vulnerability and susceptibility, but I do think it is not too much of an extrapolation from the data to expect that people that have been experiencing and breathing and living in very polluted areas, whether they are young or old, and they have pneumonia or asthma or any other chronic lung disease, and also people that are generally socially disadvantaged (e.g. African Americans, low socioeconomic status) [may face worse COVID outcomes].

These are all the communities that will experience higher COVID deaths. But I do think we need a little more refined data to be able to pinpoint this type of vulnerability profile more precisely. The unfortunate thing is that more deaths will arrive. In the next few months, we will be able to characterize vulnerability a little bit more precisely based on what we know.

GG: What additional research is needed to understand links between air pollution and COVID-19?

FD: There is an enormous amount of work that needs to be done. This is a first look at the data. First of all, this is county-level data; we need to look at the relationship between air pollution and COVID health outcomes at a much smaller spatial resolution. In some states, for example New York, they are now making available zip code-level data. It will be really important to repeat the analysis at a spatial resolution much smaller than the county.

Second, we have only looked at deaths. As we have testing done in a more systematic fashion (though the number of cases is always a little controversial outcome because it depends on practices), as we have hospitalization data, as we have data on the outcome after you’ve been hospitalized, there will be important analyses and questions to explore, regarding the potential interaction between exposure to fine particulate matter, race, and socioeconomic status with respect to COVID deaths. We know, as of today, it has been reported that there is a much higher burden of COVID deaths among African Americans so I would expect there is going to be a high interaction with exposure to fine particulate matter and race in terms of that outcome.

Third, we also need to look at many other pollutants. We are only looking at fine particulate matter but we can also look at traffic pollutants, we can look at NO₂, we can also look at ozone. I wanted to get the first data out there because I wanted to make sure that the general public and the government will start really paying attention to the communities with higher levels of particulate matter because they have potential to be more affected by the virus.

GG: What ways could public health officials and political leaders use these findings to best protect the public?

FD: There is a very concrete action which is to implement stricter social distancing measures and to make sure that there is adequate access to health care resources for the most polluted areas in the US.

It is pretty clear from the data that these are the counties in the US that have been affected and have high levels of pollution in the last few years, even if we haven’t seen it yet. In some of them, we are already seeing very high levels of deaths. But in ones where we haven’t yet seen higher numbers of deaths, we need to pay attention because they are at higher risk of much worse health outcomes for COVID. So we have to give them higher priority and really look closely at these counties because this is where getting COVID could get much worse in terms of outcomes than places where people are breathing cleaner air.

GG: The EPA is in the process of reviewing the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for particulate matter. How do these findings inform the EPA’s decision on how to protect public health from particulate pollution? What is at stake here?

FD: It seems pretty clear to me that we are now living in a new world with this COVID virus. So not paying enough attention and weakening the National Ambient Air Quality Standards standards, I actually see it as a very unwise decision, I would go as far as saying irresponsible decision because we now know that exposure to fine particulate matter puts American people at risk to die from COVID, in addition to everything else we know about the harmful effects of fine particulate matter. So I will call it unwise and irresponsible.

GG: Anything else people should know about this new research?

FD: This study is completely open-sourced. You can go on the website, you can download the data, and you can run all of our code. There is absolutely no question that this is a fully reproducible and fully publicly available study. We will continue to update the analysis as unfortunately more deaths occur and more data will come in.

Now that we have developed the platform, if for example hospitalization data becomes available, we will definitely continue to analyze data in a way that we can protect and inform public health in the best ways possible.

The proposal is similar in substance to a version that leaked to the New York Times last November, with some new twists. Here are five initial takeaways.

1. The EPA’s use of science will be even more severely restricted

The supplemental proposal expands what was already a sweeping proposed rule. The new provisions clarify that the rule now applies to all “influential science” at the agency (not just science used in regulatory efforts) and that it applies to all data and models (not just dose-response models).

It also expands the definitions of data and reanalyze to be bigger and vaguer. In the draft rule, there were open questions about how extensive the rule would apply. With this supplemental notice, it is now crystal clear that the policy stands to fundamentally alter how the EPA uses science. From pesticide regulation to air pollution protections, chemical safety rules to water quality standards, the rule will hamstring the ability of the agency to protect people from environmental threats.

2. The restrictions are more complicated and confusing, but still limit science

The EPA offers two approaches for dealing with data that can’t be made public and both are problematic. First, they offer a tiered-access approach by which data that cannot be made public can be selectively shared for independent validation. There are many issues with this approach including legal restrictions, costs, and capacity; but most immediately, it is unclear what data would even fit this category. All the original confidentiality concerns about this rule still apply even if you are sharing with a select number of people. You cannot share personal health data even if you explain that you are only sharing it with a few trusted friends. Providing a tiered-access option doesn’t address the fundamental concern here: If the relevant health data and other confidential data sources must be kept private, the EPA won’t be able to use it.

The alternative approach offered is a weighted approach where the EPA won’t be prevented from using science that relies on nonpublic data, but those studies will be down-weighted compared to studies with entirely public data. This approach would unfairly and arbitrarily devalue scientific work that relies on things like personally identifying health data. At an agency charged with protecting public health, studies involving health data are especially crucial. Many of those crucial health studies will be needlessly downgraded in EPA decision-making under this proposal.

3. The goal of the rule is to question the science

Notably, in the new proposal, the Trump administration shows its hand. This was never about promoting transparency; it was always about finding ways for those outside of the scientific community to undercut the science supporting EPA decisions. We of course know this from tobacco industry documents from the 1990s, but this proposal makes clear that goal is about allowing non-scientists to cherry-pick the science. The supplemental proposal states that the approaches offered “…can often allow stakeholders to reanalyze the data and models and explore the sensitivity of the conclusions to alternative assumptions…” (emphasis mine).

In what world would stakeholders need to conduct sensitivity analyses on data? It is extraordinarily odd for the EPA to issue a rule for stakeholders to conduct scientific reanalysis studies. Scientists, of course, do conduct sensitivity analyses and other approaches for testing the robustness of their results, but this work is rightfully undertaken in the process of peer-review, by EPA experts, and through the agency’s science advisors. The EPA is not waiting for members of the public to do deep dives into testing the reproducibility of studies. This would waste everyone’s time and resources. The sentence in the proposal reveals their intention: Those drafting the proposal appear to want data to be more accessible so that stakeholders (like regulated industry, for example) can call into question legitimate scientific studies by cherry-picking data.

4. The administration doesn’t know the difference between the EPA and the CDC

The administration seems to believe that the EPA can simply mimic data sharing efforts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) but this is unworkable for several reasons. To start, there would be tremendous cost and infrastructure needs that must be met to build and maintain the kind of data repository necessary for all the data and studies used by the EPA. These costs, too, are passed to those seeking to access the data. It can cost researchers thousands of dollars to gain access to the CDC’s Research Data Center, which the rule cites as a model. The EPA claims to be concerned with “stakeholder input” but it is unlikely that stakeholders like community groups and public health advocates will have the resources to access the data. But you know who will? Regulated industries.

5. The administrator still has broad authority to decide when the rule applies

Concerningly, the agency has not walked back the aggressive provision allowing the EPA administrator to decide when the rule applies on a case-by-case basis. This is still arbitrary and illogical, but most most alarmingly, it makes the EPA’s use of science wholly political.

We cannot let this happen

Expect more details about what this rule means for EPA’s ability to protect public health and the environment. Stay engaged. This month is the time to submit public comments about the harm that this rule is bound to impose on science and on public health.

Join me in sounding the alarms. The Union of Concerned Scientists has developed a comment guide to help you develop comments. Check it out and then join me in telling the EPA why this rule is a terrible idea for science and public health.