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

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

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

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

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

What NOAA does during Danger Season

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet the administration is undermining NOAA AGAIN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What UCS is doing: NOAA Tracker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Employee data have a long history

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

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

Employee demographic data inform worker protections

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

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

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

Hiding the data means abandoning the law

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

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

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

We can support worker protections and science

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

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

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

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

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

The clean energy transition would be easier

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

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

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

It would help with grid reliability

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

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

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

Safety is still a concern

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

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

Ecosystem damage would continue

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

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

Effects on ratepayers depend on the details

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should Diablo Canyon operations be extended?

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

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

How to protect Californians from extended operations

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

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

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

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

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

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

The devil is in the bureaucratic funding mechanism details

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mixed results on holding agencies accountable

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

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

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

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

We need to BUILD something different

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

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

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

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

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

Betraying our scientific colleagues

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

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

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

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

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

A generational loss for American science and humanity

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

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

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

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

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

What the Scientific Integrity Act does

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

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

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

The legislative process

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

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

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

This is why supporters need to speak up now.

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

The House connection

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

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

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

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

-Roy Brown, Yo no sé cual es la verdad

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

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

The climate and energy crises in Puerto Rico cannot be ignored

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

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

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

Beaches and other coastal zones: a new front of dispossession

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

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

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

What is the Maritime-Terrestrial Zone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

PC 25 ignores climate science to reduce the MTZ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The MTZ needs to be expanded, not reduced

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

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

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

Civic organizations are mobilizing to stop PC 25

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Roy Brown, Yo no sé cual es la verdad

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

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

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

La crisis climática y energética en Puerto Rico

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

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

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

Las playas y otras zonas costeras son fallas coloniales de despojo

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

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

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

¿Qué es la Zona Marítimo-Terrestre?

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

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

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

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

La ZMT brinda beneficios socioeconómicos, ecológicos y climáticos

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

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

El PC25 hace caso omiso de la ciencia climática

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

La ZMT debe ser ampliada—no reducida

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AAS: What can people reading this do?

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

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

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

Trump administration cuts to EPA budget show utter disregard for public health

Budgets reveal an administration’s priorities, and the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to the EPA signal they are abandoning protections for American communities and public health. Administrator Zeldin’s testimony before Congress defending these deep cuts—and the response from some policymakers—raises alarm bells. Despite how the Trump administration behaves, Congress holds the power of the purse in our democracy, and they write the laws that the executive branch is supposed to administer. And we all need Congress to speak up on our behalf and defend the EPA’s mission and the robust funding it needs to do it right.

Zeldin participated in three Congressional hearings, including the House Committee on Appropriations’  Interior, Environment and Related Agencies subcommittee; the House Committee on Energy and Commerce; and the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. While the administration’s allies praised Zeldin’s deregulatory agenda, some members of Congress took the opportunity to take Zeldin to task for the administration’s violations of the EPA’s mission, including:

• Rollbacks and inaction on chemical disaster prevention rules and the independent board that investigates these incidents
• EPA’s plan to unravel the Endangerment Finding that underpins climate-protecting and pollution-fighting policies  
• EPA’s abrupt changes to how they value environmental protection benefits while rigging the math to favor industry
• Clean Air Act exemptions granted to facilities that simply emailed  this administration
• Cancelling renewable energy projects
• Steep cuts to state and Tribal grant programs—which, fortunately, are facing fairly strong bipartisan opposition

Zeldin did some side-stepping, but when he was specifically asked if he supported this budget proposal, he not only affirmed support but also took partial credit for crafting it.

When Administrator Zeldin took on the job of overseeing EPA’s budget and programs, he was already planning huge cuts to its capacity, in line with the Project 2025 proposals to largely dismantle the agency. Last year he defended the White House’s proposed EPA budget, which recommended funding cuts of 46%, including slashing enforcement and compliance monitoring, wrapped in empty promises that EPA was going to get “back to basics” and uphold their statutory authority. The evidence shows the reality: under Zeldin’s watch, the EPA is simply doing less enforcement. (Read more here and here.) When an administration budget contradicts its rhetoric, it’s the budget—not the cynical words—that reveal its priorities.  

Last year, Congress passed an EPA budget with a 4% cut. This fiscal year, the second Trump administration is proposing a 52% budget decrease for EPA, or a decrease of $4.6 billion. There are proposed cuts across the board for programs intended to defend clean air, water, and land and protect us from toxic chemicals. One exception is the Superfund program, where the administration is proposing a three percent increase. This is a “kick the can down the road” approach to environmental policy, allowing releases of pollution with a promise to clean it up later instead of preventing those releases in the first place. It is the exact opposite of making decisions that are sustainable for seven generations.  

A budget is not just numbers—it’s values

A “budget justification document” lays out the summary and specifics of a budget and provides text to explain proposed costs and expenditures. Saying one thing while doing another is a major theme in Zeldin’s 2027 document. The proposal would cut state and Tribal assistance grants by 83%, with a nonsensical justification “that EPA has invested hundreds of billions of dollars over several decades building state and local capacity and many programs are mature or have accomplished their purpose.” The U.S. EPA finalizes rules and delegates their implementation to state, local, and sometimes Tribal governments through the concept of cooperative federalism—an idea of shared responsibility between the federal and state governments. They obscure their intent to weaken state and Tribal environmental programs by justifying proposed cuts as reflecting “…the Administration’s commitment to … cooperative federalism …” and even “…remove unnecessary barriers for business and industry, empower states…” But, taking away 83% of a budget is not cooperative nor empowering in any stretch of the imagination. It is demolition.

After touting the importance of water quality in their 2026-2030 EPA Strategic Plan goal to “Provide Clean Air, Land, and Water for Every American,” the proposed budget would cut the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Fund by 89%. These funds finance, via loans, the replacement of aging water infrastructure, such as eliminating lead pipes, or constructing new water, wastewater, or stormwater systems where there are none. This massive cut is curious, given EPA’s touted interest in reducing childhood lead exposures. They’re making big promises to the public while throwing out the tools to actually fulfill those promises.

The science and technology budget would experience a big hit—a 32% reduction. Several specific research programs would see cuts of over half of their funding, including Sustainable and Healthy Communities; Air and Energy; and Federal Support for Air Quality Management. Other research programs, such as Safe and Sustainable Water Resources and Chemical Safety for Sustainability, would be reduced by about one-third.

The words administrations use to justify their budget recommendations imply intent and communicate priorities, and in this case harmful priorities. In 2023, the previous administration used the word “safe” more often with respect to safety from toxic chemicals, where in this 2027 budget, when the word “safe” is used, it’s quickly qualified with reference to economic efficiency. The 2027 proposed budget justification document has about 30% fewer words compared to the same document from four years ago; if words were equally distributed in text you’d see any given word used about 30% less in 2027 compared to 2023. This administration used the words “communities” and “safe” over 80% less, and only referenced the EPA mission half as many times, as the budget justification from four years ago. This is a simple analysis, using word search functions, but it provides further evidence of this administration’s abandonment of the agency’s statutory obligations and highlights how they prioritize profits for a few powerful allies over environmental solutions for overburdened communities across the country.

Another way to look at a budget justification document is to pay attention to new initiatives and programs. Four years ago, the budget included language and proposed budget appropriations to reduce environmental pollution in areas that are overburdened and to address the pollution leading to climate change. These fit comfortably within the mission of EPA: to protect human health and the environment. In the 2027 budget, there are three new goals for this administration’s EPA: Restore American Energy Dominance; Make America the Artificial Intelligence Capital of the World; and Bring Back and Protect American Auto Jobs. These initiatives stretch the EPA well beyond its mission. To put it lightly, that’s not an EPA adopting a “back-to-basics approach.”

Congress is in charge. They need to act

Congress now has the chance to ensure that EPA’s funding reflects its mission—not just the administration’s deceptive messaging. It’s up to Congress to correct this misalignment between rhetoric and resources and to reaffirm environmental protection as a national priority. Congress should consider how the Trump administration’s proposed cuts affect states, Tribes, and local communities, and ensure that EPA has the resources needed to carry out the work they are mandated to do. EPA accounts for a tiny 0.3% of the federal budget, but the work the agency is designed to do has enormous benefits for public health and the safety of communities.  Now is the time to call your Members of Congress and tell them to support adequate funding for EPA. We can’t afford to let President Trump and Administrator Zeldin abandon the mission.

Stay informed, stay safe, stay mad, and demand better.

Crisis One: The climate kind

Climate change news has been so seismic lately that it should be breaking through the news cycle. Except that the steady explosions of new emergencies, largely caused by the Trump administration, quickly gobble both the headlines and our beleaguered attention. But let’s be clear: we are no longer on the edge of the climate crisis. We are fully inside it.

2023, 2024, and 2025 were the three hottest years on record, and during those years, we surpassed the critical 1.5°C threshold, at least temporarily. So far in 2026 scientists are grappling to understand the accelerating rise in global average temperatures, and to make sense of the developing El Niño—the speed and timing of its arrival, the intensity it could reach, the impact that could unleash, and the lasting effects. Against this climate change backdrop, the northern hemisphere is warming as it does each summer and Danger Season is kicking in, with the outlook for climate extremes, spring through fall, coming into focus:

• Extreme heat: Above-average temperatures are forecast for much of the contiguous United States throughout spring, summer, and fall. Extreme heat is the deadliest of all weather-related hazards, responsible (despite underreporting) for more deaths each year in the US than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined. Reliable, affordable air conditioning—now a lifesaving necessity across the Sun Belt—will be essential to public health and safety, particularly for the elderly, small children, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups.

• Drought: An historic drought is unfolding in the US, where about 61 percent of the continental US is in some stage of drought, with about 44 percent in “severe drought” or worse. Most of the Southeast is in extreme to exceptional drought. Much of the West, with large areas already in the grips of the worst drought in over a millennia, is facing a bleak water supply outlook following low winter snowpack and unprecedented early heat. And in the Plains states, where drought conditions are more typical of summer, thirsty crops are already suffering. These conditions are expected to increase wildfire risk, strain water supplies, and drive up food and energy costs.
• Wildfires: Scientists have drawn a clear link between fossil-fueled climate change and the increased risk of wildfires over time. This year, that risk will be heightened across large parts of the country. low snowpack, early-season heat, and just enough precipitation to drive a pulse of early vegetation growth are combining to create heightened wildfire risk across the West. The overly dry Southeast is forecast to endure a difficult fire season as well. Wildfire smoke—which can travel thousands of miles, blanket large areas of the continent, and create dangerous air quality conditions for millions far from the fires—is an accompanying threat this Danger Season.

• Flooding: NOAA’s seasonal outlook for precipitation this Danger Season is currently mixed and will be important to track. Given drought conditions, rainfall could come as a great relief to much of the country. We know, however, that rain is now falling more often in the form of extreme precipitation: warmer air holds more moisture, driving more intense rainfall events and raising the risk of flash flooding, as was seen last year in the tragic Texas floods.  Compound flooding from simultaneous hazards—also seen in the Texas floods, where existing drought counterintuitively exacerbated runoff—is a risk this season. And across the country, rising flood risk is colliding with the nation’s aging or inadequately built infrastructure, as was seen last year in Hawaii.
• Hurricanes: NOAA will release the official 2026 Atlantic hurricane season outlook later this month.  An initial  forecast from Colorado State University is calling for a below-average number of storms due to the developing El Niño. Warmer sea surface temperatures—which are at near record high levels—may counter El Niño’s typical damping effect on storm formation. But whatever the forecast, it only takes one landfalling hurricane to cause significant destruction.
• El Niño: Enter El Niño, as if the cast of characters weren’t crowded already. Forecasts of El Niño have shifted the timing of its development earlier in the year several times. It is currently forecast by the World Meteorological Organization to develop between May and July and is now widely seen as having the potential to develop into a “super” El Niño later this year.

The natural global climate cycle, of which El Niño is the hotter end, is driven by complex ocean-atmosphere interactions in the equatorial Pacific. This cycle influences regional climate patterns around the world in different ways, depending on its phase. Those “patterns” include vital things like water for crops, and thus food security, and thus people’s lives. It occurs regardless of man-made climate change, but it doesn’t occur independently of it, meaning that El Niño in a changed global climate affects us differently. And while scientists are doing their best to forecast the onset, strength and impacts of this El Niño, by warming the planet, we have made this a lot harder. Some of those hot Pacific Ocean temperatures, e.g., are in unprecedented territory and, according to at least one model, forecast to rise as high as 4°C above historic average. Elsewhere, climate patterns like precipitation in the southern half of the United States, which usually sees more rainfall during an El Niño, are proving hard to forecast. What exactly should we expect in North America with this El Niño? No one really knows.

I discuss El Niño here because, as we try to foresee and prepare for the risks ahead, it is a significant wild card, it may dominate the news and public discourse around climate extremes, and it could be a major driver of change in the US and around the world.

No matter where you live, this summer may test you in ways that would have seemed extreme just a decade ago but are becoming the new baseline of our lives.

Crisis two: The malfeasance kind

The climate extremes of Danger Season 2026 will be compounded by something that has no equivalent in our nation’s history: a US administration that is not simply failing to protect people but is actively removing protections, exacerbating risks, and inflicting harm, all with a hardening quality of authoritarianism.

The Trump administration has launched a systematic assault—largely foreshadowed in Project 2025—on the federal agencies that inform people about climate change, protect and help them recover from climate extremes, and enable the transition away from fossil fuels. Abdication of leadership is a passive abandonment. Dereliction of duty is negligent failure. This is malfeasance. Conscious, intentional wrongdoing, heedless of laws or ethics, indifferent to harm done—or intending it—and aimed to amassing profits and power to a few.

Climate change? Nothing to see here. With deep climate science cuts across federal agencies and the attack on bedrock climate policies, the administration is attempting to make climate change disappear from federal policy—even as the harms mount in people’s lives.

Budget and staff cuts to NOAA—including the National Hurricane Center and National Weather Service—have put the forecasting, early warning, and science capacity that communities depend on to stay safe in jeopardy. The continual attacks on NOAA have left staff feeling “burnt out,” caused severe disruptions to valuable datasets, and will be renewed in the upcoming budget fights.

And the destruction goes deeper, including the disbanding of the National Climate Assessment and the targeting the National Center for Atmospheric Research for dismantling, as the administration seeks to systematically erase the federal government’s ability to track, understand, and communicate our climate risk.

Help may not come when it’s most needed: With deep staffing and budget cuts to FEMA, and cuts, delays and politicization of disaster response, the administration is leaving communities to fend for themselves. It has installed unqualified leadership, downsized FEMA staff, cancelled grant programs, created massive recovery backlogs, and has pushed disaster response and recovery burdens onto state governments that lack the capacity to respond to major events, both logistically and financially. With three acting administrators within 15 months and newly confirmed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Mullin (after Kristi Noem was fired), FEMA is scrambling to hire back staff as we head into hurricane season.

Community resilience programs, which help communities prepare for and cope with climate extremes, have also been targeted and cut across agencies. Hazard mitigation grants, flood mapping, green infrastructure, heat emergency preparedness, cooling center support, low-income energy assistance—are being undermined when they have never been needed more.

Profit over people: The administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to pave the way for continued fossil fuel emissions and industry profits, gutting critical regulations and landmark public health protections. Despite the momentum of the clean energy transition, the Trump administration has sought to dismantle US clean energy policy at every turn, stymying wind and solar deployment, driving up energy costs, and handing federal energy policy to the fossil fuel industry’s surrogates; and to roll back clean air protections, actions that will make the smoke, smog, and pollution that accompany Danger Season extremes even more dangerous, especially for vulnerable populations.

In summary, our current federal government—the administration and Congress—does not care about us.

Crisis three: The (unaffordable) state of the nation

As a nation, we’re entering Danger Season distressed, fractured, and overwhelmed. Historically, climate disasters tend to bring people together, and undoubtedly they will. But there are headwinds to be named and countered.

The affordability crisis is one such headwind that’s front of mind for many millions. And the people who will experience Danger Season most acutely are those who can least afford to cope. The war with Iran, data centers, tariffs, and federal energy policy are driving up electricity, gas, food, and other household costs. Energy costs are rising even as clean energy alternatives that could lower them, longer term, are being blocked. As rising electricity rates meet a season of dangerous heat, many households will strain to pay to run the air conditioning that is essential to stay safe in a heat wave.

The country is already roiling with anger, frustration and fear, in response to the affordability crisis and the Trump administration’s rising authoritarianism and alarming choices, like waging war on Iran. The state of the nation is fraught and dangerous climate extremes are now entering the fray.

Meet the Triple Danger: Stay safe, stay mad, demand better

The dysfunction and distress at play in the US right now make us less safe, broadly, and staying safe is more challenging this year as more people struggle with everyday life. But everyone should try to consider their risks and have a plan to stay safe.

This is also a time to hold our leaders accountable for the unnecessary hardship caused, first by the Trump administration, but second by Congress’s failure to do its job. The August recess will be a key window for members of Congress, back in their home states and districts, to hear directly from the people bearing the costs of their subservience to the dangerous Trump agenda.

And let us not forget accountability for the fossil fuel industry, chief sponsor of the climate crisis and this year’s Danger Season. We’re in this danger in large part because of insatiable corporate greed and the lengths to which this doomed industry will go—deception, denial, and delay, even today—to postpone the inevitable end of the fossil era and eke out a few more years of profit.

Throughout this Triple Danger Season, UCS will be tracking climate extremes, calling out the malfeasance that is leaving communities to fend for themselves, and making the connection to critical issues like affordability and fossil fuel accountability. Stay with us, sign up to take action, follow us on social media, tag us with what you’re seeing. And when the heat rises and fires burn and floods come—as they will—remember that this isn’t leadership, but to get the leadership we deserve, we have to demand it.  

That organization, the North American Electricity Reliability Corporation—known to its friends as NERC—is on a multi-year journey of exploration to understand this question. NERC took a top-level action May 4 issuing seven multi-part “Essential Actions” to collect information from their data center customers, revise definitions for studies, and create checklists for tests and operations. These arcane precautionary steps fill a dozen pages, but are just a first step toward addressing the big issues. The core problem with these facilities is, despite new data centers being larger than the majority of facilities or utilities that NERC registers, monitors, and audits, there are no rules or oversight for NERC to interact with data centers.

In this blog, I’ll explain where NERC’s Level 3 Alert fits in the web of actions being taken to address the ways that data centers stress the grid. In short, while this is an important step addressing one aspect of reliability issues, there are other serious concerns about how data centers impact energy costs, resource adequacy (another aspect of reliability), and the clean energy transition overall.

What is and what isn’t on NERC’s agenda?

NERC does its work within highly structured processes. NERC’s action on May 4 does not bring data centers into the “registered entity” regime. “This means that large loads are not required to adhere to Reliability Standards.” That’s a direct quote! Registering data centers could happen, depending on both NERC and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) decisions to extend their oversight.

Because it can’t yet put data centers into its system, NERC is also not yet able to introduce new standards for dealing with their impacts, but that process has started. Also, because it is not part of NERC’s role, this action has nothing about costs imposed by data centers or who should pay. Costs are sorted at FERC and state utility commissions, with active debates about who benefits, who pays, and how in those arenas.

Further, little in this effort addresses datacenter impacts on electric generators, either the voracious demand consuming supply or the potential for damage done by data centers’ rapid second-by-second changes in demand. These topics are absent by design – resource (i.e. supply) adequacy is assessed periodically in separate reports and generation owners were not consulted in this present effort, or the level two alert and report that preceded it. In NERC’s July 2025 report on data center impacts, brief discussion can be found of generator failures from electronic equipment oscillations.

While the tasks are large and need to be focused, there are impacts from one decision to the next, and from NERC to FERC, and then to states. This works in every combination: state decisions about customers affect what FERC does; NERC reliability issues will lead to clarification of costs caused by customers, etc. This interconnected web of actions has led to a situation where utilities and state regulators have often been pointing fingers and waiting for others to take action, rather than engaging in these efforts and taking steps to address the reliability risks of data centers within their own realms while supporting NERC’s holistic process.

So how does NERC work?

In a few words: carefully and with deference to the utilities affected.

The electric power system depends on tens of thousands of people and machines working within set rules. Most NERC rules require electric utilities, generation owners, and transmission owners to have written procedures for all sorts of problems, and to follow those procedures. NERC often writes an authoritative report about a blackout or the characteristics of data centers as a first step. These are the careful parts.

NERC deliberations and decision-making are extensive. Let me say that for the utilities that have the time and expertise to participate over years, this process works well. However, the process is built on deference to each utility to address—or not—the issues raised by the careful deliberations and fact-finding reports. Past blackouts due to inadequate protection of gas-burning plants from cold weather, for example, were repeatedly described by NERC but did not lead to anything other than voluntary recommendations. Deference then and in the present are not so reassuring to consumers.

To this point, the action expected May 4 comes with this disclaimer:

This Level 3 NERC Alert is not the same as a Reliability Standard, and it does not create a mandatory obligation to take the Essential Actions. Your organization will not be subject to penalties for failure to implement the Essential Actions.

What is NERC looking to learn?

Translating and simplifying, the urgent actions that NERC calls for utilities to take are:

• Collect and use a list of specific details about what should be known about computational loads (NERC’s proposed name for data centers and similar loads).
• Review and study the types of grid challenges made worse by data center loads.
• Implement monitoring and protections to protect reliability from data centers.

How’s that sound?

This is an important start. Certainly, NERC and the engineers participating are concerned about the risks created by data centers on the grid. However, there is some irony that the electricity providers are struggling to get information from the Information Technology industry.

This situation is also complicated by two key issues. Utilities have an unprecedented opportunity to raise profits by accommodating data centers that will be amongst their largest customers. At the same time, rules for electric companies normally put the costs for this growth onto the bills of all customers. The utilities have multiple functions, and assigning costs happens differently in each. Data centers have been welcomed by utilities who are actively cost-shifting at the same time state and federal regulators are scrambling to find the policy reforms to sort the costs and assign them properly. These layers are shaped by past reforms that introduced competition, or protected utilities from competition.

Clearly NERC is taking action to improve understanding about some aspects of data centers’ impacts on the grid. That’s good. We also need rational, appropriate reforms that cover costs, including those costs raised by NERC highlighting serious reliability concerns. The data center industry proposes to “move fast and break things.” The electric utility sector can’t move as fast, and existing customers shouldn’t have to pay for what gets broken.

Faced with multi-year drought conditions, worsened by climate change, hard-hit communities—especially people in rural communities—need policymakers in Congress to pay attention and act now, before things get much worse.

Status of drought in the United States

The latest map from the US Drought Monitor shows abnormally dry conditions across a wide swath of the country. NOAA’s Palmer Drought Severity Index, which uses temperature and precipitation data to provide a longer-term view on soil moisture and drought conditions, hit an all-time March low for the contiguous US, with records dating back to 1895.

Nearly all (99 percent) of the Southeast is in drought, with nearly 62 percent in severe to exceptional drought. According to the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS), Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina have experienced record dry conditions for September 2025-March 2026, with records dating back to 1895. Water levels are well below normal. And the region is experiencing an outbreak of spring wildfires, with the latest fire outlook continuing to signal high fire risk in the region through at least July.

Drought conditions in Florida are especially dire—with nearly 82 percent of the state in extreme or exceptional drought. NASA satellite data show that this is already taking a severe toll on groundwater supplies, vital for drinking water and farming (see map below). This has already had a negative impact on the state’s citrus crop (which was also affected by an early season freeze). Dry conditions are even leaving alligators with no place to go!

The Southern Plains and the Southwest US have been experiencing an extended drought over six years now, so this year’s hot, dry conditions are compounding those challenges. It’s possible that a strong El Niño, which is looking  increasingly likely later this summer, could help alleviate the drought conditions in some parts of the country—but that is far from certain and there is a huge water deficit to make up. The Great Plains state of Nebraska, with 88 percent of the state in drought, experienced catastrophic record-breaking spring wildfires affecting cattle country.

In the western US, nearly 60 percent of Colorado and Utah are in extreme or exceptional drought. A May snowstorm this week is bringing more snow than Colorado has seen all winter and could help a little but is unlikely to make a big dent in the drought conditions. A multi-decade challenge of managing (and mismanaging!) water in the Colorado River basin through extended drought conditions has also come to a head with the current drought—a fact that even the climate-denying Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has been forced to acknowledge.

Snowpack is exceptionally low in the Sierra Nevada, a snow drought that is a major threat to future water supplies for as many as 30 million Californians. The early season March heatwave, which would have been “virtually impossible without human-induced climate change” according to a World Weather Attribution study, further exacerbated the situation.

Impact of 2026 drought on crops

With the spring planting season well underway, the drought is already having an impact on many crops. The latest data show that many major agricultural crops are at risk because of being in drought-stricken areas. The US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) latest weekly weather and crop bulletin notes that “Rain continued to bypass the central and southern High Plains, leaving rangeland, pastures, and winter wheat in desperate need of moisture…”

As the maps below show, 70 percent of the winter wheat crop, 98 percent of the cotton crop and 61 percent of the cattle are in areas experiencing drought currently.

Drought and food prices

If drought conditions continue to persist, they could reduce crop yields and force ranchers to cull more of their cattle. That will put livelihoods at risk this year and beyond, especially for small and midsize farmers and ranchers who are already struggling. Lower agricultural output will have a knock-on effect on food prices—which have already been adversely affected by tariffs and the impacts of the war against Iran.  

Already, US beef prices—which have been rising since last year—are projected to rise further as ranchers struggle to keep their cattle fed and watered. With prolonged drought, this can change their decisions on herd sizes over multiple years. The drought’s impact on the US spring wheat crop has started to filter into international wheat markets. These impacts are just starting to emerge, but unfortunately, they could get much worse quickly if we don’t get a lot more precipitation as the growing season unfolds.

The 2012 drought has many harsh lessons for what might potentially lie ahead, including impacts on crops, livestock, food, water and power supplies, and hindered navigation on drought-hit waterways (in 2012, water levels on the Mississippi were especially affected).

Preparing for this year’s drought, planning for future conditions

As farmers contend with the drought, the Federal Crop and Livestock Insurance Program, subsidized by taxpayers, will have to step in to provide a backstop. The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has consistently identified the crop insurance program as an area of high risk for the federal government, and those risks are growing as climate change worsens. In addition to the crop insurance program, over the last year, the USDA has paid out nearly $18 billion in supplemental disaster assistance to farmers and ranchers under the American Relief Act passed by Congress in 2025. Taxpayers may be on the hook for even more if this summer stays hot and dry, as the USDA has extended that program’s application deadline to August.

Unfortunately, climate change is fundamentally altering conditions for US agriculture, creating unprecedented risks and uncertainties for livelihoods of farmers and ranchers. The Climate Toolbox for agriculture is one valuable resource to help understand how climate change will affect the agricultural sector.

Drought can also take a huge toll on health—including mental health—and it’s vital for communities and health professionals to be aware of, and have access to resources to help cope with, these challenges. Given that, it is particularly cruel that the president’s budget proposal for next year would eliminate funding for the USDA’s network of regional Climate Hubs that assist farmers with understanding climate risks and potential resilience strategies.   

The impact of drought on water supplies obviously extends to all communities who depend on that water—especially in the Southwest and California, this is an increasingly acute crisis. Maladaptive choices about how we manage water and where development is expanding will put people’s needs on a collision course with dwindling water availability. Often the needs of lower income or less politically powerful communities, Tribal Nations, and agricultural workers are disadvantaged compared with the demands of large agricultural interests and richer communities. As my colleague Amanda Fencl put it: The consequences of the snow drought go beyond hydrologic droughts to water rights as well.

Drought can also affect hydropower resources. The latest forecast from the EIA projects that US hydropower generation will remain 1.8% below the 10-year average because of the snow drought conditions in some states. Desperate measures are being taken to try to restore water levels in Lake Powell sufficiently to maintain hydropower generation, for example. This will be important to keep an eye on as the summer progresses.

Urgent for Congress to act

Congress must take action now, anticipating the harsh effects of the 2026 drought, to help communities cope. That means addressing risks to agriculture, to water supplies, and to livelihoods. It means anticipating continued dangerous wildfire conditions and preparing for them now, before disaster strikes. Most of all, it means standing up to the Trump administration’s destructive actions attacking vital federal agencies like the USDA and its US Forest Service that help prepare and protect people from the impacts of drought and wildfire.

As my colleagues have pointed out, the recent House-passed farm bill would be a failure if enacted, as it does little to address the growing threats of climate change to farmers’ and ranchers’ livelihoods, while fueling unsustainable overproduction of climate-intensive commodity crops and undermining the affordability of healthy food for families.

US consumers are already being buffeted by challenges to the affordability of many necessities—from energy to insurance—and adding food to that list will be especially hard for families with lower incomes. While the nation must invest in resilience measures to address climate-driven drought conditions, we must also sharply cut heat-trapping emissions. A rapid transition from fossil fuels to clean energy is essential—without that, we are dooming future generations to unrelenting megadroughts.

The costly toll of climate change on people and our economy is clear. Policymakers who ignore these facts and continue to pander to the fossil fuel industry are unconscionably putting us all at greater peril.

Late on December 16, 2025, Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced that NCAR would be broken up and, soon after, the National Science Foundation (NSF), which sponsors NCAR, outlined plans to restructure the center. Already, NSF has stated they will transfer NCAR’s supercomputer, Derecho, to an unknown third-party entity.

At UCS, we sought greater transparency into these proposed and enacted changes. To that end, we have issued a public comment. In addition, we’ve made formal requests to NSF for the cooperative agreement governing NCAR, all public comments submitted during the agency’s request-for-information process, and documentation of internal decision-making involving OMB. These efforts reflect a broader concern within the scientific community: major decisions about national research infrastructure appear to be moving forward without clear public justification or a transparent scientific basis—and that could put critical life-saving science at risk.

Now, through documents released in the ongoing lawsuit brought against NSF and OMB by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), the manager of NCAR, we are beginning to see why. The documents suggest that the White House OMB directed NSF to restructure and break apart NCAR, and that parts of NCAR’s scientific portfolio were specifically identified to be cut or spun off because they viewed them as misaligned with its political priorities.

What the documents say

Materials submitted by the OMB and NSF provide a substantial window into the thinking behind proposed changes to NCAR. The volume of documentation is significant, including a version of the cooperative agreement between UCAR and NSF, FY27 NSF Budget communications between OMB and NSF, and a NOAA document (Page 30-31) detailing their policy-aligned functions of NCAR activities, and suggested some of NCAR activities be moved to “better-aligned university programs across the country.” For readers interested in the complete record, the April 23 defense filings offer a comprehensive set of materials.

I do, however, want to highlight two key documents that illustrate the direction and intent of the proposed NCAR restructuring.

November 19, 2025 OMB Draft Memo

A draft memo from OMB staff to the OMB director, dated November 19, 2025, outlines a proposed approach to restructuring NCAR, nearly one month before the public announcement by OMB Director Russell Vought on December 16, 2025, that NCAR would be “broken up.”

The memo “directs NSF to accelerate restructuring of NCAR through an RFI [public comment] process”, where key components of its “reform” would include “spin off components of [NCAR]” such as its supercomputer and two aircraft and “rescope the research and modeling of NCAR to focus on weather and not on climate modeling.” A reasoning for doing is that it “will make it easier to align NCAR’s mission more closely with Administration priorities.”

According to the declaration by Stuart Levenbach, associate director for Agriculture, Commerce, Resources, and Science Programs at OMB, the OMB director “considered the information in [the] memo, which ultimately led to the Director’s approval to pursue restructuring NCAR as part of the FY27 budget.”

December 17, 2025 Internal OMB and OMB/NSF Communications

Another document from December 17, 2025, the day after the announcement by Russell Vought, includes Internal OMB communications that identify an initial version of specific areas of NCAR research as misaligned with Administration priorities.

Under “What we’re taking action against” includes work on human-caused climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. Studies on climate variability, long-term fossil fuel-caused climate change, and atmospheric chemistry are singled out as areas to be reduced or redirected, because it “informs regulations on emissions that the Administration does not support.”

At the same time, OMB outlines “Things that NCAR does well that we are keeping,” including its supercomputer and the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory, but these are accompanied by their proposed transfer to “a different management entity.”

Finally, the memo includes background information on NCAR’s physical locations, which includes the proposal of closing NCAR’s Mesa Lab as stated by the OMB director, transferring or relocating its aircraft, and stating the University of Wyoming would take over management of the supercomputer.

Although this was the initial version, Brian Stone, the acting director of the NSF, stated in response that “many” of the NCAR activities OMB suggested for alignment “already track with what we consider aligned.”

OMB redefines NCAR’s scientific mission

All together, these documents reveal a clearer picture as to what kinds of science OMB deemed appropriate for NCAR to be allowed to do (and not do). They also reveal the central role of OMB Director Russell Vought in these actions, and the seeming predeterminations to restructure NCAR before public input was even provided.

1. The proposed changes reflect the deliberate effort to redefine the scope of NCAR’s scientific mission. That redefinition has major implications to our public safety, national security, and economic prosperity through the idea that NCAR can be fragmented or have its key components “spun off,” without impacts. They are even making changes to activities they deem NCAR is doing well. What OMB apparently does not understand is that the plan to separate high-performance computing, observational assets, and research labs or programs treats these as standalone capabilities. In practice, they function as an integrated system: models are developed and tested on shared computing infrastructure, observations inform both short-term forecasts and long-term projections, and community access ensures that advances propagate beyond a single institution. Removing pieces of that system weakens the whole.
2. The timeline is incredibly fast. It is quite fascinating to see an internal memo between OMB and NSF showing that within mere hours after Vought’s announcement they were on a similar wavelength about which of NCAR’s activities were considered “aligned.” Also, it is clear they were set to implement this for FY27, remarkably fast for any type of restructuring of this nature and essentially tearing up the cooperative agreement that is valid through 2028.
3. The documents reveal an attempt to distinguish weather prediction and climate science, but that does not hold up scientifically. Weather prediction and climate understanding are deeply interconnected; they inform each other and are mainly distinguished by different timescales. The NCAR Earth System Predictability Across Timescales Program, which the OMB memo targets, is primarily focused on Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Prediction (S2S), the underdeveloped but critical timescale between weather and climate that informs longer-term forecasting of extreme events and hazards. We cannot fully understand and predict S2S without an understanding of both weather and climate.
4. The documents reveal the “likely” management transfer of the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory, which was never explicitly stated in NSF’s ask to the public during its public comment period. Although the Mauna Loa Observatory is operated by NOAA, its solar observations are operated by NCAR. The Solar observatory provides critical observations of the sun’s atmosphere to predict and understand sun-earth interactions to reduce disruptions and damage from space weather hazards (e.g., geomagnetic storms).
5. It is more evident that OMB is orchestrating this effort. The fact that OMB was thinking about this well in advance of the official announcement in December of 2025, in addition to their own analysis of NCAR activities, suggests this initiative to break up NCAR is at the behest of the White House’s OMB. It’s also clear that NSF was directed by OMB to develop its Dear Colleague Letter (public comment period), rather than NSF doing it out of its own volition. In my view, and according to these documents, the breakup of NCAR was not something the science agency was considering doing on its own.

What can we do?

These documents from the UCAR lawsuit clearly show the intent by OMB to dismantle NCAR in a fast and rash manner. This is no longer a theory; it is documented that OMB wants this break-up implemented in FY27.

For Congress, this means ensuring oversight: requesting full transparency on proposed changes, reviewing the cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation, and evaluating whether restructuring would weaken capabilities that support weather forecasting, disaster preparedness, and national security. Congress must hold the Trump administration accountable for the damaging changes it is seeking to push through.

For the public, it means paying attention and speaking up. NCAR’s work underpins forecasts, emergency planning, and risk management tools used every day. Public comment processes, community engagement, and communication with elected representatives all play a role in shaping what happens next. Please see our action alert for how you can reach your senator and representative on the importance of NCAR. 

Following President’s Trump’s announcement assuring safe passage of ships in the strait, urea prices have fallen to $585 per metric ton, but fertilizer prices remain volatile and somewhat hard to predict due to the ongoing uncertainties of the standoff between the United States and Iran.

How much fertilizer is applied in the United States?

This crisis serves as a stark reminder of how important fertilizer is as an agricultural input and the widespread nature of its use in US farming systems. Data show that in 2022, approximately 236 million cropland acres in the country, constituting roughly 78 percent of the total 301 million acres, were treated with synthetic commercial fertilizers of some kind. Farmers apply a majority of fertilizer, especially nitrogen fertilizer, in the spring months to major row crops like corn.

In a recently released report authored by my colleague Dr. Precious Tshabalala and me, we found that in 2023, farmers in the United States used about 11.62 million metric tons (MMT) of nitrogen fertilizer on all crops. Beyond national data, this report also focused on fertilizer use in three major commodity-crop farming states: Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota, which contain some of the highest fertilizer-treated cropland acreage. The report estimated that in Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota, nitrogen fertilizer application on corn and soybean ranged between 565,856 and 883,462 metric tons.

Farmers face compounding crises at the beginning of spring planting

Spring is the time when farmers begin their planting schedules, timing fertilizer application prior to planting to maximize plant growth and yield. Despite signing contracts and locking their price months in advance, reports suggest that there has not been enough fertilizer delivered at ports to fulfil those contracts. Some farmers are now left without the fertilizer they expected just before planting the spring cycle of major row crops.

In a survey conducted in early April by the American Farm Bureau Federation, a majority of farmers indicated they were unable to afford the fertilizer they planned on using for spring planting. Results from the same survey show that farmers were already adjusting their fertilizer purchase and application decisions in response to this crisis. The ongoing supply chain disruption is also likely to affect the planting of major crops like corn, cotton, soybean, and wheat, with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) predicting a reduction in the acreage of nitrogen-hungry corn in favor of soybeans across the country. With higher fertilizer and fuel costs ahead of spring planting, predictions estimate farmers would plant about 94 million acres of corn and 85 million acres of soybeans, representing a reduction of more than 4 million corn acres and an increase of more than 4 million soybean acres when compared with 2025.

This supply chain shock is likely to reverberate for several months, as fertilizer and fuel prices are expected to remain elevated well into next year, eating into already‑thin farm margins and forcing farmers to make tough choices like planting less crop, switching crops, or absorbing sustained losses. Economists warn that the pressure will fall disproportionately on small and midsize farmers who lack the cash to pre‑purchase farm inputs, and significantly raises the risk of farm bankruptcies since costs are predicted to stay high while commodity prices lag behind.

Farmers actually apply far more fertilizer than required

Because many farmers lean on fertilizer as an insurance policy of sorts for future yields, too much nitrogen fertilizer is applied in our agricultural systems. The majority of nitrogen fertilizer applications occur on commodity crops like corn, which has a high demand for nitrogen and is usually grown in rotation with soybean. Ideally the amount of nitrogen applied would be optimized by balancing how much crops require to maximize crop production while minimizing the loss of unused fertilizer, but the truth is that rates of fertilizer application far exceed the rate of plant absorption, leaving unused fertilizer behind in the soil.

Evidence from peer-reviewed scientific literature shows that farmers apply between 30 to 50 percent more synthetic fertilizer than their crops can actually absorb. Using this range of values in our report, we estimated that US farmers apply about 3.5 to 5.8 MMT more nitrogen fertilizer than plants can absorb.

What does all that excess nitrogen do in the environment?

Excess nitrogen that is not absorbed by crops remains behind in the soil and escapes into the surrounding environment, including bodies of water, and has deleterious impacts on the health of the environment and the health of people living downstream. Unabsorbed nitrogen fertilizer also transforms into powerful heat-trapping gases like nitrous oxide (N₂O) and carbon dioxide (CO₂) that contribute to climate change. N₂O is 273 times more powerful than CO₂ in capturing heat.

Our report shows that in 2023, nitrogen fertilizer overapplication was responsible for an estimated 36 to 60 MMT of heat-trapping gas, equal to the emissions from up to 14 million gasoline-powered cars driven for a year. In Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota, heat-trapping gas emissions from the overapplication of fertilizer on corn and soybeans ranged between 1.7 and 4.6 MMT.

Heat-trapping gas emissions from the overapplication of nitrogen fertilizer (assuming 50 percent of applied fertilizer occurs in excess)

Farmers, communities, and taxpayers end up paying a high cost for the pollution caused by nitrogen runoff. As my colleague Dr. Tshababala wrote in a recent blog, the true cost of nitrogen pollution is much higher than the price farmers pay for purchasing and applying fertilizer. Adding up all the costs from fertilizer damage to the environment and human health, she notes that, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency, “total annual impact of agricultural nitrogen pollution on health, drinking water, and recreation and fisheries is a staggering $157 billion.”

Farmers face direct impacts due to the Iran war

In a previous blog post I explored the impact of increased fertilizer prices on farm input expenditures and the cost of production. With no end to the war in sight, and the tense standoff in the Strait of Hormuz, farmers remain uncertain how long they will continue facing shortages for shipments booked far in advance and ultimately how much they will end up paying.

This situation shows how vulnerable and exposed farmers are to global shocks. We need to transition away from this input-dependent, monopolistic model of agriculture and provide farmers with off-ramps. One way for farmers to reduce their fertilizer consumption is by integrating farming practices like crop rotations and diversified farming systems that build soil health and resilience. Another way is by using the “4R’s of nutrient management,” which stands for right source, right rate, right time, and right place of application. It isn’t by any means a perfect solution.

A broader pathway would be to increase investments in USDA conservation programs that offer farmers financial and technical support for enrolling their land. The expansion and purse strings of USDA conservation programs are controlled by policy vehicles like the farm bill, which is supposed to be passed by Congress every five years.

We need public policies and incentives that help farmers reduce fertilizer overuse in an intentional and predictable way. Reducing overdependence on, and overuse of, costly fertilizer would be good for our environment and farmers’ bottom lines—and it would protect them from sudden shocks like the current one.

The recent farm bill falls short on helping farmers

Despite some uncertainty and last-minute changes, the House passed its version of the farm bill on April 30, marking some progress on this long-stalled piece of legislation. However, the House version failed to make critical investments in conservation policy and fell short in making changes that would allow farmers to transition away from an input-dependent, industrial model of agriculture. The fate of the farm bill still remains uncertain as it heads to the Senate, where it will need to be debated and passed before heading to the president.

Farm policy continues to favor farmers who engage in industrial agriculture, which focuses on the monoculture of commodity crops like corn and soybean. Incentives like subsidized crop insurance and bailouts during crop failures and disasters keep farmers running on this input-dependent treadmill. There is pretty compelling scientific evidence that US agriculture needs to shift towards a model of agroecology for a resilient farming system that can keep nutrients in place and build long-term soil health. At UCS, we focus on supporting farmers by helping transform the system so they can be both financially successful and environmentally responsible.

Proponents of AI technology insist that AI will unlock solutions to a broad array of difficult, longstanding problems. In the specific case of climate change, the argument goes something like this: AI has the potential to accelerate global decarbonization, so we should focus resources on expanding data center capacity and enhancing model capability to unlock the decarbonization benefits it will bring. Bill Gates’ memo before COP30 cites AI as one of the key technologies for driving climate solutions. However, with mounting pressure from the US Department of Defense, a growing investment bubble, and warnings from AI companies themselves to not blindly accept the outputs from large language models (LLMs, the engine behind AI chatbots), we must ask ourselves: Is it prudent to depend on AI technology to solve one of our biggest challenges when it is creating and exacerbating so many others? What’s more, can AI even serve to “solve” it?

It is true that we’re past limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and that the current policies are insufficient to reach global emission reduction targets. But the problems leading to the gap between goals and outcomes are overwhelmingly ones that AI cannot fix. As a result, while AI may aid the development of new solutions, this blog post goes over some of the reasons why AI alone will not solve climate change and, most critically, why even if it could, we cannot afford to wait for hypothetical AI solutions to take climate action.

1. We already have the technology to solve climate change!

The causes of and solutions to climate change have been well understood for decades. Excess carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) released into the atmosphere as a byproduct of our fossil fuel-based energy-hungry society traps heat, warming the planet.

The obvious solution to this problem is to replace our dependence on fossil-fuel energy with clean energy solutions. Fortunately, the falling costs of solar panels and wind turbines have made renewable energy one of the fastest growing energy sources in the world and, despite headwinds, clean energy projects still had a strong year in 2025.

Rather than a lack of technological solutions, climate progress has been primarily delayed by fossil fuel interests and a lack of political will, a dynamic which UCS documented extensively in our report Decades of Deceit.

Climate action also isn’t constrained by lack of information. There is no shortage of white papers or technical analyses. Policy change requires building coalitions, generating public support, and overcoming incumbency. Democracy requires harmonizing a cacophony of discordant voices through negotiation and patience.

On the other hand, relying on LLMs to design policies creates an authoritative illusion for decision-makers to hide behind while dismissing concerns from the public. They can summarize research and generate code, but these are primarily productivity tools, not breakthroughs.

Moreover, as AI systems grow more capable, questions about alignment between strict AI objectives and fuzzy human goals become increasingly important. Additionally, these systems are impenetrable black boxes. An AI system tasked with “solving” climate change would need to navigate delicate tradeoffs between cost, reliability, equity, and emissions: tradeoffs which reflect complex human values about justice and fairness–values that cannot be straightforwardly optimized.

History has shown that when governments commit to large-scale technical challenges, they can mobilize industry and overcome coordination barriers. Consider the Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear reactor just three years after fission was officially discovered. Or the Apollo program, which put a man on the moon within a decade of beginning. Or even the international cooperation that is healing the ozone layer. The clean energy transition could be no different—if only the commitment were there.

2. Delay is costly–and climate change is happening now

People are facing the effects of climate change now. Warmer oceans are driving more powerful storms, hotter temperatures and drier conditions are making wildfires worse and longer-lasting, a warmer atmosphere may destabilize the polar vortex leading to massive winter storms, and “danger season” is getting longer and more severe. All these effects cost billions of dollars in damages and thousands of avoidable deaths each year.

For you, dear reader, that means fewer summer days you can enjoy outside because of poor air quality and deadly heat, higher insurance premiums (if you’re fortunate enough to own a home), and higher electricity bills to cool your home. Even if LLMs or some new AI system unlock fusion energy in the next ten years, pollution that happens today guarantees additional warming in the future.

Cumulative carbon emissions drive long-term warming which means we have a limited carbon budget to avoid 1.5-2˚ C of warming. The figure below shows historical emissions from the United States since 1990 and two (out of many) possible futures. The area under the black curve gives the total emissions between 1990 and 2024. The blue and magenta curves show us possible future emissions. In one case, an “act now” scenario, we take immediate action to rapidly reduce emissions until we reach zero in 2050. In the other case, we delay substantial action until some future date, after which point we reduce emissions dramatically, such as the hypothetical where AI unlocks “something” that will accelerate decarbonization. Both cases eventually reduce emissions to zero, but even in that hypothetical silver-bullet future, acting later still leads to more than 4 times greater CO2 emissions!

Of course, these are stylized scenarios, but the lesson is this: Taking immediate action on climate change and reducing emissions as quickly as possible gives us the best chance to minimize the damage caused by climate change. Acting later leads to more total emissions. Our goal must be to bend the curve downwards. This is why near‑term policies that lower the emissions curve, like clean energy standards, vehicle electrification, alternative fuels, lowering hurdles to deployment, and demand‑side efficiency, deliver outsized climate benefits relative to later innovations. Every year we delay increases the area under the emissions curve.

3. AI for Climate Science and LLMs are not the same thing

Artificial intelligence can aid climate change solutions in several important ways. This includes better understanding and predicting climate impacts—such as improved weather forecasting, enhancing extreme event detection and attribution, and downscaling climate models—as well as potentially supporting technological and process improvements on the solution side—such as facilitating molecular breakthroughs or accelerating complex engineering processes to expedite clean energy deployment. But while each of these types of contributions have real value, none address the fundamental problem at the heart of the issue: lack of political will, not lack of information or lack of solutions.

Moreover, new data center capacity is primarily driven by consumer-level LLM, not narrowly tailored applications focused on climate change. The AI-driven solutions I described above represent highly specialized applications and the total usage will only ever represent a small fraction of the computational energy demand from new hyperscale data centers, which are increasingly used for simple, everyday tasks—by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Proponents of AI development often use the argument that “AI will help solve climate change” to justify a massive, emissions-heavy infrastructure buildout to support near-term AI ambitions—new fossil fuel-fired power plants, new gas pipelines, delayed coal plant retirements, the overwhelming share of which has absolutely nothing to do with climate change-relevant AI. The sharp difference in application, and their comparative compute requirements, matters for policy: We should not conflate pursuit of targeted scientific computing with an unchecked build‑out of LLM capacity.

4. AI adds tremendous pressure to the electricity system

LLMs require tremendous amounts of computing power for the training process, and even more to serve users. Excitement about the possible uses of LLMs, largely speculative hype driven by AI companies, made AI data centers the fastest growing source of energy demand in the United States in 2024, and this growth is only expected to accelerate in the near-term. Projections from LBNL show that, in the high case, data center demand could reach 600 terawatt-hours (TWh) by 2028–nearly 13% of total US electricity demand, and more than the entire state of Texas used in 2024.

AI data center operators will look for any way they can to meet this new demand for electricity. As one recent UCS analysis shows, data center demand under current policies threatens to be primarily met by more natural gas generation—and indeed, that’s the scenario repeatedly playing out right now in fights across the country. This means that the choices regulators make now about how data centers are powered (as well as whether to power every data center that gets proposed) will reverberate into the future. Powering data centers with natural gas or coal will lock in further warming and worsen air quality leading to billions in public health costs.

UCS modeling further showed that even with high proposed levels of data center deployment, smart clean energy policies can result in most of this demand can be met with clean energy like solar and wind. The figure below shows the difference in electricity generation between a middling data center growth scenario and a no-growth reference scenario for three different policy cases.

In addition to exacerbating climate change and air pollution, data centers also consume a lot of water for cooling and are frequently built in already water-stressed locations. Data centers also generate noise and heat pollution for neighboring communities.  Further, data centers often require new transmission and generating infrastructure which increase the cost of electricity. Rarely do data center owners and AI proponents bear these costs. Instead, they fall to the communities that are forced to share their resources and electric grid. When AI evangelists argue that the technology will someday pay for itself through climate benefits, these immediate, tangible harms must be included on their side of the ledger.

Looking to the future

We already know the causes of, and solutions to, the climate crisis—and the costs and harms of delaying action. Instead of relying on a hypothetical future AI “solution,” we need to focus on overcoming the real hurdles stalling climate progress.

Namely, we need policymakers to commit to climate action, commit to polluter accountability, and commit to overcoming vested interests. Not holding out for some hypothetical silver bullet, but committing now to doing the real work, the hard work, the grunt work: mobilizing action, and sustaining progress.   

Moreover, we must now also ensure policymakers are taking action to prevent AI from being part of the problem. On speculative demand; on offloading of environmental, health, and economic risks and costs; on active pursuit of fossil fuels; on promise and perils—on all of these, tech companies must be challenged and must be held to account.

Unfortunately, implementing these solutions requires hard work and a level of commitment that has been lacking. Prioritizing time and money spent on AI, rather than contributing to known solutions, is at best a distraction, and at worst exacerbates the problem. We need to stop kidding ourselves—AI is a tool, and while it may be useful, the most effective tools we have for solving climate change are policies, not algorithms.

In a recent post, I wrote about how the Trump administration’s efforts to reorganize the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service  and shutter 57 of its 77 research and development (R&D) facilities isn’t really about efficiency—it’s about hollowing out another science agency whose mission is to protect people, places, and livelihoods. 

The Forest Service has since updated its website to qualify that these R&D closures are “possible” but not a foregone conclusion. Yet, as details of the restructuring emerge, they make one thing painfully clear: this plan would dismantle the world’s premier—and largest—wildfire research agency when wildfire risk, climate impacts, and economic losses are accelerating.  Given future drier and hotter conditions and increasing severity of wildfires, losing this research would diminish our understanding of effectively managing forests under climate change.  

Our much-beloved mascot Smokey Bear knows that President Trump’s plans to end climate studies, allowing forest fuel loads to build and diseases to spread, leaves our hands tied as we try to prevent wildfires without the benefit of evidence-based science.

So let’s get clear on what will be lost if the Trump administration moves this plan forward.  

Research that helps people evacuate safely—gone 

Take the Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory in Seattle, which is slated for closure under the reorganization. Scientists there conduct fire impacts research on human health, ecosystem function, and wildlife habitat. Current projects include updating maps of fire threats to rural communities and research in support of land managers and wildland fire fighters to identify the best times for prescribed burns that reduce fire hazards and restore forest resilience. 

Specifically, the lab produces the Fire and Smoke Map, used by millions of people every year to track fire activity and smoke exposure, with major implications for public health and local economies. The lab also conducts fire and smoke modeling research, fire behavior, and air quality impacts of wildlife. This research directly informs fire evacuation decisions—the kind that determine whether families have minutes or hours to get out safely. 

Shuttering the lab wouldn’t just slow down research; it would hamper a real-time safety tool that communities already rely on. 

Generations of science investments—lost

Long‑term research studies are important because they reveal patterns, causes, and consequences that simply can’t be seen over short time frames. This is especially true for complex systems like forests. For example, understanding how fuel treatments affect wildfire behavior or how repeated drought affects forest health requires years of observation and comparison. That’s what makes the Forest Service’s experimental forests, some over 100 years old, so special and valuable. These forests provide long-term data that’s irreplaceable if this administration takes a (literal) chainsaw to it. 

In Montana 

At Hungry Horse, closures would disrupt research tied to the nearby Coram Experimental Forest, where Forest Service scientists have spent decades studying western larch regeneration, silviculture, forest recovery after fire, and climate‑informed management, producing datasets and management guidance that depend on continuous on‑site monitoring and cannot simply be moved elsewhere. Specifically, western larch forests are diverse, productive, and valuable for timber production. Moreover, western larch regenerates well in exposed soil and sunny conditions, making it an important species for reforestation efforts, especially in a changing climate.  

The Rocky Mountain Research Station in Bozeman, MT—also slated for closure—supports the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program. FIA provides long-term data on forest condition and resources across the US. The Coram Experimental Forest helps support FIA through better understanding specific species, like the western larch. Diminishing support for this important long-term research undermines needed forestry science especially in Montana.  

In the White Mountains of New Hampshire 

At Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest located in the White Mountains of New Hampshire,more than 60,000 samples of water, soil, plants, and physical cores have been collected over multiple decades. These samples are carefully stored and archived in environmentally-controlled facilities, yet the recent Forest Service reorganization puts these samples at risk when facilities are shut down.  

Former USDA Forest Service senior policy analyst Anthony Veltri succinctly raises both the importance and serious risk of losing these critical long-term ecological data: 

“Hubbard Brook’s real value is not just what it tells us today. It is the fact that it preserves reality in a form future scientists can still interrogate. The long-term environmental record at Hubbard Brook represents profound option value: the ability to ask future questions of past reality. Nobody collecting water samples in 1963 was thinking about PFAS [“forever chemicals”]. The instrument outlasted the question it was built to answer and became the foundation for questions nobody had thought to ask yet. That argument applies equally to PFAS baseline contamination tracking, acid rain attribution, watershed chemistry, and climate monitoring continuity.” 

In the US South 

The Southern Institute of Forest Genetics in Saucier, MS is a core hub for forest genetics and long-term tree improvement research in the US South. It is also a location slated for closure, leaving at risk the Harrison Experimental Forest and their work on how Southern forests are grown, restored, and adapted to threats such as pests, disease, and climate stress. This research site maintains decades‑old genetic field trials and experimental plantings that track tree growth, pest and disease resistance, and climate responses over time—research that cannot be replicated or relocated once abandoned and that directly informs tree improvement programs used across the South.  

Beyond their scientific values, many of these Southern forests are home to iconic landscapes that are directly tied to cultural identities, including coastal cypress swamps and longleaf pine savannas. In addition, southern communities derive a portion of their drinking water from these forested ecosystems.  

For example, water from state and private forest lands serve more than 16.7 million people in Texas alone. Southern forests are not just for research, but also for keeping rural economies strong and prosperous. Southern forestry contributes more than $250 billion in economic output and employs over 1.3 million people. Southern forests’ health, productivity, and ecological services sustain communities, and the research that happens in and on these biological treasures is worth saving.  

In the Pacific Islands 

Then there’s the Institute of Pacific Islands Forestry (IPIF) in Hilo, Hawaii, also slated for closure, which is the Forest Service R&D’s only facility in the Pacific. Researchers here have spent decades studying how diseases and invasive species threaten unique tropical plants. R&D scientists also study tropical forest conservation, drought, and wildfire risk—issues that are intensifying across Hawaii and other Pacific islands under climate change. 

Closing the Hawai’i forestry station could result in Big Island forests disappearing within the next 20 years. Forest Service researchers are trying to better understand rapid ʻōhiʻa death, or ROD, a fungal disease that has killed 1 million to 2 million native trees that are the “backbone of Hawai’i’s tropical forests.” According to an extension forester with the University of Hawai’i, the Forest Service IPIF facility conducts about 75% of ROD research.

Long-term drought research in Hawai’i helped show how drought increases wildfire risk during El Niño years, providing historical context that’s essential for understanding and preparing for what’s expected to be a super El Niño this year, as well as future climate threats. In addition, this analysis uncovered $80 million in agricultural relief payments tied to drought events since 1996. I contributed to this multi-agency research, and it pains me to see less of this critical climate change research. Land managers will not have the information at hand to adapt and mitigate expected climate threats in the near future. 

Climate adaptation tools foresters actually use-eliminated 

In Michigan, a state where forests cover 56% of the landscape, four Forest Service R&D facilities are slated for closure. This will directly affect East Lansing and Wellston communities, as well as Upper Peninsula communities of Houghton and L’Anse. Local and state partnerships are at risk, since many Forest Service R&D staff work directly with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and universities. For example, the Northern Institute for Applied Climate Science (NIACS), housed in the Northern Research Station Forestry Sciences Lab located in Houghton, MI, may be relocated and consolidated to “nearby” labs including in Madison, WI. Another challenge with moving lab staff to other facilities includes storage of research equipment and scientific records and physical space for staff.  

Among the tools created and hosted by NIACS is a robust set of adaptation menus that help guide natural resource management and planning under climate change. These include adaptation strategies, approaches, and tactics for forested ecosystems, carbon management in forests, urban forests and human health, wildlife, and fire management. The underlying research and personnel behind these adaptation menus and related future could be discontinued amid this chaotic reorganization.  

This isn’t academic theory. These tools are used by people making real decisions about fuel reduction, forest restoration, and community fire resilience—often in rural areas with limited capacity to recover from disasters. Taking these resources away in the name of “efficiency” leaves local managers flying blind. 

A blow to local communities and local knowledge 

The Trump administration’s plan to relocate staff doesn’t just disrupt the research—it disrupts the communities that support and depend on critical forestry research.  

Research doesn’t just happen in isolation. Because many Forest Service labs are deeply embedded in local communities and universities, gutting these research projects also erodes the local knowledge, hard-earned trust, and community engagement built over decades that makes the science effective. 

For example, Forest Service R&D scientists work on research projects to serve natural resource managers and land managers, partner with university faculty to leverage their data and findings, and mentor the next generation of scientists by serving on their research committees. As reported in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, students and faculty at the University of Nevada Reno are losing access to long-term forested sites, endangering critical research on post-fire recovery of seedlings.  

You don’t replace decades of localized knowledge by moving people to a central office thousands of miles away. 

Smokey’s verdict 

Smokey Bear’s message, “Only you can prevent wildfires,” has always been simple. It is about taking actions and supporting people on the ground. 

This reorganization does the opposite. It disperses scientists from their local communities, shuts down irreplaceable research, and weakens our ability to respond to wildfires, climate change, and economic risk at precisely the wrong moment. 

This is just another attack on federal science and scientists. The lack of regard for science as a public good will not only set the American scientific enterprise behind global rivals but also leave communities less safe and less healthy. 

If this plan moves forward, the loss won’t be abstract. It cuts off generations’ worth of research at the knees, ending data collection that would be critical for solving current and future problems. Relocating research facilities jeopardizes clean drinking water and critical fire safety tools today, and our ability to recover from drought and wildfires in the future.     

Smokey knows better. We should too.

This is the latest in a long line of UCS work showing the influence of corporations on public policy. UCS has worked to expose how oil, gas, and coal companies have knowingly deceived the public, manufactured counterfeit science, and blocked climate action for decades. We have exposed the auto industry’s long history of using exaggerated rhetoric, misinformation, and political influence to fight against standards that deliver better cars to the nation and lower emissions.

This comes at a time when journalists have highlighted US Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Sean Duffy’s ties to the transportation industries the agency regulates, citing campaign donations to his son-in-law’s congressional campaign. But the influence of the highway lobby runs even deeper than that, and until recently, was an underrecognized throughline in the history of our transportation system.

Who is the highway lobby?

The highway lobby has been shaping transportation policy conversations for decades in its interests. It’s the fossil fuel industry that wants you to burn more gasoline. It’s auto manufacturers who want to keep you buying more cars. It’s the engineering consultants who get paid to design and build new highways. It’s the asphalt and aggregate producers who want more roads to get paved. It’s the trucking companies that tear up the roads but want to pay less for their upkeep.

That’s where this research study comes in. In their paper, the researchers focused on eight different trade associations that represent the highway lobby industries: the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC), the American Road & Transport Builders Association (ARTBA), the American Trucking Associations (ATA), the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC), the National Asphalt Paving Association (NAPA), the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the National Stone, Sand & Gravel Association (NSSGA), and the US Chamber of Commerce (US CoC), along with multiple coalitions. The full list of the highway lobby is much larger, but these are some of the more prevalent groups.

“While other trade associations organize fly-ins once a year, the ATA Federation has a permanent presence in the halls of Congress year-round, with state associations visiting weekly on a rolling basis” – ATA 2023

These industries are those that benefit the most from the highway-oriented status quo. In UCS’ report, “Freedom to Move: Investing in Transportation Choices for a Clean, Prosperous, and Just Future,” we find that over 80% of US transportation spending, public and private, goes to the auto, oil, and roadbuilding industries. My colleague Dave Cooke has written about how the trucking industry causes more than 90% of roadway damage while paying far less than its fair share for upkeep—and how the industry is pushing to further reduce its financial contribution to our transportation system. The trade associations above are how companies in these industries exert their influence as members or on boards of directors. Companies like Ford, Shell, ConocoPhillips sit on the board of the US CoC, and Toyota, BP, and ExxonMobil sit on the board of NAM, among many others in the roadbuilding and trucking industries.

How does the highway lobby keep us stuck?

These industry groups are well practiced and well-funded to lobby hard. The eight organizations analyzed in the paper collectively employed over two hundred lobbyists, spending over $100 million on lobbying and political donations. With this amount of resources, they are able to employ the full gamut of tactics such as:

1. Direct lobbying of legislators and policymakers. The most direct line to influencing public policy is to talk to decisionmakers—whether that’s hiring former Congressional staffers or political appointees to meet legislators on policy priorities; having organizational heads testify in Congress; or commenting on rulemakings like one recently rescinded by the Trump administration setting targets for heat-trapping emissions from transportation. Most of these activities are federally required to be recorded in lobbying disclosures, which you can explore for yourself on OpenSecrets.org.
   
2. Engaging industry members. Every organization in the paper mobilizes its association members to fly into Washington DC and talk to legislators on Capitol Hill. The scale of this is striking—in the course of nine months in 2021, the researchers found the US CoC excited to share that they held more than 330 meetings and events with members of and sent them more than 3,600 letters. During one so-called fly-in in April 2023, ATA had 332 meetings with members of Congress, and they continue to maintain ongoing weekly Congressional visits. AGC frequently inserts lobbying materials into paycheck envelopes (i.e. payroll stuffers) to get employees at member firms to reach out to their members of Congress.  
   
3. Shifting public opinion. These organizations are seasoned and leverage extensive media campaigns. US CoC organized regional press calls, social media campaigns, and placed ads in dozens of districts on the last surface transportation reauthorization. As another example, AGC installed provocative billboards in a Pennsylvania congressman’s district after he voted to prioritize maintaining existing highways—before expanding them—in the bipartisan INVEST in America Act, a commonsense approach that would address the nation’s maintenance backlog.
   
4. Industry-funded policy research. Almost all of the associations have an affiliated research institute or foundation that provides an appearance of independence while supporting industry priorities.
   The American Transportation Research Institute? That’s the research arm of ATA. The Transportation Development Foundation? That’s ARTBA. Yet their funding sources and staff almost always come from the same place, with the same motives. The problem—scientific literature has documented how industry-sponsored research is more likely to produce favorable results for the sponsors. In addition, these organizations benefit from tax-deductible donations to these “neutral” spinoffs.
   
5. Fund political campaigns: The last tactic researchers highlighted was direct support to political candidates, parties, or political action committees (PACs). By influencing who is in the decisionmaker’s seat, trade associations push for candidates who are more friendly to their business interests. Six of the eight trade associations investigated are in the top 5% of political contributors in the US, spending over $13 million in 2024 alone.

In sum, the researchers uncovered an extensive number of ways that the oil, auto, roadbuilding, and trucking industries exert their influence on our transportation system for their benefit. Their experience and political connections are deep – in their materials, they emphasize working with state departments of transportation and public officials to advance their own industry-oriented campaigns.

“In all cases, the governor and/or state DOT director was a strong proponent of the legislation, either visibly or behind the scenes” – ACEC, 2021

The research found the massive scale of highway lobby actions. It continues.

The oil, auto, roadbuilding, and trucking industries continue to hold back our transportation system today. They are out front calling to have taxpayers contribute more to their own bottom lines. Often, the highway lobby shows up as the same groups under slightly different coalition configurations (e.g. the Transportation Construction Coalition). Sometimes, these coalitions put public officials and industry groups signing onto the same letters (e.g. the Move America coalition, United for Infrastructure), raising ethical concerns about the influence of corporate self-interest in government.

The result of the highway lobby’s activities?

• Transportation is the second highest household expense, with the average US household spending over $12,000 a year on owning and operating vehicles.
  
• Over 90% of people in the US don’t have access to frequent transit.
  
• Roadway maintenance strains state and local budgets while the federal government continues to support expensive highway expansions.
  
• The US transportation system continues to be the country’s biggest contributor to climate change and a major source of inequities.

In short, our transportation system currently doesn’t have enough sustainable, affordable, and equitable transportation options, and the highway lobby has mounted an extensive campaign to keep it that way.

While the scale of the highway lobby is eye-popping, there is a diverse and science-based coalition of community, environmental, business, labor, disability, transportation professional groups, and many more who are standing up for the public interest alongside everyday individuals. As history shows, from the tobacco wars to fighting industrial polluters for environmental justice, when we assemble community-based coalitions to counter industry interest, we can win.

That’s where UCS comes in—as an independent organization in the public interest that doesn’t take government or industry money. You can find out more about UCS’s research and join our work toward a people-centered transportation future here. This latest research has shown that the highway lobby has loomed over transportation policy, past and present. Now it’s time for something different.

This is particularly vital as energy costs have become an everyday point of discussion for Massachusetts families, businesses, and policymakers. High prices during one of the coldest winters in years forced too many families to keep their homes at unsafe temperatures. A brutal blizzard left hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts households in the dark for days. And now, gas and oil prices are soaring due to the US-Israeli war against Iran. These events all underscore the same challenge: Our energy system requires immediate attention so that the decisions being made have a real impact on the affordability, resilience, and reliability of our electric grid—now and for the future.

It is no surprise that in the energy affordability bill within the Massachusetts State House, and Governor Maura Healey’s recent executive order targeting energy supply, solar energy is raised as a key solution to help the state cover its increasingly high energy needs while making the cost of electricity more affordable. As these discussions evolve, it’s vital to remember not just the value proposition of distributed energy resources such as rooftop solar and battery storage, but also the importance of ensuring its benefits reach everyone in the commonwealth, especially underserved communities where these investments have the greatest impact on both affordability and resilience.

A new report from Applied Economics Clinic (AEC), commissioned by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and its partners Clean Energy Group and Vote Solar, offers key insights to help inform state efforts to unlock its vast solar and storage potential in environmental justice (EJ) neighborhoods—where people of color, low-income people, and limited-English proficient speakers live. Electrification with Equity IIestimates the technical potential of behind-the-meter (BTM) solar and solar paired with storage in EJ neighborhoods, looks at housing conditions to better tailor programs that enable adoption for end users, maps the overlap with extreme heat and energy burden data, and offers insight on the barriers and their solutions to scale up deployment in and for EJ communities. It is a companion to another new report from AEC that looks at solar and storage issues and opportunities in Massachusetts more broadly. This report was developed in collaboration with an advisory committee bringing perspectives from different sectors—including environmental justice organizations, affordable housing, and clean energy developers—to reflect on-the-ground experiences and priorities for EJ neighborhoods.

Here are a few key findings around BTM solar and storage technical potential, as well as key barriers and recommendations to successfully unlock these valuable resources.

Solar and Storage Potential in EJ Neighborhoods

EJ neighborhoods across the Commonwealth have an enormous BTM solar potential. Building on DOER’s 2023 Technical Potential for Solar study and using the 2023 U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, AEC estimates that the technical potential of BTM solar in Massachusetts EJ neighborhoods is 31 gigawatts (GW) of solar, enough to power all of the state’s almost 3 million homes. The potential for BTM storage paired with solar is estimated to be 13 GW.

Activating this resource is key to fulfill the state’s decarbonization and affordability goals. Peak electricity demand in Massachusetts is predicted to reach 24 GW by 2050, double the 2020 peak of 12 GW. This means that the technical potential for new BTM solar and BTM solar paired with storage (simplified as “BTM solar and storage” in this blog) in EJ neighborhoods is greater than the expected increase in peak demand. Despite the overall success of the SMART program at facilitating the growth of solar and storage, data shows that just 1% of the program’s allocated solar capacity is located on low-income properties. 

The Commonwealth is heavily dependent on fossil gas (also known as natural gas), which provides more than 65% of in-state net electricity generation. Covering increases in peak demand with clean generation is crucial given that more than 80% of polluting power plants—with their associated health risks—are located in or within a mile of EJ neighborhoods.

In addition, not only do BTM solar and storage adopters save directly on their bills, but these cost saving benefits flow to all ratepayers because these resources help with lowering peak demand. Addressing the peaks minimizes the need for expensive transmission and distribution investments and reduces wholesale electricity prices.In fact, during a 100^oF peak event in June 2025, a study from Acadia Center found, BTM solar saved New England consumers at least $8.2 million on one of the most expensive days of the year for the grid. Those savings are particularly impressive considering how small the BTM solar deployment is across Massachusetts, and makes actualizing the full potential even more appealing.

Access to BTM solar can lower bills alleviating the energy burden of households.

The average energy burden—the percentage of a household income that goes into paying for energy—in Massachusetts is about 3%. It rises to 10% for low-income populations, and, as high as 31% in certain neighborhoods. When looking at EJ neighborhoods facing higher than that statewide average energy burden, this study finds a technical potential of 11.4 GW of solar paired with 4.9 GW of storage. A 2024 study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) shows that rooftop solar reduced the median 2021 energy burden for low-income adopters from 7.7% to 6.2%, pointing to the value that BTM solar can provide in alleviating energy costs for those that need them the most.

BTM solar and storage can advance energy security and support communities’ energy resilience. EJ communities are more likely to live in dense urban areas and neighborhoods that lack green spaces, exposing them to the urban heat island effect. These communities are also more likely to live in places with inefficient heating and cooling systems, costing these households more in energy. For this study, AEC finds that more than 90% of Massachusetts’ total BTM solar and storage potential in EJ neighborhoods is within a hot spot area, underscoring the value that deploying solar in these areas can bring.

A 2025 Berkeley Lab study found that low-to-moderate income households generating 80-100% of their electricity needs with rooftop solar leads to significant reductions in energy bills. This can translate into households being able to keep their homes at comfortable temperatures, especially when facing extreme heat. Access to BTM solar and storage can also provide backup power during grid disruptions, including for resilience hubs in community buildings and shelters bringing cooling and other essential services during outages.

Barriers to unlocking this solar potential

Although the Commonwealth offers a suite of energy, climate and housing programs, the BTM solar and storage potential in EJ neighborhoods remains largely untapped.

The study found the main barriers for deployment, include financial challenges, technical issues, workforce roadblocks, market conditions, and program coordination. Lack of incentives for renters and condo owners requires special attention, as only a third of BTM technical potential in EJ neighborhoods is located in single family homes.

The state has clear energy targets and procurement requirements for specific technologies such as offshore wind, but there is no specific carve out for BTM resources including solar and storage. Likewise, most clean energy programs lack equity participation targets or incentives hindering the flow of benefits to those that need them the most.

Solutions to unlocking this solar potential

The Commonwealth has a mandate to ensure the equitable distribution of energy and environmental benefits. However, to date, most of the state’s solar and storage policies and programs have no explicit and enforceable equity provisions.

This analysis identifies a suite of recommendations to tackle these challenges, including incorporating equity-focused funding, incentives, targets, and carve-outs to successfully overcome underinvestment in EJ neighborhoods and ensure that these communities have direct access to the benefits that on-site solar and storage can bring. Greater and context-specific focus on communications and outreach are tools that will help EJ communities understand better the value that solar and storage has to offer them. Attention to transparency from clean energy solicitors will also be crucial to build trust and protect EJ communities. And securing employment opportunities for trainees will only strengthen the commonwealth’s clean energy economy.

The full study elaborates on existing program gaps and recommendations to soundly advance an equitable clean energy transition.

We need action from Massachusetts policymakers

BTM solar and storage are proven technologies that have a lot to offer to the Commonwealth, and in particular, to its most vulnerable populations. Advancing these resources in EJ communities is key for addressing the energy affordability crisis, improving public health and making communities more resilient to extreme weather.

The recommendations included in the new Electrification with Equity II report are common-sense solutions informed by existing programs, and build on proven experience in Massachusetts and elsewhere.

Provisions supporting solar and storage are reflected in the latest version of the “An Act relative to energy affordability, clean power and economic competitiveness” (House Bill 5175), including around plug-in solar and solar permitting. As the Massachusetts legislature discusses ways to strengthen this energy affordability bill, our recommendations focused on offering targeted incentives, and electric system readiness should be integrated into this crucial bill.

That means establishing equity participation targets and include carve outs for distributed energy resources. The Clean Energy Equity Act (House Bill 3540, Senate Bill 2303) sets a framework for the fair allocation of clean energy benefits. And An Act Maximizing and Optimizing Small-scale Assets in Communities (House Bill 3521, Senate Bill 2270) stablish goals for the deployment of distributed energy resources—including solar and storage—in the commonwealth.

Further, we need policymakers to support MassSave as an effective way to advance solar and storage readiness. Proposed cuts to MassSave at a time when it’s increasingly serving low- and moderate-income households contradicts any effort to make energy more affordable and will hinder the limited resources the program has to support electric upgrades. With over 50 percent of our region’s electricity generated from gas, families are already exposed to price volatility; cutting Mass Save leaves them even more vulnerable to demand spikes from extreme heat and harsh winters.

Massachusetts policymakers, we’re counting on you to ensure that the benefits of a clean energy economy are successfully unlocked for our neighbors in the Commonwealth’s environmental justice communities, at last.

The commentariat’s view of the future is narrowly focused on assembling military capabilities and demonstrating the resolve to use them. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times believe the war in Iran created a “munitions gap” that has “significantly drained” the store of weapons the United States needs to deter China and defend Taiwan. The Atlantic suggested Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz might teach China how a blockade of Taiwan can paralyze a conflicted US president. The Japan Times said senior US defense officials struggled to convince skeptical Asian allies that US security guarantees remain credible.

This circumscribed discussion of the Taiwan-related implications of the Iran war is encouraging a reluctant US Congress to reconsider President Trump’s request for a massive increase in defense spending. Opponents continue to argue it would further undermine an already shaky US economy. No one imagines it would help reopen the Strait of Hormuz or relieve the economic pain of its ongoing closure.

Declassified US and Soviet accounts of the Taiwan Strait Crisis suggest that understanding Iranian intentions may be more productive than increasing US capabilities. The Eisenhower administration refused to talk to China’s communist leaders and consequently misunderstood their language and behavior. That led to a military conflict in the Taiwan Strait that carried a greater risk of nuclear war than the Cuban missile crisis. 

The parallels between these two situations are striking and instructive.

Aggressive allies with powerful lobbies

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the press that President Trump decided to attack Iran because Israel planned to strike Iran on its own. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly met with Trump on multiple occasions to press the case for war. Senator Lindsay Graham, building on years of lobbying by hawkish Republican Party donors and right-wing religious organizations, worked hard to help Netanyahu secure Trump’s acquiescence.

In the mid-1950s, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who led a Republic of China (ROC) government that fled to Taiwan after losing control of China, lobbied President Eisenhower to support a major military offensive to reclaim the mainland. Powerful allies in Congress and the US military, like Senate Majority Leader William Knowland and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Arthur Radford, helped Chiang make his case. Influential media barons including Time’s Henry Luce and right-wing religious zealots from the John Birch Society amplified calls to “unleash Chiang” in the fight against communism. 

Rubio repeated this McCarthy-era slogan when describing the US-Israeli bombing of Iran. Over the years it has become a euphemism for the core Republican Party belief in the efficacy of aggressive military solutions to geopolitical problems.

Isolation and embargo

For decades, the US government actively helped suppress the revolutionary movement that led to the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran in November 1979. After Iranian students seized the US embassy and took hostages, President Carter froze Iranian assets, imposed economic sanctions, and severed diplomatic relations with the new Iranian government. Successive administrations continuously tightened those sanctions, with a modest respite after President Obama negotiated an agreement to place limits on Iran’s nuclear energy program in 2015. President Trump abrogated the agreement and imposed even tighter economic sanctions three years later.

The US government also helped suppress the revolutionary movement that led to the creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. It continued to recognize Chiang’s rump government in Taiwan as the sole legitimate sovereign of all of China. It imposed an economic embargo and policed it with a naval blockade. The brutality of the Korean War, as well as the long and acrimonious negotiation to end it, convinced Eisenhower that talking to the Chinese communist leadership was a waste of time. After the armistice ending the fighting in Korea was signed, the United States continued to aid and encourage Chiang’s repeated military attacks from ROC-held islands close to the Chinese coast.

In both cases the US government used a combination of economic warfare, military threats, and diplomatic isolation that led to the marginalization and impoverishment of a sovereign adversary. Severe restrictions on social and cultural contact inhibited constructive communication, making it extremely difficult to develop the mutual understanding and respect needed to manage adversarial relationships without resorting to violence. 

Bad-faith negotiations

In addition to withdrawing from the nuclear agreement with Iran, President Trump attacked the Islamic Republic—twice—during what appeared to be encouraging talks about a substitute agreement. A ceasefire intended to pause the second and more extensive round of attacks was supposed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but Trump immediately undermined that possibility by imposing a naval blockade on any ships entering or exiting Iranian ports. He made a series of unsubstantiated statements the Iranians claimed were misleading and manipulative. He spoke as if his goal was to compel Iranian capitulation. 

Eisenhower treated the Chinese communists with an equal measure of arrogance and contempt. In the spring of 1955, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Vice President Richard Nixon publicly threatened to attack the Chinese mainland with nuclear weapons if the Chinese military did not stop shelling the ROC forces harassing Chinese air and naval traffic from the offshore islands. Radford, Dulles, and other anti-communist ideologues convinced Eisenhower that if those islands fell, the rest of East Asia would follow like dominoes. Eisenhower was fully prepared to strike, but a request from Indonesia to the PRC to represent China at the Bandung Conference prompted him to wait. Diplomatic entreaties from almost every other participating nation convinced Eisenhower to finally agree to PRC requests to open negotiations aimed at resolving the crisis in the Taiwan Strait.

The negotiations dragged on for three years. Every time the Chinese communists made concessions to US demands, including a commitment to forgo the use of force to dislodge the ROC government in Taiwan, Secretary of State Dulles moved the goal posts. He instructed US negotiators that the only US objective in the talks was to avoid being blamed when they broke down. After Dulles unilaterally downgraded US representation at the talks, the Chinese communists resumed shelling the offshore islands.

Lessons from Taiwan’s past for Iran’s present

Misunderstanding, miscommunication, and an unwillingness to negotiate in good faith with the Iranian leadership are serious problems that require both immediate and sustained US attention. 

President Nixon, in secret negotiations that were vociferously opposed by the Taiwan lobby and its many supporters in Congress, decided to speak respectfully with the Chinese communist leadership about its concerns. Those conversations encouraged Nixon to make meaningful concessions in the interest of the greater good of both nations. His visit to China in 1972, amid the ideological fervor and political violence of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, changed US public perceptions of the country overnight. The subsidence of US public hostility towards the communist Chinese opened the door for a decades-long geopolitical realignment that produced economic and security benefits for both countries that greatly outweighed the domestic political costs.

Something similar can take place between the United States and Iran today. Like China, Iran is an equally proud and ancient civilization led by a radical revolutionary government that would have a compelling interest in responding to a conciliatory change in US behavior.  

Another lesson Taiwan holds for Iran is that bilateral breakthroughs to resolve an urgent situation—in this case restoring the free flow of a critical set of global commodities—shouldn’t be negotiated in secret without informing other countries and peoples that have a vital stake in the outcome.  

Nixon lied about the deal on Taiwan he struck with Mao. He lied to Congress, to US allies, and to the American public. Today, many of the economic and security benefits accrued from the US-China rapprochement are now in jeopardy because the concessions Nixon made were not acceptable to many of the external constituencies he deceived.

The third lesson is that successful diplomatic outcomes take a long time to negotiate and can only be sustained with constant and unending effort. One of the benefits of abiding by the Cold War–era adage that “politics stops at the water’s edge” is that it helps protect negotiated results across administrations. US adversaries can’t enter substantive agreements if they fear future US administrations won’t honor them.

Seven years passed between Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 and the establishment of formal diplomatic relations with communist China. Carter was unsettled when he discovered the secret concessions Nixon made, especially his failure to get the Chinese communist leadership to agree to forgo the use of force to reunify the two rival Chinese governments. In the end Carter decided that the United States should keep its word. Congress, which was not only never consulted but also intentionally deceived, tried to impose its will through the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, which broke every significant commitment that Nixon and Carter made by maintaining de facto diplomatic relations with a rival Chinese government and providing it with arms. 

One final lesson is that our troubles in Taiwan and Iran are intimately connected to the state of US domestic politics. There can be no peace abroad without some degree of consensus at home. 

The long-term future of the Strait of Hormuz is now bound up in complex multinational religious, ethnic, economic, and territorial disputes with long and complex histories. It will take decades of sustained diplomacy to resolve these disputes peacefully. If the US government is unwilling or unable to commit to seeing that process through, the only other choices available are to continue suffering the political, economic, and moral costs of participating in the violence, or to withdraw.

The Trump administration and its allies in Congress have conspired to slow the transition to clean energy in this country, undercutting solar and wind power, propping up coal plants, and backing fossil fuels over renewable energy at every turn. Clean energy, though, has pushed back, and pushed forward. Solar in particular came into the second Trump administration with a whole lot of momentum, and that momentum has carried renewable energy to many new heights lately.

Here are four examples of impressive renewable energy progress, how they came about, and what to watch for next.

US solar blows past its generation record

What happened: US solar generation in 2025 was a stunning 28% higher than in 2024. The electricity flowing from all our solar—on rooftops and parking lots, in fields and deserts—was equivalent to the amount used by every household across 14 states in the Midwest and Northeast, from Wisconsin to New Jersey and up to Maine. Solar generation in a single month (July 2025) was more than a full year’s worth of solar generation just a decade ago.

How it happened: A lot of solar capacity has come online lately. 2024 was a record year for new solar installations in the United States, 21% higher than the previous record-setter. While new installations in 2025 were down from that height, last year still had the second-highest tally ever. Texas installed a Texas-sized amount of that recent solar, California followed, and Indiana took the #3 spot, up from #15 in 2023. The total capacity by the end of 2025 was enough to meet the electricity needs of tens of millions of US households.

What’s next: The pace of new installations will be driven in part by deadlines and restrictions imposed by last year’s megabill, and will also depend on the vagaries of the tariff regime under this administration. This year is sure to break the record for solar generation yet again, though, with all of 2025’s installations leaping into action and more solar coming online every day. Preliminary results suggest that solar electricity generation year-to-date is more than 20% higher than in the same period last year.

US wind breaks record after record

What happened: Wind power is the largest source of renewable energy in this country, and it keeps growing. For example, last month in New England, wind farms added up to a record amount of peak generation—more than 30% above where the region’s wind record had stood just six months earlier. Plus, a record-breaking project is starting to come online in the US Southwest: SunZia will be the largest wind project in North America—and, with its associated transmission line, the largest US renewable energy project ever.

How it happened: InNew England’s case, a lot of credit goes to offshore wind. While the region’s land-based wind farms play an important role, what’s new are the injections of power from offshore wind turbines. Vineyard Wind, located in the waters off Massachusetts, has been generating power from a majority of its turbines since last year, and will be fully online very shortly. Once it’s completed, it will be the first large-scale offshore wind project in the United States—indeed, in all of the Americas. Add in strong offshore winds, and you have a recipe for some awesome generation—including at times when the region needs it most.

In the case of SunZia, the “how” includes a whole lot of patience. The project involves a remarkable 916 wind turbines in New Mexico and a 550-mile transmission line to carry the power to Arizona, where it goes on to serve customers in California. And it took over two decades, most of that in permitting, to get to this stage.

Even as it is coming online, SunZia is breaking other records: the amount of wind generation showing up in California’s electricity mix has leapt to new records multiple times in the last few weeks.

What’s next: Overall, the way forward for wind power is much fuzzier and more challenging than it should be, in part because of the Trump administration’s particular animus toward it, especially offshore wind. So one thing to watch for is the progress of the various lawsuits against the administration, which are trying to put an end to their various illegal moves to block wind farms.

But some next steps are clearer, including for the handful of offshore wind projects that are moving forward.

• The workers responsible for bringing Vineyard Wind to life installed the blades on the final turbine last month, so once the electrical systems and final tests are done, it’ll be all systems go.
• Revolution Wind, also in the area south of Massachusetts/east of Long Island, is itself almost fully built, and just started sending power to New England too. That contribution will ramp up as the project moves to completion.
• The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, under construction, will be the largest in the country and one of the largest in the world when it comes fully online next year; last month it sent its first megawatt-hours to the mid-Atlantic electricity grid from some of the turbines already in place.
• Two other offshore wind farms also under construction, Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind, will soon be strengthening the New York electric grid.

Onshore, the new SunZia wind and transmission capacity will continue to show up in increasingly high levels of wind for California.

And wind records will continue to be broken elsewhere. Each of the other regional transmission organizations (grid operators) across the country—in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest, New York, the midcontinent, Texas, and the Southwest—have scored records in the last few months.

US renewable electricity passes the 25% mark

What happened: Renewable energy generated more than a quarter of US electricity in 2025 for the first time.                                                               

How it happened: All that new renewable energy capacity adds up to more renewable electricity. Wind maintained its spot as the top renewable source, accounting for more than 10% of US generation last year. Solar’s fast growth brought it to almost 9%—four times its contribution in 2018. Hydro power was the next largest contributor, at 5.5%.

What’s next: Though there’s been considerable variability over the years, renewable energy’s contribution to overall US electricity supply has increased by an average of 1.2 percentage points per year. The federal Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecasts that renewables will be the source of the most growth in generation in 2026, with solar increasing 17% and wind 5%.

US renewable electricity out-generates gas on a monthly basis

What happened: In March 2026, for the first time ever, US renewable electricity beat gas generation over the course of a full month. Renewables accounted for 35% of generation, vs. gas’s 34.4%, according to Canary Media.

How it happened: Spring is always a strong time for renewable energy—the sun is shining, the winds are blowing, the waters are flowing. And the interlude between winter’s cold and summer’s heat is when demand for electricity is lowest. That all means less demand for gas. This recent crossover milestone, though, is principally a consequence of all the new renewables capacity of late.

Renewables’ strong showing last spring meant that these sources plus nuclear generated more than half of US electricity in March 2025 for the first time ever. That is, fossil fuels fell below the 50% mark. That happened again in April 2025 and March 2026.

What’s next: Watch for more months when renewables outperform gas, and fossil fuels get pushed below 50% (as a prelude to much greater push-downs in the years ahead); spring, and then fall, will be where that phenomenon will be more likely. More such achievements will require renewables continuing to grow and outpace increases in demand at a time when demand for electricity is growing more rapidly than it has for years—and all while contending with a major push for new gas-fired power plants and a Trump administration aggressively thwarting new clean energy deployment. But renewables have proven themselves time and again.

More 2025 wins, around the world

Renewable energy is making even more of a mark globally. Here’s a sample:

• According to analyst firm Ember, wind and solar generated more power than fossil fuels in the European Union for the first time over the course of 2025.
• In Colombia, solar power alone supplied more electricity than coal on an annual basis for the first time.
• Solar globally grew by a record amount in 2025, said the International Energy Agency (IEA), with China accounting for more than half that growth, the European Union achieving record numbers, and India posting 60% growth.
• Solar was “the single largest contributor to growth in global energy supply in 2025,” the IEA said—”the first time on record that a modern renewable source has led global primary energy supply growth.” Solar supplied more than 25% of that increase, compared to 17% for gas.
• Wind installations globally also hit a record (also led by China).
• Overall, the world installed a record amount of wind and solar—17% more than in 2024.

Lots more clean energy is on its way

Renewable energy’s momentum is a product of the many advantages it offers. Renewable energy is not just the cleanest but often the cheapest source of new electricity in the United States. Solar and wind have the advantage of potentially being faster to get installed than new gas plants, given the multi-year backlogs for gas turbines. And worldwide disruptions have brought into stark relief more of the risks of dependence on fossil fuels.

None of that means that new fossil fuel plants won’t get built, particularly given a big thumb on the scales from the White House. It does mean, though, that where clean energy is allowed to compete, the outcomes will likely to continue to testify to those advantages.

And projections bear that out. Solar, wind, and energy storage (batteries) combined had a record year in 2025, and made up more than 90% of new energy capacity in this country, according to industry association American Clean Power. And they will make up 93% of what gets built in the power sector in 2026, forecasts the EIA. All that will add up to more clean energy, and give us even more possibilities for phasing down fossil fuels and accelerating the transition to a clean and just energy future.

The transition to clean energy is a marathon, not a sprint. The people and communities behind clean energy in its many forms and uses will continue to push boundaries and break record after record. Count on it.

This isn’t just casual curiosity. Communities facing floods, families displaced by wildfires, and governments planning infrastructure need accurate information about how a warming climate affects the risks and impacts we all face.

Attribution science has emerged over the past few decades to answer precisely these questions. And like any scientific field, it deserves thoughtful examination of its methods, limitations, and contributions.

Today, attribution work spans interconnected dimensions. Event attribution asks whether climate change made a specific weather event more likely or severe. Source attribution traces contributions back to specific emitters and sectors. Impact attribution connects climate-driven changes to real-world damages: lost lives, destroyed homes, disrupted livelihoods, and strained public systems. Together, attribution science can help to form a more complete chain of understanding.

Attribution quantifies the contribution of climate change to extreme events

The connection between climate change and extreme weather is well established. In their most recent report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that “Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe.”

Think of climate change like adding fuel to a fire: The spark might have existed anyway, but the fuel makes it burn hotter and spread further. Weather would exist regardless of emissions from human activities; however, the weather we all experience is changing. Attribution research follows that fuel—from the fire’s intensity, to who poured it on, to what burned because of it.

Put more scientifically, attribution research investigates these changes in weather, asking whether climate change has made an event more likely, more severe, or both. It can also help us to understand how emissions from specific sectors have altered climate events and show us the contribution of climate change to impacts from such events.

Counterfactuals make attribution studies possible

Attribution methodology compares the actual event against modelled scenarios of what might have occurred in a world without human-induced warming. By running simulations with and without anthropogenic emissions, researchers quantify how the probability or intensity has shifted. This counterfactual approach is standard across many scientific disciplines, from epidemiology to economics, and is at the heart of all attribution science.

Here is an example of what a counterfactual might actually look like (figure 1 below). This figure from Perkins-Kirkpatrick et al 2024 shows how climate change shifts the odds of extreme heat. The dashed curve represents a counterfactual world without human-caused warming, while the solid curve shows a world with today’s warmer climate. Because the temperature distribution has shifted to the right, very hot days are now much more likely. The shaded areas illustrate this change in risk: an extreme temperature that was rare in the past (p0) becomes significantly more common today (p1).

In order to set a counterfactual, the researcher needs to define what version of the world they are comparing against, and the biggest decision point here is which time frame to use. This choice is based on the specific research question being asked. A study examining long-term climate trends might compare today’s conditions to pre-industrial times, while one focused on policy impacts might use a more recent baseline. In attribution studies examining the fossil fuel industry’s role in climate change, counterfactuals become especially salient given the industry’s decades of documented disinformation campaigns that delayed climate action. By modeling what climatic conditions might have been but for the industry’s actions—such as had they disclosed internal research or ceased obstructive practices at key moments—scientists can quantify not only how much warming occurred, but how much could have been avoided.

Attribution science is a mature scientific discipline

The first peer-reviewed event attribution study appeared in Nature in 2004, examining the 2003 European heatwave that killed tens of thousands of people. This research emerged from academic researchers at University of Reading and University of Oxford in the UK. Until this study was published, scientists had used attribution methodologies to attribute trends in global average surface temperature to climate change, but had never before linked an individual event to climate change, making this study a huge scientific and methodological achievement in the field.

Since then, the field has developed substantial methodological infrastructure to support continued research and development. The National Academies of Sciences published a comprehensive review in 2016, establishing frameworks to assess event attribution research quality and confidence levels. The IPCC has systematically evaluated event attribution literature across multiple assessment cycles, increasing confidence statements as methods improved and evidence accumulated.

Today, attribution studies appear in prominent scientific journals including Nature, Science, Environmental Research Letters, and PNAS. These studies undergo peer review—a standard scientific process—by independent experts who evaluate methodology, data quality, and the author’s characterization of uncertainty.  In order to be responsive and help ensure science is available to inform decisions makers, the research group World Weather Attribution has pioneered rapid event attribution assessments. Using peer-reviewed methods, this group of experts produces near-real-time analysis to help inform the public about the role of climate change in specific events.

While there are well accepted methods, this is also a growing field that’s learning and advancing. We are also seeing improvements as computational power increases, observational data expands, and understanding deepens. In journal articles and at conferences, scientists engage in the practice of science by actively debating best practices for baseline selection, model ensemble construction, and uncertainty quantification. This internal critique is healthy science at work.

Evaluating and communicating uncertainty

All rigorous science includes an evaluation and communication of uncertainty, and attribution research is no different. Climate modeling experts are always balancing complexities: countless variables interacting in a changing climate system. That’s why attribution papers routinely report confidence intervals, probability ranges, and explicit statements about methodological limitations.

But not all event types carry the same uncertainty.

For heatwaves, confidence is relatively high because the physics are straightforward (more trapped heat = hotter temperature). For other event types like hurricanes or floods, confidence is lower because multiple factors influence outcomes and models have greater limitations. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report reflects this nuance, expressing high confidence for heatwave attribution while noting lower confidence for tropical cyclones and some precipitation events.

This variability in confidence between event types isn’t a weakness—it’s the manifestation of standard scientific practice. Researchers are careful to match their claims to what the evidence supports. When media headlines simplify these nuances, that’s a communication challenge, not a scientific failure.

How attribution science is used

Attribution research serves multiple purposes across different sectors—none more important than the others, but each drawing on the science in distinct ways.

For communities and planners, attribution science informs practical decisions about infrastructure, insurance, and emergency preparedness. A city designing flood defenses needs to know whether historical rainfall records still represent future risk. An agricultural region needs to understand changing drought probabilities. A utility company planning grid resilience needs to anticipate heatwave frequency. Attribution science can be used as one tool to help shape budgets, building codes, and local planning.

For researchers, attribution science advances fundamental climate understanding. By examining how specific events unfold in different climate scenarios, scientists test and refine climate models. This can improve projections for future conditions, strengthening the foundation for climate science.

For policymakers and legislators, attribution findings help quantify climate risks that inform emissions targets, adaptation funding, and regulatory standards. When laws require climate risk disclosure or mandate resilience planning, attribution science provides the evidentiary backbone.

For litigators and their clients, attribution research helps establish connections between emissions, climate change, and specific harms—evidence for courts to weigh in the context of legal standards that vary by jurisdiction and claim type.

Attribution science is robust, growing, and more important than ever

The path forward requires continued investment in attribution research, improved observational networks, better climate models, and clearer communication of what studies can and cannot conclude. It also requires recognizing that scientific uncertainty isn’t ignorance—we often know enough to make informed decisions even while continuing to refine understanding.

Attribution science has matured into a valuable tool for understanding climate change impacts. Like all science, it has limitations that researchers openly acknowledge. But its core findings that human-caused climate change is affecting weather events in measurable ways rest on solid methodological foundations and contribute meaningfully to both scientific understanding and practical decision-making.

Communities facing climate risks and impacts deserve nothing less than rigorous, transparent science. Attribution research, conducted through peer-reviewed channels with appropriate uncertainty communication, delivers exactly that.

This unseemly political maneuver must be seen for what it is: An attempt to silence independent scientists, shut down evidence-based decision making, and keep the public in the dark.

Politicization of the National Science Foundation

The move is troubling because the National Science Board plays a critical role in oversight, accountability, and transparency in how the nation’s premier scientific research agency makes decisions on everything from major research investments, to international partnerships, to merit criteria for grantmaking. Without a functional National Science Board in the near term, the agency is left without the guidance and oversight of independent experts, and the public is left without information on how NSF is carrying out its mission. And it’s worth remembering that mission is to serve the public. As my colleague, Dr. Carlos Javier Martinez puts it, “For the past 75 years, the NSF has quietly powered innovations that shape our daily lives, from the classroom to the smartphone, from the weather report to the internet.”

There are many reasons this should concern us, because it is not the first instance of political interference in the National Science Board and NSF during President Trump’s second term. Last year, eminent scholar and former deputy assistant to the president, Dr. Alondra Nelson resigned her seat on the National Science Board, citing a loss of integrity in the institution and political interference from Trump officials in the board’s deliberations. In March, the administration put up an unqualified, conflicted nominee to lead NSF. And earlier this month in an apparent move to obey in advance, the NSF preemptively killed its Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate, citing the proposed presidential budget.

Abandoning science advice

These NSF moves add to larger threats to the federal science advisory system. Since the current Trump administration started, scores of federal advisory committees at science agencies have been disbanded, frozen, or otherwise disrupted—a trend that is similar to disruptions in science advice during the president’s first term.

The pattern is alarming, not only because of the lack of science advice that government officials are now receiving, but also because the Federal science advisory committee system under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) provides an important layer of transparency and accountability for science-based decisions across the government. FACA requires committees to deliberate in public and take public comment. As a result, we in civil society have access to what science advice the government is receiving, and can hold them accountable when they don’t take it. Firing members of the National Science Board cuts science—and the public—out of the picture.

A risk for more interference in federal science

Alarmingly, firing of the qualified and vetted members of the National Science Board clears a path for the Trump administration to appoint conflicted and unqualified individuals in their stead, who could provide political cover for the Trump administration to avoid science-based and mission-aligned decisions at NSF. Such concerns are not just hypothetical. So far this term, the Trump administration has:

• Stacked the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) with tech industry CEOs;
• Filled a quarter of the seats on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board with employees of the chemical industry it regulates; and
• Illegally and secretly stood up a Climate Working Group of climate contrarians to undermine EPA’s Endangerment Finding, the scientific and legal unpinning for the agency’s climate actions, to name a few.

But who’s keeping score? (We are, in fact. And the count is up to 562 attacks on science this term.) 

The rise of independent science outside of government

We must not accept these anti-science actions. Instead, scientists across the country must resist by ensuring independent science advice continues beyond the halls of US government institutions. Thankfully, many in the scientific community have been taking matters into their own hands and stepping up to ensure science advice continues.  These independent science activities have popped up across scientific fields, with courageous scientists volunteering their time and expertise to inform and advise the public and decision-makers at all levels of government.

You can join us by opposing Trump’s unqualified and conflicted nominee to run NSF, launching an independent science advisory committee if you are in a position to do so, and staying tuned to what’s happening. We in the scientific community must watch diligently what the administration does next and insist on evidence-based decisions at NSF and beyond.  

Throughout the history of the United States, our transportation system has been funded through a host of different types of local, state, and federal taxes and fees. Those fees can largely be broken down into three different categories: 1) general government taxes, including property, sales, and income taxes; 2) user fees, which are simply fees assessed on users of the transportation system like tolls and fuel taxes; and 3) Pigouvian taxes, which are a specific category of user fees that respond to an external harm, such as congestion fees and carbon taxes.

The mix and design of these different revenue sources help shape how we think about our transportation system—who pays, why, and how much can set the tone for whose voice is represented in our transportation decisions. It can shape who benefits from our transportation system and who is ultimately responsible for bearing the costs of that system. In this blog, I walk through a number of these funding mechanisms and what each of these choices could mean for creating a more equitable transportation system.

How funding sources contribute to transportation equity

Each of the funding sources discussed below comes with its own choices, including the assessed rate and who its applied to. Those choices have a direct impact on the relative burden placed on any individual or business trying to access transportation services, and that of course means it has an impact on the equitability of our transportation system.

While user fees are not the largest source of revenue for transportation, it tends to be what people think of when they think of transportation funding. While some registration fees may be tied to vehicle value, which could have some tax progressivity, generally user fees are regressive. In the case of fuel taxes, for example, lower-income households spend a larger share of their income on transportation, generally, and on fuel, specifically, which means they are contributing disproportionately to fuel tax revenue. Additionally, because commercial vehicles do not pay their fair share of road use, private drivers at all income levels are effectively subsidizing commercial trucking.

The largest contributor to transportation funding today comes from general funding from local, state, and federal governments, at roughly 23 percent of all transportation revenue, along with an additional 29 percent of revenue that comes directly from a broad range of directed tax revenue, including from property and sales taxes. With each and every one of us having a stake in how we get around, broad public investment in our transportation system is consistent with the role government plays in the shaping of those choices. To the extent that government funding comes from income taxes, the more progressive that revenue source is likely to be. Conversely, the modern shift towards sales taxes as a growing source of government revenue increases the regressivity of government revenues. That means even general government expenditure could be adding to the disproportionate burden faced by lower-income families.

Pigouvian taxes can help shape behavior, and we’re seeing in New York City right now that putting a price on congestion can help reduce emissions and fund much-needed service upgrades for transit. At the same time, these types of taxes can look an awful lot like user fees and often need complementary policies (as in NYC with its low-income discount) to ensure they do not punish individuals facing a transportation system with limited choices.

In approaching efforts to reshape our current transportation system towards one that is more sustainable and equitable and centers people and communities, how we pay for that system must be part of that equity discussion.

Property taxes

The earliest roads in the United States were the responsibility of local governments and required property owners to provide fees and/or labor to maintain the roads. Since the local economy directly benefits from the transportation system through its provision of mobility for jobs outside the local region as well as the support for the influx of customers, goods, and services, it can make sense to tax the landowners benefiting from the value transportation provides. However, today property taxes make up just 15 percent of dedicated local government contributions to transportation and less than 4 percent of all surface transportation revenue and are primarily used for maintenance and operations. Accounting for general transfer from government funds, it is likely around 7 percent of funding, still a far cry from the U.S.’s origins.

Taxing land value derives revenue from the individuals and businesses benefiting financially from the provision of goods and services enabled by local transportation infrastructure.

A lag in property value increases from improvements can limit transportation development. Property taxes are frequently seen as a regressive funding mechanism for a range of reasons, including inaccurate property assessment, but nuances in local policies have a significant impact on the relative regressivity of specific property tax regimes. Housing restrictions can create regions of haves and have-nots for basic services, as observed during eras of “white flight” to the suburbs or modern NIMBYism.

Tolls

As the United States developed, roads began to play a more critical role in connecting cities, straining local resources for road maintenance and putting more pressure on state governments to facilitate travel. However, in the aftermath of the American Revolution states were still strapped for cash and turned towards private entities to construct and maintain their thoroughfares. From turnpikes (so called because of the pike across the road barring travel until the fee is paid) to the modern toll road, this forces users of the system to pay directly for their travel.

Today, tolls are often assessed differently according to vehicle class, which allows the toll facility to extract some additional funding from commercial vehicles due to the additional wear and tear they impose on the infrastructure. However, tolls generally do not charge for all the costs associated with vehicle traffic such as those related to congestion and pollution. They currently fund just 6 percent of transportation.

Charging users directly for road usage creates a direct relationship between the provision of a service and its cost, like many other public services (water, trash, electric power, etc.).

Tolls create a pay-for-play system that inherently favors higher income households and can impede mobility access for lower income households. Tolls do not account for the full recovery of all the harms from utilizing our roads and are frequently tied directly to the construction and upkeep of specific infrastructure without consideration of the transportation system holistically.

Registration fees

At the turn of the 20^th century, the newly developed motor vehicle numbered in the thousands in the United States. New York was the first state to require each vehicle to be licensed, back in 1901, and with the growing number of vehicles on the road, fees for vehicle registration and, eventually, licensure to drive them, became a growing source of revenue for states funding the proliferation of roads to support these vehicles. Today, vehicle and driver registration fees support about 13 percent of transportation spending.

Registration and licensing can serve safety-related purposes.

Like tolls, registration and licensing requires financial costs up front to participate in our auto-centric transportation system. While some vehicle registration may be based on vehicle or age and, therefore, may indirectly reduce fees for lower-income households, most states operate on a flat fee basis, making these regressive taxes. Moreover, registration and licensing enforcement can reinforce systemic racial bias through pretextual stops, biased penalties, and predatory fees.

Fuel taxes

Oregon was the first state in the country to implement a fuel tax to fund the development of roadways in 1919, but just a decade later fuel taxes represented over half of fees collected from drivers. The federal fuel tax was introduced in 1932 as part of a revenue act in the wake of the Great Depression but was not dedicated to transportation funding until the creation of the Highway Trust Fund in 1956. Over the course of the 20^th century, highway expansion in the United States was funded primarily through fuel taxes, and today fuel taxes account for about 24 percent of spending on roads.

Not all fuel taxes are targeted towards the highway system, however. Some state and local governments dedicate a portion of fuel tax revenue towards general spending, though it is a much smaller amount than the funding from government coffers towards highways. Additionally, a share of state and federal fuel taxes are dedicated to public transit services (about 14 and 18 percent, respectively) and cover just over 20 percent of transit expenditures nationwide.

Fuel taxes are correlated with usage of the service provided, like many other public services, and act both as a (small) incentive to improve vehicle efficiency and as a (small) disincentive against driving.

Fuel taxes are priced independently of the costs of oil and highway usage. Moreover, while there is a long history of fuel taxes being used as a revenue generator for government services, the link between fuel taxes and road use has been used (via the user-pay myth) to oppose non-highway transportation spending. Additionally, a disproportionate share of transportation expenditures for lower-incomes are spent on fuel compared to higher incomes, so fuel taxes are regressive.

Sales taxes

With federal fuel taxes unchanged for over three decades and vehicle and fuel taxes across all levels of government providing a reduced share of transportation funding, many states and localities have turned to sales taxes to close the funding gap with sales tax revenue dedicated to state and local transportation funds or even specific projects. In 1998, sales tax revenue accounted for 6 percent of all dedicated transportation funding—25 years later, it accounted for 14 percent. Including contributions from general government spending, sales taxes now likely make up at least 17 percent of transportation revenue.

Sales taxes are mode-neutral and raise revenue from participants in the local economy, which is inherently linked to the local transportation system.

Sales taxes are even more regressive than fuel taxes and are not tied in any way to transportation use or need.

Congestion pricing

Recently, more attention has been paid to the ways in which price signals via taxes and fees can affect the use of our transportation system. One of the prime examples of this is New York City’s successful deployment of its congestion fee program.

Every vehicle on the road contributes to traffic, and every additional car or truck can slow down the system overall, increasing time for other road users. Congestion pricing is designed to incentivize drivers to either shift travel to off-peak times or find alternatives.

There are many ways of designing a fee, but the important point is that it is tied to traffic flow, either through time (e.g., a different charge for peak vs. off-peak hours), current state of traffic (e.g., dynamic pricing of toll-lanes), or by zone (e.g., a fee for entering congested areas of a city).

Because congestion pricing is a specific form of tolling, some of the same concerns around regressivity/pay-to-play exist. However, exceptions related to income, as in the case of NYC’s program, can help mitigate some of these concerns. Additionally, directly connecting the funding from congestion pricing to the support of alternatives can help facilitate a transition towards less harmful, more equitable choices like transit.

Congestion pricing helps internalize the implicit subsidies our transportation system provides to drivers, better ensuring drivers pay for the real costs of driving. Additionally, most frequently congestion pricing revenues are used to directly fund alternatives, expanding mobility options for a region to help reduce the harms of high-impact traffic areas.

Congestion pricing raises many of the concerns of general tolling, so it can be regressive if additional countermeasures are not taken to mitigate these issues.

Carbon taxes

Another unpriced cost of our auto-centric transportation system is the harm from vehicle emissions. All vehicles on the road produce pollution in the form of tire and brake wear, and all combustion vehicles further contribute tailpipe pollution—all of these forms of pollution result in health harms for the local communities living near our roadways. Additionally, transportation is the largest source of heat-trapping emissions in the United States.

One of the major reasons we have such a fossil-fuel dependent transportation system is because all these harms related to vehicle pollution are not priced into the cost of transportation—drivers may pay for gas, but they don’t pay for the health costs for communities owed to the particulate matter from their tailpipes, and they certainly don’t pay for increased risks of wildfires and other climate-related disasters owed to the hundreds of billions of gallons of gasoline we combust every year in this country.

Pigouvian taxes are fees designed to internalize costs related to a cost currently uncaptured by the market. Carbon taxes are one of the most prominent ideas for how to shift the external costs of climate change back onto the source of climate pollution—in transportation, for example, drivers don’t currently pay for all the climate-related costs of driving, but if we actually added to the price per gallon of gas the monetized climate harms burning that gas in an automobile caused, that would provide a greater signal to the market to use it more efficiently and/or find alternative solutions.

Carbon taxes help internalize the implicit subsidies our transportation system provides to drivers, better ensuring drivers pay for the full costs to the climate resulting from driving.

Many of the drivers of our fossil fuel dependence are systemic, so carbon taxes run the risk of placing a regressive tax on households without choice. Mitigating this impact may involve economic rebates and/or tying revenue to more sustainable alternatives. Further, carbon taxes only address one of the many forms of pollution from vehicles; additional or expanded policies would be required to ensure the full suite of harms are addressed.

Mileage-based fees / road user charges

Fuel taxes are an indirect fee for road use—more efficient vehicles use less fuel to travel the same distance as less efficient vehicles but may result in comparable wear and tear (within similar vehicle classes). If one is interested in directly allocating the costs of the infrastructure to a vehicle, it may be preferable to simply directly charge users for that upkeep through a mileage-based fee, also referred to as road user charges (RUCs) or a vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) fee.

Some RUCs may be weight-based, which better allocates the wear and tear of the trucking industry on our nation’s roads. While there is no federal RUC, the Department of Transportation has funded a number of state-based pilot programs.

Road user charges provide a more direct connection between funding and use than fuel taxes. Additionally, because higher-income households travel more miles and have more efficient vehicles overall, shifting from a fuel tax to a RUC can be a progressive act.

Because a greater percentage of purchases for low-income households are in the forms of goods rather than services, RUCs focused on the most damaging vehicles (commercial trucks) can be even more regressive than general sales taxes.

Personal and corporate income taxes

General government funding represents the largest source of funding for transportation today, and for most states as well as the federal government, the largest source of tax revenue for this spending are taxes on personal and corporate income.

Income taxes are generally the most progressive tax, with rates typically increasing for higher income thresholds.

Exemptions for capital gains or the treatment of business income/losses can significantly reduce the tax rate of wealthier households, flattening the overall tax code.

It’s not just about where the money comes from, but where it goes

There are a host of different ways government and transportation agencies raise revenue for the provision of services, but no matter the revenue source, our system is defined by where that revenue is spent. While most sources of revenue are regressive, progressive distribution of those revenues prioritizing the mobility of lower-income households can help drive towards an equitable transportation system.

While some funding mechanisms may send price signals to users to make more sustainable choices, it’s impossible to take a choice that isn’t available. And so many around the country right now have either the option of an extremely expensive and burdensome car-dependence or underfunded transit alternatives with lengthy headways and/or insufficient coverage to access jobs and other important destinations.

The latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office continue to show that federal revenue does not match federal spending, and at current levels the system is likely to break down by 2028. As I’ve noted throughout this series, funding has failed to keep pace with our choices. But ultimately, what will bankrupt the Highway Trust Fund is not that we have failed to increase fuel taxes—it is that we have failed to support a broader array of mobility choices.

Whether the funding comes from more equitably charging drivers for their impacts or simply by digging even deeper into the Treasury coffers, the next surface transportation bill needs to fund a more holistic, diverse transportation system. Or we will continue to fail to provide folks in the US with the freedom to move.