For over 75 years, the United States has been a global leader in climate change research. In the 1950s, scientists at the University of California showed that carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were increasing and established the first long-term CO2 monitoring system, while Norman Phillips at the Institute for Advanced Studies developed the first computer model of the global climate. The U.S. soon launched three of the world’s top climate modeling centers: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in 1955 (based in Princeton since 1968); the National Science Foundation’s Boulder-based National Center for Atmospheric Research in 1960; and NASA’s New York City–based Goddard Institute for Space Studies in 1961. By 1965, it was clear—in the words of President Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee—that humankind was “unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment” with potentially “deleterious” consequences. In 1990, Congress established the U.S. Global Change Research Program to better understand these changes and figure out how to protect human, economic, and planetary health.
As climate change has grown from a distant threat to a present danger, federal support for global change research also grew: from about $1 billion in 1990 to $2.6 billion per year in the 2010s, peaking at $4.3 billion in 2023. Over the decades, NASA and NOAA have produced crucial records of changes in atmosphere, sea level, greenhouse gas emissions, and more. Among many other benefits, U.S. investments in climate research have helped cities design flood protection, farmers make cropping decisions, and communities prepare for hurricanes.
Then came the second Trump administration.
Over the past year, as part of its broader assault on governmental capacity and independent institutions, the Trump administration has withdrawn from global scientific leadership, shrunk the federal scientific workforce, and sought to defund climate research. As part of its broader politicization of nonpartisan institutions and subordination of evidence to political goals, it has scorned climate science and promoted disinformation about what it calls “climate alarmism.”
At the same time, the climate research community has begun organizing to promote genuine science and preserve U.S. participation in the global climate science community. Much more remains to be done—beginning with the recognition that the struggle to preserve climate research cannot be separated from the struggle of other scientific communities, like the public health community, nor from the broader effort to rebuild American democracy. Here’s a rundown of where things stand right now.
Targeted assaults on climate institutions
The attack on climate science started with a deluge of funding cuts, cancellations, and layoffs.
In February, NASA canceled the contract by which the U.S. was supporting the technical support unit for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s mitigation working group. The administration subsequently fired all the State Department staff responsible for international climate diplomacy, including for governmental engagement with the IPCC. (In January 2026, the Trump administration formally announced that the U,S. government would no longer participate in the IPCC and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change—memorializing a state of affairs that already existed in practice.)
The administration also dissolved the U.S. Global Change Research Program, or USGCRP, which is responsible both for interagency coordination of U.S. climate research and for producing a quadrennial U.S. National Climate Assessment. Authors for the Sixth National Climate Assessment, of whom I was one, were selected in mid-2024. In April 2025, the administration fired all the USGCRP support staff, dismissed the assessment’s approximately 400 authors, and eventually turned off the USGCRP website and removed the previous quarter-century of National Climate Assessments from the internet.
DOGE early-exit incentives decimated the National Weather Service and took out about one-third of staff at the Energy Information Administration, a key source of information for understanding the state of the U.S. energy system.
In September, the Environmental Protection Agency announced plans to end the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, which is essential to tracking national and state-level greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. Geological Survey moved to shut down three of its regional Climate Adaptation Science Centers. The Arctic Research Consortium of the United States shut down after nearly four decades of connecting U.S. and international Arctic researchers, Indigenous communities, and other stakeholders.
The three flagship U.S. climate-modeling centers have all been targeted too. In April, NOAA cut $4 million in funding for the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, claiming that the lab promotes “exaggerated and implausible climate threats” and “climate anxiety.” In May, NASA evicted the Goddard Institute for Space Studies from its 59-year home on the Columbia campus, iconically located above the Seinfeld diner. GISS has yet to find a new building, and the federal government remains on the hook to Columbia for the lease—so the eviction has resulted in zero taxpayer savings, merely a transfer of expense from one federal agency to another.
The GISS eviction perhaps served as a model for a broader assault on science as a whole. In June, the administration decided to evict the entire National Science Foundation from its building in Alexandria, Virginia. Like the GISS scientists, NSF staff are now working remotely while a new office is being sought. In December, the White House Office of Management and Budget announced that the administration would dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a leading global center not only for climate modeling but also for atmospheric and space weather research more broadly. Announcing the move, OMB Director Russell Vought called NCAR “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.” The administration made no pretense that this decision originated with the science agency, which rushed to catch up with the White House announcement.
The president’s vision for the federal budget
All these extraordinary actions came in addition to more pedestrian and constitutional approaches to budget cuts. The president’s Fiscal Year 2026 proposed budget, released in May 2025, was explicitly advertised as “ending the Green New Scam” and “eliminating funding for the globalist climate agenda.” At NSF, the proposed budget cut geosciences funding by more than 40 percent, ocean observations by about 80 percent, and projects explicitly related to global change research by 97 percent. At NASA, the budget cut science funding in general and earth science funding in particular by about half. At NOAA, it eliminated the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. At the U.S. Geological Survey, it eliminated the ecosystems program, which supports most of the agency’s climate-related work. At the Department of Energy, it cut the Biological and Environmental Research program by about 60 percent, effectively eliminating the “Environmental” part. Of course, the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to appropriate funds. And on a bipartisan basis, Congress pushed back on the top-line cuts to science-funding agencies. Underneath those top lines, however, within some limited specific constraints from Congress, it seems likely the administration will direct spending following the priorities laid out in the budget request, and many of the programs targeted for cuts in the proposed budget could continue to be crippled. For climate research, the outlook remains grim. Graduate programs, for instance, are essential to building the next generation of American researchers. Yet in the face of a deeply uncertain funding environment, many programs are unwilling to make the multiyear commitments required to bring promising new applicants on board.
Censorship and propaganda
Meanwhile, the administration has been working to control and censor the scientific process across multiple fields, especially public health and climate science. Two executive orders, one issued in May and one in August, require each federal agency to have a senior political appointee sign off on scientific information and approve funding opportunity announcements and grants. NSF—which among all funding agencies has most jealously protected the autonomy of its funding decisions from political micromanagement—is adopting a new structure that reduces the agency’s access to scientific expertise and weakens its independence. The administration has shut down government websites like GlobalChange.gov and Climate.gov, while also removing National Park Service displays about climate change.
It has also begun actively promoting scientific misinformation about climate change. Last July, in support of the administration’s attempt to reject the 16-year-old EPA finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare, DOE released a report that read like a time capsule of climate denial from the early 2000s, full of oversimplification, cherry-picking, omissions, straw-man arguments, and simple errors. The report was not peer-reviewed in a manner that would meet the legal standard for inclusion in EPA rulemaking, and was also written in violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires advisory committees to hold public meetings, comply with open records requirements, conduct broad outreach for nominees, and be balanced in viewpoint.
After the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists sued, DOE quietly dissolved the committee that wrote the report. The final February 2026 EPA rule attempting to repeal the endangerment finding chose to rely only on legal arguments, not contesting the science at all. Meanwhile, there are persistent rumors—including within DOE emails—that the Trump administration will be reconstituting USGCRP to promote climate denial, potentially attempting to write a National Climate Assessment on the cheap with a handful of climate-skeptic authors and large language model assistance.
The broader autocratic and anti-science turn
The targeted assault on climate research has, of course, taken place in a broader context of growing authoritarianism. In 2025, many prominent universities had federal grants withheld to force the schools to adopt certain policies and even curricular changes. Climate research is not the only target of official disinformation: Led by a prominent anti-science conspiracist, the Department of Health and Human Services has fostered confusion about vaccines and autism, while undermining the process for funding biomedical research.
Meanwhile, international graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are choosing not to come to a country where they are told that they don’t have free speech rights and could find themselves disappeared for months into a semi-secret detention system. Proposed changes to the student visa system could prevent international students from staying long enough to complete a Ph.D., and a hefty new fee for H-1B visas could effectively block universities from recruiting faculty from outside the U.S.
International researchers are also choosing to avoid trips to the U.S. The annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, or AGU, the world’s largest association of earth and space scientists, saw 30 percent fewer attendees this past December than in 2024. Other conferences are choosing to relocate outside the U.S. so as not to deter international colleagues.
Candles in the dark
But the scientific community is fighting back. AGU has—perhaps surprisingly for such a large professional association—leaned into the “union” part of its name. It joined labor union–led litigation in support of federal scientific workers, and it has also provided backbone for a couple of initiatives to support climate assessment.
When it first became apparent that the U.S. was withdrawing from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a coalition of U.S. academic institutions with IPCC observer status (including my own institution, Rutgers University) worked with AGU to form the U.S. Academic Alliance for the IPCC. The alliance nominated experts for participation in the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report and worked with philanthropies to ensure that selected U.S. authors have funds to travel to IPCC meetings. As a result, despite the U.S. government withdrawal, the IPCC has a full complement of scientists participating in this cycle. (I am one of those scientists.)
When the Trump administration shut down the Sixth National Climate Assessment, AGU and the American Meteorological Society launched a cross-journal U.S. Climate Collection to solicit synthesis papers that will inform future assessments of climate risks and solutions in the U.S. This project (for which I’m now on the steering committee) is not a substitute for the legally required National Climate Assessment, which needs tens of millions of dollars and extensive stakeholder engagement to do properly. But it’s an opportunity to strengthen the foundations for future assessments—perhaps even to think about how assessments can be done better in the future.
Scientists are also mobilizing to counter the administration’s misinformation. When DOE put out its disinformation-rich “critical review” in July, Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M asked on Bluesky whether there would be a coordinated response. He ended up coordinating it. I joined a couple of weeks later to help him coordinate. By the time DOE’s call for comments on the 141-page report closed, a little over a month after its first public release of the report, 85 authors had produced a comprehensive, 450-page technical review.
Elsewhere in the scientific community, teams are working to preserve environmental data and maintain climate services abandoned by the federal government.
Where to go from here
But efforts to preserve U.S. leadership in climate research will fail if they are undertaken in isolation. The scientific enterprise expands human knowledge through an iterative process of open collaboration and structured critique. That process is not sustainable in a closed, illiberal society in which scientific fact is subordinated to political power.
The scientific community has long tried to act as though it were apolitical. This myth was credible when all parties, left and right, subscribed to a shared set of liberal values—a society where it was agreed, as Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan wrote, that “real patriots ask questions.”
With American politics fracturing between supporters of liberal democracy and of autocracy, that myth is no longer viable. Like neighbors in Minnesota standing vigil together, the climate research community needs to stand in solidarity with other targets within the scientific community (such as the public health community) and beyond. Collaboration between geoscience professional organizations, health professional organizations like the American Public Health Association and the American Academy of Pediatricians, and labor unions like the American Association of University Professors would be a good step in this direction.
The research community also needs better strategy. When opposition to the Trump administration has succeeded, it has been focused around specific, relatable issues with strong polling. For example, Minnesotans’ defense of their neighbors and the summary executions of Renee Good and Alex Pretti have solidified public opinion against mass deportations; as of late January, only 37 percent of U.S. adults approved of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and a plurality supported its abolition.
Rallying public opinion requires a focusing event and well-selected framing. It is too easy to get lost in the details of the assault on climate research that I’ve discussed above. The scientific community is committed to evidence-based reasoning, and we need evidence to design effective messaging in defense of climate science. That might mean making specific bad actors like Russell Vought, the mastermind behind Project 2025 and the Trump administration’s budget cuts, a symbol of scientific destruction the way RFK Jr. has become the symbol of disastrous public health policy. It might also mean rallying around public institutions, like NCAR, which the administration is seeking to scrap and sell off in parts to the private sector.
Whatever the case, it’s clear that saving American climate science—and American science in general—requires that the community discard the myth of political neutrality, engage in a concerted defense of liberal democracy, and stand in solidarity with this administration’s other targets.
