Trump’s climate threats rattle world’s biggest science meeting
By Zack Colman, Chelsea Harvey
Researchers attending the American Geophysical Union conference worry their work could disappear when a president who rejects climate science takes office.
Censorship. Funding cuts. Layoffs.
Those concerns loom over the world’s largest conference of climate scientists as they brace for whiplash at the White House when President-elect Donald Trump takes office in six weeks. Trump has recently said climate change isn’t happening, called it a hoax and joked that rising seas would create more coastal real estate — all in contradiction to the work of the 25,000 researchers attending the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in downtown Washington this week.
“Everybody at AGU is nervous,” Jill Brandenberger, climate security program manager at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, said in an interview. “The unknown is what makes people nervous.”
Some scientists like Brandenberger say they’re confident that government research would survive in some form — much as it did during Trump’s first term, when many federal websites erased references to climate change, even as agency work largely plodded on. Yet they’re girding for changes. They expect priorities to shift from the Biden administration, which placed an emphasis on climate change and improving public health through rules to curb pollution from fossil fuels.
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“He won the popular vote, he won every swing state, and almost every county in the United States swung right in this election,” said Caitlin Bergstrom, AGU’s program manager for science policy and government relations. “So it is something to keep in mind as we’re thinking about this kind of work that this wasn’t a fluke.”
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The announcement of Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has also fueled angst. Led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the commission is tasked with shrinking the government through funding cuts, sparking fears that federal climate science initiatives may be among the first to face the chopping block.
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‘Bad things happening’
But this time, Trump has tapped loyalists for Cabinet posts and as advisers who might be less willing to resist his impulses, including former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin, who was picked to lead EPA, and energy executive Chris Wright, who was named to head DOE.
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‘Incredibly worried’
NASA employees are already concerned about job security following two rounds of mass layoffs at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in February and November of this year. The announcement of Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has raised new concerns among federal scientists.
“Everyone’s demoralized,” the NASA scientist said, adding that Musk’s potential influence at the agency — particularly his dream of sending a crewed exploration team to Mars — might affect NASA’s Earth science programs or compete with climate programs for funding.
Legal experts attending the conference dished advice to anxious scientists on subjects ranging from lobbying laws to the possibility of mass layoffs. The latter has been a concern for years — Trump issued an executive order at the end of his first term, known as Schedule F, that would have reclassified federal workers to make it easier for them to be fired or replaced. That plan, which experts expect Trump to revive, is a centerpiece of Project 2025.
“I had people come in last AGU worried about this,” said Chris Marchesano, a staff attorney with the nonprofit Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. “We’ve been hearing a lot from scientists who are incredibly worried.”
Yet even as federal scientists brace for the worst, many are already considering strategies to protect their research and safeguard scientific integrity.
