Part 1: The Purge of Climate from All Federal Programs
By Bob Sussman
Bob Sussman was Deputy Administrator of EPA during 1993-1994 and Senior Policy Counsel to the Administrator during 2009-2013.
Few were surprised when Donald Trump announced on Inauguration Day that the United States was withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on climate change. After all, Trump had taken the same action early in his first term, and during the campaign he repeatedly referred to climate action as the “green new scam.” Observers also expected Trump to roll back climate rules issued by the Biden Administration, again in keeping with his first-term efforts to weaken Obama-era regulations reducing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, vehicles, and oil and gas production.
However, Trump’s first-term playbook on climate change has been replaced by a more alarming and destructive agenda. Its centerpiece is EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s March 12 announcement that the Agency plans to reverse its seminal 2009 endangerment finding for greenhouse gases, and then repeal all regulations and policies based on it. With this announcement, the Administration mounted a frontal assault on the legitimacy of all government action on climate change and underscored its determination to target all federal climate programs for extinction.
The Endangerment Finding, In Danger
Developed in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision, the endangerment finding provides a legal and scientific foundation for reducing greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act and justifies a host of other government initiatives to address the causes and effects of climate change. The finding aligned the United States with the global consensus in support of collective action to slow climate change, and paved the way for American leadership in negotiating the Paris Agreement. The core of the finding was a comprehensive review of climate science that supported several powerful conclusions: that the earth is warming largely because of manmade emissions, that warming trends are harmful to human health and welfare, and that these impacts are expected to worsen as higher levels of greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere.
During its first term, the Trump team periodically questioned the science behind these conclusions, and even considered convening a “red team-blue team” process that would provide a platform for dissenting voices to debate mainstream scientists. Ultimately these efforts were aborted, perhaps because of fear they would backfire, and the Administration tacitly accepted the scientific and legal basis for the endangerment finding and EPA regulation of greenhouse gases.
While the pace of emission reductions slowed, climate continued to play a role, albeit a reduced one, in many government programs, and agencies continued to conduct and fund climate-related scientific research, develop mitigation and adaptation programs, and engage with the global scientific community.
But this limited space for climate science and policy has now vanished, replaced by a fanatical aversion to any acknowledgement of climate change and a sweeping purge of all climate programs administered or funded by the federal government.
Embracing this approach, Zeldin’s March 12 announcement boasted that reversing the endangerment finding “represents the death of the Green New Scam and” and “drives a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion” by eliminating its “holy grail.” The unmistakable message was that the endangerment finding was the product of misguided religious faith rather than science and climate change believers are heretics and worshippers of false idols who should not be tolerated in the public space.
This astonishing inversion of faith and science dismisses not only decades of peer-reviewed scientific research, but also recent opinion polling that shows nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults are concerned about global warming and nearly half of Americans believe global warming will pose a serious threat to themselves or their way of life during their lifetimes.
Despite Zeldin’s inflammatory choice of words, the scientists, economists, lawyers, and engineers who work on climate change are likely not in physical danger. But the Administration has other tools to stigmatize beliefs and actions it does not like and silence those who espouse them. As we’ve seen in its assaults on “diversity, equity and inclusion” and “environmental justice” initiatives, Trump and his team have no qualms about banning words and phrases they deem taboo, shutting down programs that promote disfavored policies and firing their employees, and withholding federal funding from offending state and local governments. It is now using these methods to banish climate policy and science from all activities of the federal government.
Dismantling U.S. Climate Science
Before the election, Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025 and now director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote that “the Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.” This unwinding is now well underway and has already assumed frightening proportions:
- Recently leaked plans call for closing the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a mainstay of federal climate research, and ending grant funding for climate, weather and ocean laboratories and cooperative institutes at major research universities. According to Tom Gilman, a senior Commerce Department official in the first Trump term and 2024 campaign advisor, slashing NOAA’s climate research programs would eliminate a “colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”
- The Secretary of Defense has ordered the cancellation of climate-related studies and reports and called for a review of both mission statements and military planning documents to ensure there are no “references to climate change and related subjects.” The Secretary said that the Department of Defense (DOD) “does not do climate change crap” and the Pentagon’s spokesperson elaborated that “climate zealotry and other woke chimeras of the Left are not part of [DOD’s] core mission.” Previous DOD work on climate focused on the impacts of changes in weather patterns and temperatures on force readiness and the resiliency of military installations and weapon systems.
- The administration is eliminating funding and staff for the Global Change Research Program (GCRP), established by Congress in 1990 to coordinate climate research and analysis among 14 federal agencies and outside scientists. The Program’s mission includes preparing a National Climate Assessment every four years, which analyzes the effects of rising temperatures on human health, agriculture, energy production, water resources, transportation and other elements of national life. The Administration has now dismissed nearly 400 contributors to the Assessment, leaving the future of the report in grave doubt.
- The National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, recently decided to stop funding research on the health effects of climate change. NIH employees were instructed to tell researchers to “remove all mention” of climate change and other prohibited topics from their funding proposals.
- The Commerce Department recently announced it was cutting nearly $4 million in federal funding at Princeton University for climate change research to study sea-level rise and coastal flooding. Even though one of its principal researchers was awarded a Nobel Prize, the Department asserted that this program “promotes exaggerated and implausible climate threats, contributing to a phenomenon known as ‘climate anxiety,’ which has increased significantly among America’s youth.” It added that the program’s “focus on alarming climate scenarios fosters fear rather than rational, balanced discussion” and that “[u]sing federal funds to perpetuate these narratives does not align with the priorities of this Administration.”
- The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently canceled its Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, a $3.1 billion competitive grant program to incentivize farming practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enable meat, vegetables, livestock feed and timber to be marketed as “climate-smart.” The Secretary of Agriculture condemned the program as a “slush fund” created to “advance the green new scam at the benefit of NGOs, not American farmers.” USDA employees have also been ordered to remove pages referring to climate change from agency websites.
- The Federal Emergency Management Agency is canceling its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program (BRIC), the biggest climate adaptation initiative the federal government has ever funded, which awarded nearly $1 billion in 2023 to cities and states to identify and mitigate their vulnerabilities to climate-related disasters.
- EPA is eliminating its Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP) for nearly all industrial sources. The program, which stems from a 2009 congressional directive, requires thousands of facilities to submit annual reports of the amounts of carbon dioxide, methane and other climate-warming gases they emit. These reports are critical for quantifying the contribution of different sectors and individual plants to the U.S. greenhouse gas inventory and to track changes in emissions over time. Administrator Zeldin’s March 12 announcement described the GHGRP as “burdensome” and claimed it has hurt our “ability to achieve the American Dream.”
- EPA’s sweeping reorganization plan, announced by the Administrator on May 5, targets for elimination its Office of Atmospheric Protection, which was responsible for numerous climate programs, including GHGRP reporting, EPA’s annual national inventory of greenhouse gas emissions and sinks, and Energy Star and other climate partnership initiatives with industry and states.
- The Administration has included “climate crisis,” “clean energy,” “climate science,” and similar phrases on its list of prohibited terms that agency employees and recipients of federal funding must remove from websites, funding proposals, reports, guidance and regulations, and other program documents.
Over the last few decades, there has been bipartisan support for U.S. investment in climate research, adaptation, and low-emission technologies, even as emission reduction mandates have been controversial and subject to legal challenge. Many of the programs Trump is now eliminating have been mandated by Congress, supported by Republican and Democratic administrations alike, and funded through the annual appropriations process.
Experts have opined that Trump’s unilateral withholding of funds for these programs despite their authorization by Congress violates the constitutional separation of powers, and some courts have stepped in to prevent the Administration from cutting off mandated climate funding. However, Congress has not forcefully defended endangered climate programs, and the purge of these programs and their employees will likely gather steam as the Administration’s plans to downsize agencies, fire federal workers, and slash budgets are carried out. Unchecked, the end result will be the near-total disappearance of climate research, policy and regulation from the federal government, making the U.S. an extreme outlier in a world that otherwise remains committed to action to slow global warming and its consequences.
In Part Two, I explain why the coming battle over the endangerment finding may force a public reckoning over climate science that the Trump Administration may lose if it continues to insist that belief in climate change is a dangerous religion lacking any scientific support.