\n <\/p>\n
At the US Environmental Protection Agency, scientists say proposed cuts will gut research. <\/span>Credit: Eric Lee\/Bloomberg via Getty<\/span><\/p>\n For 30 years, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has conducted controlled air-pollution studies at a state-of-the-art facility at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The facility is equipped to test numerous airborne pollutants, including ozone, diesel, wildfire smoke and chlorine. Data collected in its chambers have been pivotal to establishing stricter air-quality standards for deadly pollutants, and have been instrumental in protecting the health of people in the United States.<\/p>\n However, in February, shortly after US President Donald Trump took office, the EPA \u2014 which is charged with protecting the nation\u2019s environment and its people\u2019s health \u2014 notified the university that it would not be renewing its lease. By May, research had ceased. \u201cThere are no other places with the capability of doing these studies on the wide range of pollutants that the Chapel Hill facility does,\u201d says Robert Devlin, a former EPA researcher who worked at the facility until recently. In August, after almost 40 years at the agency, Devlin retired when his appointment was not renewed.<\/p>\n How your research can survive a US federal grant termination<\/p>\n<\/p>\n The exposure laboratory was under the purview of the EPA\u2019s Office of Research and Development (ORD), which pursued a broad swathe of independent research into air and water quality, toxicology, homeland security and waste management. It has been hit particularly hard by cuts the Trump administration has made to federal agency science. Internal documents suggest that lay-offs and voluntary early-retirement programmes have already reduced ORD\u2019s 1,600-person staff by one-third.<\/p>\n The remnants of ORD are expected to be folded into a new Office of Applied Science and Environmental Solutions (OASES) that reports directly to the EPA administrator, a presidential appointee. The reorganization has spooked agency scientists, who fear that research priorities might end up being set according to a political agenda. \u201cOne value that the EPA\u2019s ORD provided was independent scientific review of proposed regulatory actions,\u201d says former EPA toxicologist George Woodall, who retired in September after receiving a termination notice.<\/p>\n In addition to cuts at the EPA, the administration has already cut or proposed cutting more than US$50 billion in research funding across the nation\u2019s science agencies, with research on climate, ecosystems, renewable energy and health disparities particularly affected. Although the administration characterizes the cuts and reorganizations of federal research programmes as realigning them with the president\u2019s priorities, critics say the aim is to remove environmental and health protections and other regulatory safeguards. The cuts to EPA staffing are \u201cthe biggest blow that agency has ever had\u201d, says Christopher Sellers at Stony Brook University in New York, who interviews EPA scientists for the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a watchdog group for US federal environmental data.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not just EPA. Science is being destroyed across many agencies,\u201d says a senior ORD official who was put on administrative leave in June. It remains to be seen whether Congress will pass Trump\u2019s proposed budget request for 2026.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, a US government shutdown has been in place since 1 October, after lawmakers failed to agree on a funding bill for the current fiscal year. As Nature went to press, the shutdown had stretched into its fifth week, with no end in sight. Some 4,000 federal agency workers have been laid off since it began, with plans to reach around 10,000, according to the Office of Management and Budget.<\/p>\n Demonstrators protest against US President Donald Trump\u2019s plans to slash NASA\u2019s budget.<\/span>Credit: Graeme Sloan\/Bloomberg via Getty<\/span><\/p>\n At the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 1,300 employees, including many investigating disease outbreaks and collecting data on infectious diseases, were fired on 10 October; roughly half of those were subsequently rehired. Agency watchdogs are concerned that cuts to CDC staff have paved the way for efforts to spread misinformation. On 22 September, the secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and Trump made a series of controversial claims about autism, most notably that use of the painkiller acetaminophen (also known as paracetamol) during pregnancy is a suspected cause \u2014 a claim that global public-health bodies say is not backed up by scientific evidence.<\/p>\n As agencies lose scientific expertise and evidence-based guidance, the knock-on effects will be widespread and costly \u2014 to the economy, the environment, public health and the broader research enterprise. Agency scientists say the cuts will compromise a swathe of resources and initiatives, including hurricane forecasting, air-quality improvements, public protections against chemical exposure and efforts to monitor endangered species \u2014 science that falls under the government\u2019s purview to protect citizens and the environment.<\/p>\n Non-government entities and academic scientists typically cannot conduct coordinated research at the scale needed to inform US policy. Scientific agencies\u2019 institutional knowledge will take years, if not decades, to replace, current and former federal scientists say. And early-career researchers fear that the cuts to federal agency science and funding will hurt their long-term career prospects.<\/p>\n Nature spoke to 19 current and former federal agency scientists, covering the EPA, the CDC, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the US Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to find out what agency-directed research has been lost and what that will mean for the United States. Many of those currently employed by these agencies requested anonymity for fear of retribution. Nature contacted all six agencies for comment, but the CDC, NOAA, NIH and USGS did not respond.<\/p>\n Beyond air and water pollution, the EPA oversees tests to determine whether new chemicals \u2014 more than 2,000 of which enter commercial use each year \u2014 are hazardous to human health. EPA scientists expect that the Integrated Risk Information System, an EPA database of chemical data and risks, will be dismantled \u2014 a move industry groups have long been pushing for. This would \u201cput the agency in a reactive rather than proactive mode\u201d when it comes to chemical safety, says Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, a former ORD principal deputy assistant administrator for science.<\/p>\n On top of that, research on pressing environmental concerns has come to a standstill. At the EPA, a series of strategic planning meetings intended to map out future research priorities have not taken place. \u201cWe were really humming along,\u201d says the senior ORD official, noting that the office was making progress on prioritizing research on PFAS, also known as forever chemicals, and microplastics. Determining how these pollutants get into the environment \u201cwould require the kind of research only EPA can do\u201d, they add.<\/p>\n When Nature asked the EPA for a response to the numerous criticisms about cuts to research programmes, a spokesperson pointed to the creation of OASES, \u201cwhich will allow EPA to prioritize research and gold-standard science more than ever before and put it at the forefront of rule-makings and technical assistance to states\u201d.<\/p>\n Scientists at NASA also worry that crucial efforts to track the health of the planet (and its inhabitants) will not continue \u2014 among them, efforts to monitor greenhouse-gas emissions. \u201cOne of the first things I worry about is environmental monitoring,\u201d says Jack Kaye, a former associate director for research at the Earth Science Division of NASA\u2019s Science Mission Directorate, which is based in Washington DC. Field campaigns to track air pollutants, for example, require dozens of sophisticated instruments to monitor chemicals and meteorological conditions synchronously on land, in the air and from space, often for weeks at a time and with the involvement of multiple, sometimes international, partners, says Kaye.<\/p>\n Jack Kaye says budget cuts are \u2018devastating\u2019.<\/span>Credit: Yaitza Luna-Cruz<\/span><\/p>\n Trump\u2019s 2026 budget proposal \u2014 a spending blueprint currently in legislative limbo owing to the government shutdown \u2014 cuts dozens of active and planned NASA missions. One casualty is the pair of Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellites, which are key to tracking global carbon dioxide emissions, spotting early signs of drought and monitoring plant health. When asked about how this might compromise NASA\u2019s ability to monitor the environment, a NASA spokesperson pointed to the president\u2019s budget request, which says the satellites are not aligned with Trump\u2019s priorities and are \u201cclimate missions beyond their prime mission\u201d.<\/p>\n NOAA has a similar global remit, investigating the complex relationship between the oceans and atmosphere. Investigating climate change has become a key research area, says Craig McLean, a former NOAA assistant administrator for research, who is based in Silver Spring, Maryland. In an effort to understand how the oceans shape the climate, he says, \u201cWe built satellites, ships, drifters, floats, gliders, models and other expertise.\u201d But the Trump administration\u2019s budget proposes axing the entire budget for NOAA\u2019s office of oceanic and atmospheric research, a move Kaye calls \u201cdevastating\u201d for the nation\u2019s climate research.<\/p>\n \u2018We were ready for this\u2019: meet the scientists suing the Trump administration to reinstate terminated grants<\/p>\n<\/p>\n The administration also proposed closing NOAA\u2019s 10 research labs and 16 cooperative institutes, which focus on different research areas. One, the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML), based in Miami, Florida, models hurricanes using observations from \u2018hurricane hunter\u2019 flights, drones and gliders, says Robert Atlas, a former director of AOML. \u201cFlying through a hurricane? I don\u2019t see anyone else doing that,\u201d adds McLean.<\/p>\n On the basis of previous calculations, the loss of those observations would translate to a 20\u201340% decrease in hurricane forecast accuracy, which would result in not only increased economic losses \u2014 of $5 billion for each major hurricane striking the country \u2014 but also increased loss of life, says Atlas. These cuts seem to have been a bridge too far; the House of Representatives and the Senate have pressed forward with legislation to protect NOAA\u2019s research labs and cooperative institutes.<\/p>\n But not every agency has received congressional protection. At the USGS, the Ecosystems Mission Area, which monitors the health of species, communities and ecosystems, has been targeted for closure. The president\u2019s 2026 budget request eliminated almost $300 million in funding for this area, which is responsible for studying invasive species, ecosystem restoration, wildlife disease and biodiversity, among other things.<\/p>\n The USGS \u201cdoes science to help preserve natural resources and public lands for the nation\u201d, says an anonymous USGS researcher. \u201cWe\u2019re not doing science for science\u2019s sake; it\u2019s about ensuring these resources are there for the next generation.\u201d For example, the USGS conducts two major bird monitoring efforts, which both collect population data on hundreds of species, to inform conservation efforts and hunting regulations. \u201cAcademia isn\u2019t going to run a bird survey,\u201d says Sam Droege, a wildlife biologist who works at the USGS Bee Lab in Laurel, Maryland. \u201cYou don\u2019t get tenure doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n Scientists across several agencies are raising the alarm about the administration\u2019s push to shut down a wealth of climate-based research. One of the worst transgressions, say researchers, is Trump\u2019s attempt to overturn a 2009 EPA finding that CO2 and other greenhouse gases harm human health. This legal finding, called the endangerment finding, authorizes the EPA to regulate these gases as part of the 1963 Clean Air Act, which empowers the agency to establish and enforce air-quality standards.<\/p>\n \u201cNow they are starting to proffer misinformation and putting a government seal on it,\u201d says McLean. Agency scientists say that this, along with the decision to halt nearly all national climate-change research, will result in the country being unable to adapt to climate extremes, which will bring huge losses in food production and, ultimately, greater loss of human lives during natural disasters.<\/p>\n In response to these criticisms, an EPA spokesperson wrote that the EPA\u2019s proposal to rescind the endangerment finding is legal in nature and that \u201cthe agency considered a variety of sources and information in assessing whether the predictions made, and assumptions used, in the 2009 Endangerment Finding are accurate and consistent with the limits on EPA\u2019s authority under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act\u201d.<\/p>\n At the US Environmental Protection Agency, scientists say proposed cuts will gut research. Credit: Eric Lee\/Bloomberg via Getty For 30 years, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has conducted controlled air-pollution studies at a state-of-the-art facility at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The facility is equipped to test numerous airborne pollutants, including<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32153,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[10227,216,15161,319,516],"class_list":{"0":"post-32152","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-agencies","9":"tag-destroy","10":"tag-dismantling","11":"tag-federal","12":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32152\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/32153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Environmental monitoring at risk<\/h2>\n
Reclaiming the narrative<\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"