Union of Concerned Scientists Global Warming

Imagine it’s June and a tropical depression has formed in the Atlantic Ocean. Over the course of a few days, it develops into a tropical storm over the Caribbean Sea, threatening coastal communities along the Gulf of Mexico.

The tropical storm then travels over warmer-than-usual Gulf waters, where it undergoes a rapid intensification cycle (or two), jumping to a Category 3 or 4 storm overnight. Ferocious wind speeds and catastrophic storm surge threaten homes and people across the Gulf. Communities in the hurricane’s path need to evacuate to safety, but reliable projections and forecasts of storm surge, precipitation, wind and storm movement speed, as well as estimates on where the storm will likely make landfall, aren’t available.  

First responders, emergency managers, regional authorities, businesses, and residential communities no longer have the critical information they need to protect vital infrastructure and safely evacuate people in harm’s way. It’s unavailable because of firings, downsizing, grounding of hurricane hunters and weather balloons, and shuttering computational infrastructure and data services at the National Weather Service (NWS), all of which is creating a void of life-saving information during the time of the year when climate change is making summers ever more dangerous and deadly. 

These dire circumstances have not yet come to pass, but the Trump administration’s extensive and ongoing attacks on science, including further cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) threatened in the President’s skinny budget, make it a likely scenario during this year’s Danger Season.

Danger Season runs yearly from May through October and is a time when extreme weather events, made worse each year by climate change, are at their peak in the US and increasingly likely to collide. But this year, on top of weather and climate dangers, we have the added risk of not having the best possible science that can warn and protect us from extreme weather events, due to the decimation underway of staff and resources at NOAA and the NWS.

Five former NWS directors have sounded the alarm about how dangerous this could be for the lives of people across the country. And as I wrote before these ill-advised cuts started, a strong and independent NOAA is essential to keep us safe from extreme weather and climate change. In this post, I examine how President Trump’s cuts are degrading extreme weather science and our ability to stay safe in a world made increasingly dangerous by ongoing fossil fuel use and climate change. 

1. Grounded weather balloons degrade weather forecasts 

The NWS relies on many different tools to monitor weather conditions, including sophisticated technology like Doppler radar, satellites, aircraft reports, and automated surface observation systems. Despite these advancements, weather balloons equipped with an instrument called a radiosonde remain the most effective method for measuring temperature, wind, relative humidity, and atmospheric pressure at higher altitudes. 

Since February 27, 2025, when the first suspension of weather balloon launches at the Kotzebue (AK) weather forecasting office (WFO) was announced, more cancellations of, or reductions in the number of weather balloons have taken place. As of this writing, the WFOs in Riverton (WY), Grand Junction (CO), North Platte (NE), Green Bay (WI), and Gaylord (MI) all have reduced the number of balloons to one per day. Rapid City (SD), Omana (NE), Albany (NY), and the Gray (ME) WFOs have suspended their balloon launches altogether. 

Weather balloon launches in many Weather Forecasting Offices have been reduced or suspended since late February 2025. Source: Union of Concerned Scientists

And the impact of their absence is not speculative; weather balloon cutbacks have already degraded forecasting. For example, in mid-April while tornado warnings across eastern Nebraska were ultimately issued in time, additional data that can only come from radiosondes could have helped identify the tornado threats sooner.  

When there are no additional data collected for rapidly-evolving events such as a tornado outbreak, forecasters may not have enough information to accurately update emergency alerts. In the same instance in Nebraska, staffing shortages limited what are usually multiple balloon launches to just one launch at 3PM, skipping a second one at 7PM.

“We didn’t get to see how the atmosphere had evolved between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. to understand how did the atmosphere evolve so that now we’re getting tornadoes instead of hail.”

Chris Vanasky, NWS

It is a truly frightening situation, and one we fear could play on repeat as the Trump administration carries out its anti-science, pro-fossil fuel agenda. 

2. MIC drops (not cool like literal mic drops) leave 78 million people at risk 

Meteorologists-in-Charge (MIC) bring senior operational leadership and expertise to the business of weather forecasting at NWS. They do quite a bit—from directing and managing staff, including those issuing weather warnings and providing forecast services, to serving as the main point of contact with local emergency managers before and during severe weather events. MICs make sure the quality of warnings and watches are up to standard. They also control communications between, for example, NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center and local WFOs during severe weather. Just like any other place where experienced senior leadership is valued, their expertise is critical in keeping WFOs running smoothly.  

But the administration is dropping MICs across the country, and unlike literal and beloved microphone drops, MIC drops do not signal confidence in a great performance. On the contrary, firing MICs signals that people across the United States should expect to endure more uncertainty and degradation in the life-saving services that our NWS—paid for with our tax dollars—has provided to the public for decades. 

As of May 6, 2025, the Trump administration had fired Meteorologists in Charge (MIC) from 30 Weather Forecasting Offices covering 796 counties in the US. Union of Concerned Scientists.

As of early May, 30 out of the 122 WFOs did not have MICs on staff due to firings. This represents 25% of all WFOs, leaving nearly 78 million people in the 796 counties covered by these WFOs without the experienced leadership of MICs. That’s 23% of the 2021 US population, a number that is expected to increase as the Trump administration continues its scorched-earth approach to dismantling the federal scientific enterprise we all rely on daily whether we realize it or not.  

As of May 7, 2025, Weather Forecasting Offices without a Meteorologist in Charge due to Trump firings are depriving 78 million people across the country from critical expertise and leadership in weather forecasting. Union of Concerned Scientists, National Weather Service, and US Census Bureau. 3. Trump administration’s FEMA and HUD cuts are putting people in harm’s way 

Reduced weather balloon launchings and fired MICs are just two of the ways the Trump administration’s actions are endangering people as we head into Danger Season. The list is long and growing, as we learn more about the cuts and their implications for extreme weather forecasting.

Degradation of the NWS’ alert and response capacity is making it harder for everyday people to cope with the frequent heat waves, hurricanes, floods, and wildfires that threaten us during Danger Season.  And with similarly devastating, illegal, and ill-advised cuts at key agencies and offices such as FEMA and HUD, it will be harder for people to recover after these events or mitigate future risk.

As in previous years, this Danger Season state and local governments will be put under enormous financial pressure as they attempt to respond to increasingly extreme weather. At the household level, the financial precarity caused by disasters will be compounded by market instability sparked by tariffs and other political gamesmanship.  

Finally, the President’s “skinny budget” released last week threatens even further devastating cuts not just to NOAA, but to FEMA and HUD as well, which play key roles in helping people deal with climate disasters.  

4. Lying about climate change

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is denying and attempting to gaslight the public about the cause of worsening climate extremes through denial and disinformation about extreme weather and climate.

That’s because a key goal of Trump and his Congressional allies is to make the impacts of climate change less visible to the public in order to alleviate pressure on policymakers to curtail the use of fossil fuels and benefit that industry’s profit-making. The administration and the fossil fuel industry are undermining clean energy and resilience-building solutions at the expense of public safety and health.

As we see with the agency cuts, they are apparently willing to do tremendous harm to the American public in service of this goal.

We’re tracking extreme weather alerts—and making the connection to climate change

To keep the public informed about the connection between extreme weather and climate change, for the third year in a row we at UCS are tracking heat, flood, storm, and fire weather alerts issued by the NWS during May through October. In 2023, nearly 100% of the US population faced at least one of these four types of extreme weather, and by the end of the 2024 Danger Season, every single county and equivalent in the US had faced at least one such alert.  

This year, we integrated the EPA’s Air Quality Index (AQI) for fine particulates (PM2.5) into our Danger Season tracker tool. Air quality suffers greatly when smoke from wildfires pollute the air, and dangerous fine air particulates can travel long distances, far away from where wildfires burn. You can consult our tool daily to find out if your county is under any of these types of alerts, or if it has an air quality index that has reached a level deemed unhealthy for sensitive groups.

The tool also displays the number of people under extreme weather alerts, the percentage of people who have been under at least one extreme weather alert since May 1, the percentage of extreme heat alerts clearly influenced by climate change (thanks to Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index), and the percentage of people who live in disadvantaged communities under alerts.  

We have solutions—but they’re also under attack by the Trump administration 

This summer’s Danger Season is setting up to be even more risky and dangerous because of the Trump administration’s attacks on NOAA’s scientific resources that help with forecasting AND on FEMA and HUD programs and budgets for pre- and post-disaster response.  

As my colleague Shana Udvardy noted in a recent blogpost, there have been numerous attacks against FEMA in the first 100 days of the Trump administration, including gutting the agency’s staff and cutting popular programs like the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program that help communities become more resilient.  

The climate crisis and the affordable housing crisis are also increasingly intersecting, as my colleague Zoe Middleton points out, which is why cuts to staff, budgets and programs at HUD are also going to leave communities—especially those with the fewest resources—at heightened risk.   

Congress must step up and do its job to protect communities by: 

1. Halting attacks, reversing cuts and restoring staff and their functions:
   • Reversing the administration’s actions and restoring functions and staff at NOAA, NWS, FEMA, HUD, for example, will help the US government keep people safe during extreme weather and climate events and help recover and rebuild after disaster strikes. 
2. Boosting investments in resilience:
   • Government at all levels should invest further in common sense resilience-building measures that we know are badly needed, like climate-resilient affordable housing and grid resilience (see UCS’ Alicia Race’s sobering photo essay blog on the topic), as well as turning again toward the healthy, safe, and affordable clean energy future that people want. And we should make polluters pay their fair share for putting us in this situation. 
3. Following the money and holding bad actors accountable:
   • Fossil fuel interests are a main source of climate disinformation that deceives about the real causes of climate change. People-centric campaigns such as Summer of Heat on Wall Street are shining a light on their lies and deceit. Many large social media outfits and Big Tech pollute the information ecosystem by amplifying these lies. Both industries must be held accountable for their actions in perpetuating harmful lies.  

Danger Season is here. The relentless pace of unabated climate change is making extreme weather worse and more dangerous across the US. The Trump administration’s attacks on federal science are doubling down on the dangerous situation already created by runaway emissions and climate disasters. We need science-based solutions that will keep us safe.  

Please contact your members of Congress and urge them to protect NOAA and FEMA from unrelenting attacks from the Trump administration.  

Take action here:  

Stop the Trump Administration from dismantling FEMA

Protect NOAA: Our Safety in a Climate-Changed World Depends on It

Resources 

• Danger Season tracker tool (English): https://dangerseason.ucs.org/?lang=en 
• Danger Season tracker tool (Spanish): https://dangerseason.ucs.org/?lang=es 
• Danger Season 2024 wrap-up video (English):  https://s3.amazonaws.com/UCS_Videos/ds-2024-roundup-english.mp4 
• Danger Season 2024 wrap-up video (Spanish): https://s3.amazonaws.com/UCS_Videos/ds-2024-roundup-spanish.mp4 
• Danger Season 2023 wrap-up video (English): https://s3.amazonaws.com/UCS_Videos/ds-2023-roundup-english.mp4 
• Danger Season 2023 wrap-up video (Spanish): https://s3.amazonaws.com/UCS_Videos/ds-2023-roundup-spanish.mp4 

After a series of fits and starts, and close votes, the House and Senate have now agreed (along partisan lines) on a budget resolution which will serve as the foundation for a potential reconciliation package. The adopted resolution sets dramatically different spending and revenue targets for the House compared to the Senate–a yawning gap that will have to be bridged at some point. House Committees receiving reconciliation instructions in the final resolution have now begun working on their specific pieces of the package. 

At the core of the majority’s agenda is a plan to use the reconciliation process to extend tax cuts that disproportionately benefit corporations and the wealthy. These tax cuts, which are set to expire under current law, plus additional spending priorities, come at a steep cost, estimated at approximately $5-6 trillion. As a result, the majority is also considering slashing spending to offset a small portion of that staggeringly high cost. This short-term calculus poses a dire threat to numerous UCS priorities, from clean energy, to electric vehicles, to sustainable agriculture, to climate resilience, to reducing the threat posed by nuclear weapons.  

A post from February provided a broad overview of the Congressional budget reconciliation process as it was getting underway. That post summarized UCS plans to defend current budget priorities and highlight the disastrous impacts of the House and Senate spending plans. 

Here, a deeper dive into what’s at risk—and what you can do to help. 

Defending Clean Energy 

Over the past few years, Congress enacted milestone legislative packages to support and advance the clean energy transition, from the technologies driving it, to the workforces powering it, to the manufacturing and supply chains enabling it, to the communities benefiting from it.  

As Julie McNamara writes, despite the well-documented and wide-reaching success of these policies, they are now at risk of repeal as the majority scrambles to cover the cost of their policy agenda, sacrificing proven economic winners for a vanishingly small offset. Moreover, gutting clean energy policies now will put further and immediate strain on an energy system already struggling to meet rapid growth in electricity demand, threatening skyrocketing electricity bills and surging pollution from increased reliance on heavily polluting, dangerous coal- and gas-fired power plants.  

Two of these key policy interventions are tax credits and grants and loans—and both are now at risk. 

Tax credits supporting the clean energy transition. A series of tax credits, identified by their section of the tax code, are helping to drive a surge of deployment in clean electricity generation (45Y/48E), investments in advanced manufacturing (45X), and individual investments in rooftop solar and cleaner and more efficient use of energy (including 25D and 25C).  

Recent policies also expanded the reach of incentives through a mechanism known as transferability, and access to incentives through a mechanism known as direct, or elective, pay. The former improves the efficiency and value of claimed incentives; the latter, which broadens access to incentives for non-taxable entities such as municipalities, Tribal entities, schools, and community centers, is delivering real savings with immediate impact in communities all across the country.  

Grants and loans supporting the clean energy transition. In addition to tax credits, previous Congresses enacted grant programs and expanded loan authorities intended to help build out the foundations of a forward-looking clean energy economy, such as increasing the capacity, reliability, and resilience of electricity infrastructure; reducing local air pollution in heavily burdened communities; supporting exploration of promising energy transition technologies; and lowering energy costs.  

Since the start of the Trump administration, these Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy programs have come under repeated attack, including multiple attempts by the administration to freeze, and subsequently rescind or cancel, projects without any evidence that recipients have violated project terms. These attacks, now the subject of ongoing litigation, have been deeply destabilizing for implicated businesses, workforces, host communities, and the broader innovation environment. 

The fight ahead: The majority in Congress is now threatening to use reconciliation as a means of repealing these tax credits and permanently rescinding these grants and loans. Repealing these proven policies and programs would send electricity prices soaring, slash promising workforce opportunities, cede US leadership in critical areas of innovation, increase climate- and health-harming pollution, restrict access to the benefits of the clean energy transition, and result in the cancellation of major investments in communities all across the country.  

Defending Clean Transportation 

Our outdated, fossil fuel–centered transportation system is the biggest contributor to global warming emissions and a major source of health-harming air pollution with inequitable impacts across the country. Fortunately, we’re on the cusp of a momentous transition in transportation—one that offers the opportunity to build a more sustainable, more equitable transportation system that gives everyone clean, affordable ways to get where they need to go. 

One of the best ways to reduce transportation pollution is by switching to electric. Replacing gasoline with electricity greatly reduces carbon emissions from driving, even when emissions from mining, manufacturing, and generating electricity are included. Recently published UCS analysis shows that driving the average EV in the US produces carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to a hypothetical 100 mpg gasoline car. 

Working with the prior Congress, the Biden Administration made significant progress in facilitating a transition to electric vehicles. A combination of consumer incentives, emissions standards, and infrastructure investments set the stage for a much cleaner transportation future – all of which could be reversed through this reconciliation process. 

Tax Credits Making it Easier to Switch to Electric Vehicles: Clean Vehicle Tax Credits established under the Inflation Reduction Act make it easier for drivers to switch to electric by reducing the upfront cost of electric cars and trucks, up to $7,500 for new vehicles (30D) or $4,000 for used vehicles (25E). These tax credits can be taken at “point-of-sale” – so the price reduction happens at the time of purchase, potentially reducing the down payment required or the amount financed (or both). The tax credits include income caps and vehicle cost caps which serve to exclude luxury vehicles and target the incentives towards lower and middle-income households, and the new vehicle credit includes supply chain requirements to incentivize domestic manufacturing. In addition, the Commercial Vehicle Tax Credit (45W) assists fleets by defraying upfront costs associated with purchasing a commercial clean vehicle with a tax credit of up to $40,000 per vehicle. The transition to zero emission medium and heavy-duty vehicles will usher in massive reductions in pollution as well as billions of dollars in savings to fleets, making this a huge win-win.  

Tax Credits Making it Easier to Charge Electric Vehicles – in the Locations that Need it the Most: The Alternative Fueling Infrastructure Tax Credit (30C) makes installing EV charging cheaper for both individual drivers and businesses. Individuals can offset the cost of home charging infrastructure with a tax credit of up to $1,000 per item. Businesses can offset the cost of charging infrastructure with a tax credit of up to $100,000 per item. The tax credit can support more direct current fast charging, whose speed is needed to serve drivers traveling long distances and heavy trucks that have large batteries. Notably, the tax credit is targeted to low-income and rural areas. While not a perfect proxy, this condition of the tax credit is meant to target those who need charging infrastructure support most. 

Fuel Efficiency and Emissions Standards at Risk: Some in Congress have floated the idea of repealing federal fuel efficiency (CAFE) and global warming pollution standards for cars and trucks through the reconciliation bill. These standards, finalized under the last administration, represent some of the largest actions ever taken on climate change, and would directly impact people’s wallets. Eliminating the global warming pollution rules would increase fuel and maintenance costs for new vehicles by $6,000 over the life of the vehicles, and rolling back the commonsense CAFE standards would increase fuel costs by $23 billion through 2050. 

New Fees Penalizing Clean Vehicle Drivers: Under the guise of “fairness,” some in Congress have proposed new annual fees of $250 for electric vehicles and $100 for hybrid vehicles to make up for the shortfall in the Highway Trust Fund (HTF). However, these fees are neither fair nor productive. The proposed fees on clean vehicles are blatantly punitive – far outweighing the contributions of gas-powered vehicles to HTF while barely making a dent in shortfall. This model also ignores the way roads are funded and the taxes that EV drivers already pay for electricity usage. The notion that EV drivers are getting a free ride is just plain wrong, thanks in part to taxes and fees levied at the state and local level, where more than 80 percent of road funding comes from. In 36 states, there is even already a net tax penalty for driving an EV compared to a gasoline vehicle thanks to the combination of taxes and fees already in place.  

The fight ahead: These tax credits and efficiency and emission standards have spurred increased domestic auto jobs and investments, increased the affordability of new and used electric vehicles for consumers, and charging infrastructure accessibility. We must ensure that the whole ecosystem of complementary policies remains in place to ensure the transition to clean vehicles is a win for consumers, jobs, and the environment. 

Defending Sustainable Agriculture 

The House and Senate Agriculture committees begin the reconciliation process with a huge gap in proposed funding cuts: the House Agriculture committee has been instructed to eliminate at least $230 billion in funding for agriculture programs, while the Senate minimum level for cuts is $1 billion. It’s not clear exactly how the two chambers will bridge this enormous divide, but the apparent plan by Republicans to cut a total of $1.5 trillion from the overall budget seems likely to increase pressure on Agriculture committee members to produce a final package of cuts that lands closer to the House number. 

The fight ahead: It appears likely that most (if not all) of these budget cuts will come at the expense of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides food assistance to more than 42 million low-income Americans. While 80% of the US public supports increasing benefit levels for SNAP, it currently seems this is the most likely route for the Republican-led Agriculture Committees to pursue. 

While SNAP appears to be the most likely agriculture-related program to suffer significant reconciliation cuts, other programs—from conservation to agricultural research to rural development—could also be in danger of losing funds if legislators decide more money needs to be found to reach a final level to offset tax cuts for the wealthy.  

Defending Against Dangerous Military Spending  

The reconciliation bill would increase defense spending by $150 billion over four years, including enormous increases in spending on an already colossal program to rebuild the entire US nuclear arsenal, with money for new missiles, new submarines, new bombers, and new nuclear warheads for them to carry.  

The fight ahead: In particular, $1.5 billion is allocated for an unneeded, expensive, and dangerous new land-based, nuclear-armed missile, one that is already 81% over budget and so far behind schedule that there is currently no known date when it might be built. 

That money also includes $25 billion for President Trump’s “Golden Dome” version of the long-discredited missile defense scheme known during the Reagan Administration as Star Wars. Of that, up to $5.6 billion is for space-based interceptors, which are hugely destabilizing, accelerating the already growing global nuclear arms race.  

Defending Climate Resilience 

Across the nation, communities are struggling to cope with extreme weather and climate-fueled disasters, yet the Trump administration has attacked the agencies, staff, funding, and programs that can help build resilience and protect people and critical infrastructure. Unfortunately, the budget reconciliation process could be yet another pathway to codify these harmful actions. Some of the key things we are watching for include: 

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The Trump administration has cut FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, a critical program to help communities build resilience in advance of disasters. The bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act had allocated $1 billion for BRIC over five years, of which only $133 million has been distributed to date. Congress should reinstate this important program and not allow the Trump administration’s illegal overreach to be enacted into law.  

The administration has also recklessly fired FEMA staff and cut its budget, even as the summer Danger Season looms, and has threatened to shift an unfair burden of disaster response to states—which don’t have the resources to cope with major disasters without federal aid. The reconciliation process should not be used to cut the disaster relief fund or unfairly shift disaster response to states beyond their ability to cope. Homeland Security Secretary Noem has gone as far as to call for the complete dismantling of FEMA by October 1, which would be disastrous as my colleagues Shana Udvardy and Zoe Middleton explain. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle understand the crucial importance of FEMA for their constituents and should push back strongly against any such extreme notion.  

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA has come under relentless attacks from the Trump administration, with reckless mass firings, budget cuts, threats to critical data monitoring, modeling, research capabilities, and more. Now, a leaked Trump budget memo described in news reports indicates that NOAA will face further drastic cuts in staffing and budgets soon, including potentially getting rid of the entire Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) division.  

As my colleague Rachel Cleetus says, our nation’s foremost federal scientific agency for weather forecasting and climate research is under a full-scale assault—and that should alarm us all. And as my colleague Marc Alessi points out, that would affect everything from hurricane forecasting to seasonal forecasts that farmers rely on. There is grave concern that the agency could be decimated if these reckless budget cuts were enacted as part of the budget reconciliation process. That’s why more than 3,300 scientists and experts have just sent an open letter to Congress and Commerce Secretray Lutnick, urging them to stop the attacks on NOAA and ensure the agency is fully funded and staffed.  

The fight ahead: Simply put, drastic funding cuts will undermine NOAA and FEMA’s ability to achieve their missions. If enacted, these reckless proposals will put communities in greater danger, without the information they need to protect themselves or the resources to prepare for and recover from disasters, not to mention imposing mounting costs to our economy. Congress must not rubber stamp these costly, harmful actions through the budget reconciliation process.  

Three Things You Can Do Right Now 

1. You may have seen a recent Action Alert providing tools and information about how to contact Members of Congress regarding budget reconciliation. You can also take a minute to send a message to your members of Congress here and urge them to stand up for science and preserve much needed investments during the budget reconciliation process. Congress needs to hear from concerned citizens like you, so they know these issues are a priority for their constituents. 

2. Some members of Congress are also hosting town halls during this crucial time. UCS recently hosted a webinar training with information on how to ask the tough but necessary questions at town halls. Check out our town hall toolkit here which contains all the information you need to know to find and prepare for a town hall where you can ask your member of Congress a question to get them on the record on issues you care about. You can make a real difference in standing up for science today.  

3. Finally, please be on the lookout for further information from UCS regarding the next milestones in the budget reconciliation process and steps you can take to protect the critical funding and programs that may be at risk.  

The first 100 days of the Trump administration have put many of us who track and care about the work of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in a tailspin. It seems like every day there’s been yet another attack on the agency, established almost fifty years ago to help communities prepare for and withstand catastrophic disasters. So, fasten your seatbelts and get ready for a rocky ride. Here’s a rundown of some of the Trump administration’s worst attacks on FEMA.

1: Gutting FEMA’s staff

On February 21, 2025, as part of the Trump administration’s mass federal agency layoffs, 200 FEMA staff were fired. Since then, an estimated 20% of FEMA staff (roughly 1,000) are expected to take voluntary buyouts. All of which comes on top of a staffing gap that FEMA and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) agreed was at 35% in 2022 and the Congressional Research Service suggested is likely much higher.

I had a chance to speak with Michael A. Coen, Jr., who was the  Chief of Staff to former FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell, regarding his concerns about the current FEMA staffing levels. He served at FEMA for 15 years and supported staff out on field operations for thousands of disasters across every state, territory and multiple tribes. Here’s what he said:

With the reduction of over 2,000 FEMA employees since January 20th, I am worried about the capacity for FEMA to support the increasing number of disasters and increased intensity of disasters that will affect people across the country. Much is expected of FEMA when Americans are experiencing the loss of their home or community following an earthquake, fire, or flood. With continued ongoing response and recovery operations supporting the California wildfires, Kentucky flooding, 2024 disasters, and events from years past including the Maui fires, FEMA is stretched.

The departures from firings, retirements, or resignations have diminished morale and increased mistrust in agency leadership. FEMA employees are proud of their mission, but the mission has been under attack by the spread of misinformation and the lack of transparency from the current administration.

2: Rescinding cost-effective, popular preparedness grant funding

On April 4, the Trump administration ended one of FEMA’s most effective and popular grant programs, the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, that President Trump originally signed into law in 2018. The cancellation of BRIC leaves communities less prepared even as disasters are mounting and as the Atlantic hurricane season (which starts June 1) approaches. Colorado State University is predicting nine hurricanes, including four that might advance to major hurricanes. Communities need more resources and funding to get prepared before such storms, not fewer. 

The cancellation of these grants will disrupt projects already underway or planned by emergency managers and local and Tribal governments. For 2025, this puts $3.3 billion into jeopardy for projects across the US that would help mitigate heat, wildfires, flood and other extreme weather and natural hazards, according to Urban Institute. BRIC has had bipartisan support because members of Congress understood that investing in reducing risk and preventing future damages is a wise use of taxpayer dollars. On average, every $1 invested in federal mitigation grants saves $6 in avoided losses (in addition to saving lives and reducing disruption) and FEMA saves approximately $700 million annually (in 2018 dollars) by investing in these types of mitigation projects.  

Many other FEMA funds have also been illegally frozen, causing states to sue the administration over executive overreach. On February 11, a FEMA official ordered a freeze on federal grant programs and in March FEMA blocked $10 billion in disaster aid on the pretext of immigration concerns. The result is chaos with states and jurisdictions scrambling to defend the funds they were promised.

3: Threatening to reduce disaster aid

This is a big one given the different and numerous ways President Trump has worked to threaten, deny, withhold, and otherwise disrupt disaster assistance. The only good news is that for President Trump to do real damage, at least legally, he will need to conduct rulemaking and work with Congress, and this will take time. However, in the interim states and communities are worried. So, what has he done to date?

On March 19, the president signed an executive order (EO) titled “Achieving Efficiency Through State and Local Preparedness.” I wrote about the significance of this EO and how the first section of policy speaks to what Trump has been threatening all along: to shift more responsibility for disaster resilience, preparedness and response onto the shoulders of state, local, Tribal, and territorial governments. This is concerning because when it comes to handling catastrophic disasters, and why FEMA exists, states—even larger states such as California—don’t have the same resources as the federal government. If Trump gets his way, disaster response and recovery will be more chaotic and ineffective, endangering more lives, especially those of the elderly, youth, those who have disabilities, and others with fewer resources to prepare or evacuate.

On April 12, FEMA head Cameron Hamilton sent a six-page draft memo to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) entitled “Actions to Rebalance FEMA’s Roles in Disasters” that only came to light weeks later through CNN news and subsequently on LinkedIn (yet another FEMA memo that has not been officially posted to the FEMA website—another red flag). In addition to the lack of transparency, there are two other jarring aspects of the memo. First, it details short-term federal actions FEMA would like to accomplish prior to the Atlantic hurricane season start on June 1, which gives emergency managers little notice to make contingency plans. Second, its intent is to implement significant agency changes over the near and long-term without first going through a federal request for information or a pre-rulemaking to get thoughtful input from stakeholders. Admittedly, not everything listed under the short-term actions is all bad. We’ve long advocated for making the right reforms to FEMA—but these actions which could determine the fates of communities in their most vulnerable hours ought to go through a public comment process. Other federal actions listed, however, are deeply concerning, including but not limited to:

• Increasing the public assistance (PA) threshold for major disaster declarations by four times the current amount. Typically, FEMA provides stakeholders with a significant amount of time for public input when it comes to major changes such as these. For example, a long and thoughtful federal pre-rulemaking process was started under the Obama administration and continued under the first Trump administration on how to increase the PA threshold while also giving credit for risk reduction—the so-called “PA disaster deductible.” A four-fold threshold increase for state, local, tribal and territorial governments (especially in this economy) would mean that President Trump will deny many more disasters, leaving state, local, Tribal and territorial governments big, small, hurricane-prone, or wildfire-prone alike at the mercy of their own insufficient resources when a disaster strikes. Again, such a substantial change ought to go through the federal rulemaking process.

• Halting the automatic approval of the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP). Local hazard mitigation planners rely on the HMGP for supporting their planning efforts to help them develop their mitigation plans, so this could severely hamper local hazard mitigation planning. However, HMGP also supports risk reduction measures pre-disaster. So, the practical loss of HMGP along with BRIC means the few resources to help communities prior to extreme events have been thrown out, pulling the resources jurisdictions have counted on, out from under their feet.

4: Establishing a political “Review Council“

On January 24, President Trump signed an Executive Order establishing a FEMA Review Council to provide the president recommendations on how to “improve FEMA” and “give states more of a role in disaster response.” The Council was also charged with requesting information from a range of stakeholders. This was posted on the federal register and the deadline for comments is May 15. You can submit comments and let the Council know that while not perfect, FEMA is essential to helping communities become more prepared before a disaster and recover after catastrophic events.

Three months later, on April 28, the public only just learned of the eleven members appointed to the Review Council, much behind the deadline President Trump set for the Council’s first public meeting.

This is just the start of an uphill battle to ensure our voices are heard above the administration’s mis-and disinformation, politicizing disaster assistance, and calls for dismantling and canceling FEMA altogether. Briefly, the 11 new members, in addition to the chairs of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem and Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, largely represent the Gulf states including Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

The Council members also include:

• Governors of Texas and Virginia and the former Governor of Mississippi
• The chair of the Republican National Committee
• Two emergency managers and a two-time acting FEMA administrator
• Tampa city mayor and the Miami-Dade County Sherriff
• A representative from the private sector (Chubb Insurance)
• A former Chief of Staff for the former governor of Louisiana

We must stay vigilant as the Council members will likely be pressured to have a narrow focus and reduce the agency’s mission in alignment with the goals of DHS Secretary Noem and President Trump to dismantle FEMA.

5: Failing to nominate a FEMA Administrator and instilling a culture of fear

It’s not hard to make the case that a president ought to have a FEMA administrator nominated soon into the start of the new administration, and at least within the first 100 days. Moreover, it is just a wise thing to have the nation’s FEMA administrator nominated and in place prior to the start of the Atlantic hurricane season on June 1. During President Trump’s first term, he nominated former administrator Brock Long on April 28, 2017, but he wasn’t confirmed by Congress until June 20. In this term, on January 22 President Trump appointed the inexperienced former Navy Seal Cameron Hamilton as the top official to lead FEMA, with the title “Senior Official Performing the Duties of FEMA Administrator,” who still remains in the position today.  

The president has yet to even nominate a FEMA administrator, among rumors that he may select Florida emergency manager Kevin Guthrie. Congress enacted the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 to ensure future administrators have demonstrated emergency management and homeland security knowledge and background, and a minimum of five years of executive leadership and management experience in the public or private sector. In fact, members of Congress requested the Government Accountability Office to determine whether Cameron Hamilton legally meets these requirements. Maybe the next step Congress should take is to set a minimum period by which a President nominates a FEMA administrator.

In alarming news from CNN on April 12, Cameron Hamilton and 50 FEMA staff were given lie detector tests for allegedly leaking “national security information” after taking part in a meeting with top DHS officials. While Cameron Hamilton was cleared, some officials “failed” the polygraph test and were escorted out of the building, instilling a culture of fear at FEMA. This culture of fear is a double whammy on an agency that was already understaffed and overstretched.

6: Disbanding critical advisory councils

During the first week of the Trump administration, officials disbanded FEMA advisory councils based on a Department of Homeland Security January 20th memo.. Advisory councils are critical to assisting agencies with collecting unbiased, science-based analysis and recommendations on policies and programs. President Trump has terminated the following advisory councils—each of which were established by acts of Congress—representing a continued overreach by the executive branch:

• FEMA’s National Advisory Committee (NAC) was established by the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 to help address needs and gaps in disaster assistance and planning, among others. The current administration has taken the previous NAC reports down, and they are available by email request only. However, you can find the 40-member NAC 2024 report here—their largest portfolio and largest collaboration of work. I hope the FEMA review council will read this NAC report and its 15 recommendations, as well as the previous NAC reports.
• The Technical Mapping Advisory Council (TMAC) was established by the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012 to help improve and review FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRMs), to recommend updates to standards, guidance, and technology, and to incorporate climate change science. In its very significant and latest 2023 report on future conditions, the TMAC had six major recommendations, including to add a second flood hazard layer to help communities plan for climate change related impacts into the future.
• The National Dam Safety Review Board was established by the 1996 National Dam Safety Program Act included in the Water Resources Development Act that year, and helps to ensure federal standards are updated and that states are in federal compliance with these standards. Dam failures can be deadly and are critical given the number of dams across the US. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials analysis of state programs found that from January 2005 through June 2013 there were 173 dam failures and 587 episodes that would have become failures if not for state intervention.

What’s next?

It’s hard to cover all of President Trump’s attacks on FEMA in one post. Moving forward, we can expect more of the same by the Trump administration: continued attacks, lack of transparency, mistrust within FEMA, mis- and disinformation—and  perhaps worse, I suspect. In the interim, the FEMA Review Council will begin to compile recommendations and process their report to the President. More will be revealed in the coming weeks and months on disaster assistance as FEMA begins to implement the April 12 memo, and as we get closer to the start of Atlantic hurricane season.

FEMA staff will continue to be worried about the readiness of the agency to respond when disasters hit, and will be over stretched when they do. State, local, Tribal and territorial governments will try to keep up with the chaotic changes under FEMA and must brace themselves for the reality that FEMA may not be there for them when disasters strike as we enter Danger Season.

During forthcoming budget negotiations, it’s crucial that Congress provide robust funding for FEMA to fulfill its mission. Giving in to the Trump administration’s proposals to make drastic cuts in FEMA’s budget and staffing will just risk leaving communities in peril when disasters strike, and increase hardship as they struggle to recover after the worst happens.

We must continue to sunlight the lack of transparency, point out mis- and disinformation, and advocate for science-based and publicly informed decision making and investments. Congress must ensure any changes moving forward happen through the proper channels, not by sidelining science and democracy.

The chaos by design of the most recent Trump administration’s first one hundred days hasn’t spared any part of government. Here are some of the biggest ways layoffs, agency dismantling and overreaching executive orders have impacted the US housing system.  

Firings at HUD and fair housing rollbacks

As part of DOGE’s assault on the federal workforce, there have been careless layoffs at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)—the federal agency dedicated to addressing housing, homelessness, community development, and long-term disaster recovery.  In previous blogposts, I’ve highlighted the importance of HUD and its role in advancing affordable, climate resilient housing.  

More HUD layoffs and regional office closures are anticipated in the coming weeks and will impact the agency’s ability to manage programs like Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage underwriting and Community Development Block Grants that cities, counties, and states rely on to support affordable housing, economic development programming, and disaster recovery.   

President Trump’s recent executive order (EO) on “restoring equality” is a stepping stone to Project 2025’s goal of repealing the Fair Housing Act. The order contradicts a 2015 Supreme Court ruling and calls for federal agencies to ignore the disparate impact standard—a key legal principle for the civil rights movement that has helped fight discrimination in housing and employment in cases that may at first appear neutral but have a practically significant impact on people based on their race, sex, disability, or other protected trait. 

In a country where discrimination has touched millions of lives and shaped cities, climate risk, and disaster recovery, this EO is an ominous rejection of basic historical facts with serious consequences for our future.  As the Alliance for Housing Justice notes, this EO is an unconstitutional “greenlight to discriminate at scale—putting people’s homes and lives at risk.” 

Taking housing out of federal homelessness strategy

The US Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) is a small federal agency dedicated to preventing and ending homelessness through coordination across federal departments. In September 2024, USICH released the first ever federal homelessness prevention framework rooted in public health principles and the Housing First model. 

In March 2025, President Trump, via DOGE, effectively dismantled USICH.  At a time of record homelessness and economic uncertainty, President Trump’s dismantling of USICH clears the way for his strategy to address homelessness through development of privately operated tent cities.

Hanging community development financial institutions out to dry

Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs)  are an important part of America’s under-resourced affordable housing ecosystem. In a nutshell, CDFIs are lenders that provide both investment capital and technical support for communities and projects that the mainstream financial system can’t or won’t serve.  CDFIs help finance affordable housing construction and preservation, community development, and climate solutions. Tariffs levied by the Trump administration have further complicated the financing of housing construction and are anticipated to add 9,200 dollars to the average price of a newly constructed home.  

On March 25th, President Trump ordered the dismantling of the CDFI Fund, a department created in 1994 through bipartisan legislation by stripping back its activity to only what was statutorily required. This mirrors the administration’s strategy with other agencies. Through one of its largest programs, the New Market Tax Credit, the CDFI fund has allocated 81 billion dollars. While the New Market Tax Credit is not without its criticisms, the program is important in that it represents a “direct effort to reverse the impacts of past discriminatory legal frameworks.” Attacks on the CDFI Fund should be understood as part of the administration’s fealty to corporate interests—and the push to sell public lands for real estate development as a false solution to the housing crisis.

What to expect next?

In the next 100 days and beyond, as we enter a Danger Season of climate-fueled extreme weather that destroys homes and wreaks havoc on household finances, the harmful impacts of all the cuts we’ve seen to date will become ever clearer. We should also expect more dangerous executive orders and for the Trump administration to continue to ignore court rulings that don’t serve its political agenda. We should also expect to see the continued politicization of disaster response, including making aid harder to access.

Congress must push back against these and other egregious actions and should not rubber stamp a budget that puts housing justice and shared prosperity further out of reach.

No matter what the next hundred days and beyond bring, the housing crisis isn’t going anywhere. While chaos reigns on the federal level, cities and states must forge ahead to build and preserve meaningfully affordable and climate resilient housing on the ground and advance housing rights.

Do you remember the first time that climate change really entered your consciousness?

For me, it was the powerful Congressional testimony by the Director of NASA’s Goddard Space Institute, Dr. Jim Hansen, in 1988. What he was telling the world sounded unbelievable. But he was from NASA, one of our nation’s—and the world’s—premier science agencies, so I knew this was real. I was a distracted, big-haired teenager, frozen in my tracks. I’ve been working for climate solutions ever since.

Fast forward to today…

I know…

Our political crises are a lot to hold. But as part of the climate movement, you also know that climate change is the context in which all of these crises are unfolding. You know that if we are successful in slowing down or stopping the Trump administration’s authoritarian roll and restoring democracy, we still have this colossal global climate problem to contend with. What you may not know—what is just now becoming clear through leaked documents covered in the press—is that the administration is preparing to bring climate science in the United States to its knees. This illegal overreach will make the work of contending with climate change so much harder for many years to come.

We have to stop them.

The insatiable anti-science Trump agenda

The infamously anti-science Trump administration, back in February, requested reorganization plans from each federal agency by April 14th. The planned cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), according to news reports, are not the equivalent of trimming but of sawing a whole tree down to the ground. Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), for example, is at risk of elimination, a move that would gut NOAA’s ability to pursue climate change research itself and to support, as it currently does, countless research efforts across the US and around the world.

As my colleague, Marc Alessi summarizes in his blog, the leaked memo “proposes closing all 16 Cooperative Research Institutes in 33 states, every one of the 10 research labs, all 6 regional climate centers, slashing the budget for the NASA Goddard Space Institute, and ending $70 million in grants to research universities. Thousands of seasoned scientists, early career scientists, and young scientists in graduate schools will lose funding.” As of this writing, the rich online resources of three of the Regional Climate Centers have already been taken down. The destruction is underway.

Also requested in February and presumably being finalized now are plans for “large-scale reductions in force (RIFs)”. Those firings of federal employees would come on top of the hundreds of NOAA staff who were fired last week—for the second time, this time permanently.

This is what I mean by bringing US climate science to its knees. And as my colleague, Rachel Cleetus, details in her blog, it is at the same time incredibly reckless and carefully premeditated by those behind Project 2025.

Climate science tracks and unpacks the dangerous trends that will harm people’s lives and livelihoods, and already are. It shows, for example, that both the strength and rapid intensification of hurricanes are increasing, that the intensity and duration of drought and extreme precipitation are increasing, that sea level rise and coastal flooding are increasing, and that wildfires are increasing in frequency and size. If we look back just a handful of months, from Hurricane Helene to the L.A. wildfires, the devastation our changing climate is causing in people’s lives is clear. The proposed cuts would ravage our ability to understand and meet these evolving threats.

The entire global climate science community relies on NOAA scientific expertise and the science it produces. A passing anti-science administration, hell-bent on destruction across our federal government, has no right to make these legacy scientific resources disappear. They belong to us. NOAA belongs to the millions of people warned and kept safe by our National Weather Service, to the diverse economic sectors informed by its annual, seasonal, and monthly outlooks, and to the thousands of communities dependent on good information to invest and plan for the future. This anti-science agenda is anti-people and it must be stopped.

Federal climate science IS climate science

After my 1988 wake-up call, many indelible moments of new climate awareness followed—so many bearing the fingerprints of NOAA and NASA science. For millions of us in the climate movement, it was the first time we saw the “Keeling Curve”, the iconic chart illustrating the steady rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels since 1958, as recorded at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory. (The observatory’s support office is on a DOGE list of federal leases slated for cancellation.)

This NOAA graph shows the full record of monthly mean carbon dioxide measured at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii. The carbon dioxide data on Mauna Loa constitute the longest record of direct measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere.https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/during-year-of-extremes-carbon-dioxide-levels-surge-faster-than-ever

For many, seeing the “hockey stick” chart or NOAA’s global historical temperature anomaly record sent shockwaves of recognition through us: we are in unprecedented territory.

This NOAA graph shows yearly surface temperature from 1880–2024 compared to the 20th-century average (1901-2000). Blue bars indicate cooler-than-average years; red bars show warmer-than-average years. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature

NOAA’s sea level rise projections similarly transformed our collective sense of the future of our coastal communities and the inevitability of large-scale human migration: seismic change lies ahead.

This NOAA graph shows observed sea level from 2000-2018, with future sea level through 2100 for six future pathways. http://climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-sea-level 

Just yesterday, new climate research was released using NOAA’s long-term historical record of carbon dioxide levels to show a dramatic recent spike in CO2. While the scientific community needs to determine what this means for our climate, it is a terrible trend—and a vital one for us to see, track and understand. These measurements are part of the work of the Global Monitoring Laboratory—one of the laboratories proposed to be closed by these cuts.

This NOAA graph shows annual mean carbon dioxide growth rates based on globally averaged marine surface data. https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gl_gr.html

Speaking of laboratories, NOAA’s  Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) is targeted for closure. GFDL developed the world’s first global climate model and remains at the forefront of climate research. Its loss would represent a serious wound to climate science, globally.

It is no accident that these watershed moments in public awareness of the climate crisis (alongside climate disasters of historic proportions like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy) came courtesy of our federal agencies. This is a central purpose of government: marshalling collective resources for the public good. This is our federal science at work—as we want and need it to work—advancing and innovating over time to bring our changing climate into focus in service of the public’s well-being, today and into the future.

Climate science serves people

Our federal climate science isn’t just big picture trends and long-term projections. It also provides us with the localized, near-term data, information and expertise we need to perceive current changes at granular, community and neighborhood levels and to anticipate unavoidable impacts for which we must prepare.

Put bluntly, NOAA science saves lives and money. Improved hurricane forecasting by institutions like those currently slated for closure is estimated to have yielded nearly $5 billion in avoided damages for each major US-landfalling hurricane, not to mention the many lives saved, while the cost of letting those institutions do their job is a fraction of that. With climate change driving more dangerous and costly hurricane seasons, this is bad math.

The pillars of NOAA’s mission include “1. To understand and predict changes in climate, weather, ocean and coasts. And 2. To share that knowledge and information with others.” As it quips on its website, climate is what you expect, weather is what you get. Its work is based on the understanding that climate and weather are inseparable, that each year, climate change manifests in more extreme weather events, and that we must understand these changes in order to meet them.

We’re still making sense of the implications of these cuts for everyday people, but as my colleague writes, they could lead to a significant decrease in hurricane forcasting accuracy, since the proposed cuts would end support for NOAA’s hurricane hunter missions; elimination of important climate monitoring and decision support for farmers with the loss of the NOAA Regional Climate Centers; and coastal communities left without the National Ocean Service and the critical information it provides, e.g., on flood risk from extreme weather events. 

NOAA and NASA are able to respond to the mounting threat of climate change because of many decades of taxpayer investment in their work. Americans value the services we receive from this science and use them every day. No one but the Trump administration, Elon Musk, and the creators of Project 2025 is asking for the dismantling of the public US scientific enterprise. But like barbarians at the gate, the administration is ignorant and/or uncaring about the painstakingly-constructed, globally-prized scientific asset that NOAA and NASA represent. They only seem intent on sacking and claiming the spoils, apparently to make a small dent in the cost of tax breaks for billionares and to pave the way for greater profits for big corporations.

Make it hurt until they make NOAA whole

So, Climate Movement, I know we don’t feel like a “climate” movement right now, and that’s as it should be. Too many urgent fronts to fight them on. But we’re still here. And this assault on climate science requires the greatest response we can marshal. If they succeed, we will be badly delayed in building the climate future we need by having to rebuild the climate science past they stole.

The Trump administration claims a “mandate” to justify the destruction, but a strong majority of the American public is concerned about climate change. Amidst the coming, inevitably-bruising summer—or “Danger Season“—of climate extremes, frustration will rise over the administration’s crushing of both federal climate science and disaster preparedness efforts. Layered on top of this will be the volatility, harm and added vulnerability people will be facing from the administration’s countless other egregious actions, from cuts to housing and cooling assistance to ever-expanding rights violations.

Congress has an opportunity to stop this madness and we need to make them. Members should hear encouragement to be bolder or face constituent anger at every turn until they stand up for NOAA, climate science, and the public good.

The people, especially those of us with privilege, have an opportunity to stop it, too. The streets, local media, town halls, the market place should fill with our bodies and our voices calling for the restoration of these vital agencies and programs—as well as rights and freedoms and the rule of law, however misaligned those are with the Trump agenda. It’s time to be bold and go hard. They can’t take it from us if we refuse to let it go.

Remember the board game Risk? I used to play it with a neighbor who always moved most of his armies to one spot on the world map to project overwhelming force, only to lose the battalions he left exposed. The strategy of protecting your positions was lost on him—he thought he could win through sheer intimidation.  

Two recent events show that President Trump is falling prey to a similar weakness. Instead of addressing the many ways climate change threatens the country’s financial stability, his administration is pulling back safeguards in order to reward his Big Oil donors. 

Delivering for fossil fuel donors 

On March 28, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—an independent federal agency that protects investors by watching Wall Street—abandoned a rule it passed just last year requiring companies to examine how climate change impacts their operations and disclose their findings. The rule received overwhelming support from investors, who said they needed such information to assess risks to companies’ business models. 

Three days later, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), one of the three independent agencies responsible for regulating banks, withdrew from a collaboration among the agencies to create guidelines on climate-related financial risk. The guidelines, issued in October 2023, would help banks with more than $100 billion in assets manage the ways in which climate change affects bonds, mortgages, and other financial products. Both the rule and guidance were significantly weakened by corporate lobbying but still represented an acknowledgement of the financial threat climate change poses. 

The SEC rule and OCC principles grew from a longstanding demand by investors that was accelerated by a Biden Administration executive order directing regulators to assess the US financial system’s exposure to risks resulting from climate change. Trump revoked that order on his first day in office, along with several others related to climate change, public health, and the environment. He would later issue another order stripping away power from independent agencies like the SEC and OCC, both of which were established to make sure companies and banks don’t take too much risk with the public’s money. Both agencies are currently led by acting officials appointed by Trump. 

The rollbacks didn’t come out of left field.—they’re  a return on the fossil fuel industry’s major investment in Trump’s reelection campaign. The SEC rule and Biden executive order were explicitly named as targets for elimination in a 2024 briefing book for the board of the American Exploration and Production Council, an oil and gas trade association representing the country’s largest oil and gas companies. Trump’s executive orders also advance industry interests by making it easier to increase fossil fuel production while blocking clean energy development.  

The fossil fuel industry has aggressively fought efforts to track and regulate climate-related financial risk. Industry representatives such as the American Petroleum Institute and U.S. Chamber of Commerce tried to stop the SEC rule with lawsuits, which are now combined into a single suit currently before an appeals court in Missouri (the SEC’s recent move withdrew agency defense of the rule, but state attorneys general continue to defend it). One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuits against the SEC rule is Liberty Energy, the company founded by Chris Wright, who Trump appointed secretary of the Department of Energy. Last year, ExxonMobil filed a lawsuit against investors pressing the company for increased disclosures.  

Risky business 

What does climate-related financial risk actually mean? Though the answer might seem implicit, it’s helpful to remember that banks, investment funds, insurance companies, and other financial industry players are in the business of assessing risk. The financial industry employs legions of analysts to crunch numbers that will hopefully prevent them from losing money. If you’ve ever taken out a mortgage or other type of loan, you know how much work is required to prove that lending to you is a safe bet.  

Climate change poses what risk experts call “systemic risk,” meaning it affects so many parts of the financial system that any negative event could set off a cascading series of crises, thereby destabilizing the entire system. Mark Carney, a former governor of the Bank of England who was recently elected Canadian prime minister, laid out three principal types of risk that climate change poses to financial stability in a 2015 speech to insurance executives.   

The first is physical risk, meaning devaluation of physical assets like buildings or oil rigs due to climate-related hazards like hurricanes or wildfires. The second is liability risk, also called legal or litigation risk, meaning losses from legal action by parties harmed by climate change who seek compensation. The third is transition risk, or losses to fossil fuel-intensive industries resulting from the world’s transition to renewable energy sources. These can manifest as decreased demand for products like gasoline, or policy changes that limit the amount of carbon emissions a company can emit, to give just two examples.  

As some of the world’s highest emitters of the carbon emissions that cause climate change, fossil fuel companies face heightened levels of these risks compared to other industries. Oil and gas companies are particularly vulnerable to physical risks to infrastructure located in extreme weather zones like coastlines or oceans; transition risks related to falling demand for their products; and liability risk. Several dozen lawsuits against fossil fuel corporations have been filed in the United States alone by states, counties, cities, and tribes seeking accountability for fraud, climate damages, or racketeering. While these cases do not seek to regulate emissions directly, they represent a significant financial and reputational threat through introduces risk through potential judgments, discovery of internal documents, and the broader scrutiny of industry practices. 

Using science for risk resilience 

In his 2015 speech, Carney said risk “will only increase as the science and evidence of climate change hardens.” Ten years later, that hard evidence has continued to mount. A well-established field known as attribution science is strengthening evidence of climate change-related risk to companies, investors, communities, and the economy. Attribution science can explain how climate change makes a heatwave hotter or a hurricane-related downpour more intense. This kind of event attribution helps assess changing risks to assets, infrastructure, and insurance.  

Another branch of attribution science focuses on emissions sources, quantifying how emissions from specific companies contribute to global warming and related impacts over time. 

A new UCS study, building on a robust body of UCS-led research, shows that nearly half of the increase in present-day temperature and one-third of present-day sea level rise can be traced to emissions from just 122 fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers.   

Think of all the damage wrought by rising seas, warming oceans, and hurricanes, and it becomes clear why so many are calling for greater accountability from oil and gas companies—much like the public reckoning that followed with the tobacco and asbestos industries. 

Roll the Dice, Pay the Price

These political shenanigans are just attempts to deny a reality that Wall Street already knows: Climate risk is financial risk. Just this year, banks and insurance companies released a slew of reports chronicling how climate change will impact the financial world. For real-time evidence, investors need look no further than the current insurance crisis. As my colleague Rachel Cleetus recently wrote, this crisis “was entirely foreseeable, and largely preventable…climate scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades, and yet the market and policymakers have reacted with short-term strategies because those are the timeframes for determining shareholder value, profits and elections.” 

Trump’s rollbacks reflect more of this cynical, short-term thinking. But companies across industries must look beyond politics and face the reality of climate-related risk disclosure, both from within the US (rules in states including California) and abroad (regulations in Japan and the EU).

The key to winning the game Risk is fortifying your positions against all attackers. But where a board game depends a good deal on a roll of the dice, we can and must take charge of our future by accounting for the risks we face. By removing mechanisms to hold companies accountable, the Trump administration is playing political games with our financial future as well as the planet’s.  

Last week, hundreds of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA ) employees were fired for a second time (!) by the Trump administration. Since then, news reports have indicated that NOAA will face further drastic cuts in staffing and budgets soon, including potentially getting rid of the entire Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) division. Our nation’s foremost federal scientific agency for weather forecasting and climate research is under a full-scale assault—and that should alarm us all.

The cuts identified in news stories have not yet been publicly confirmed by NOAA or the Trump administration. In any other administration, one might be inclined to wait and see, hoping that rational choices safeguarding the public interest will prevail. But again and again, this administration has shown that it’s willing to engage in unbounded destruction and cares little about what it’s destroying or if their unilateral actions are even legal. Cut first and ask questions later, no matter the harm to people, seems to be the modus operandi.

And what they’re destroying is an incredibly rich and valuable scientific enterprise, built up over decades through investments made by US taxpayers, for the public’s benefit. NOAA belongs to all of us—communities, first responders, farmers, mariners, businesses, local decisionmakers—and we need to fight for what is ours. Congress needs to step up to do its job: reclaim its constitutional power and limit the worst excesses of this increasingly authoritarian administration.

Timing and scale of cuts to NOAA

Numerous news outlets have reported on a leaked document showing the president’s proposed budget for NOAA, which outlines significant cuts to the agency. As my colleague Marc Alessi points out, if those cuts go forward, they would significantly degrade the agency’s ability to provide lifesaving and economically beneficial data and forecasts.

Back in February, following from an executive order issued by President Trump, Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Charles Ezell, acting director of the Office of Personnel Management, (OPM) issued guidance requiring agencies to author and deliver reorganization plans by April 14. Specifically, it says:

Agencies should… submit a Phase 2 ARRP [Agency Reduction in Force and Reorganization Plans] to OMB and OPM for review and approval no later than April 14, 2025. Phase 2 plans shall outline a positive vision for more productive, efficient agency operations going forward. Phase 2 plans should be planned for implementation by September 30, 2025.

US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who heads the department that oversees NOAA, has presumably complied with this guidance but those decisions have not yet been made public.

It seems that the administration is determined to degrade NOAA’s capabilities, one way or another. Of course, decisions about the actual budget appropriated for agencies are made by Congress—and it should not just obediently rubberstamp these dangerous cuts.

Threat of eliminating NOAA’s Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) division

OAR, headquartered in Silver Spring, MD, provides the foundational research and data underpinning the work of other parts of the agency. In collaboration with various divisions at NOAA, OAR helps develop and advance scientific understanding of Earth systems to ensure more accurate weather forecasts, better early warnings for extreme weather events, and greater understanding of climate change within the US and across the globe.

From improved hurricane forecasting to better tornado modeling and warning systems, OAR science and scientists play a critical role in keeping people in every part of the country safe.

Yet, the leaked proposed Trump budget document calls for the elimination of OAR as a line office, and many of its career staff have already been laid off. While parts of its work and staff may be shifted to other divisions of NOAA, there’s no question that huge cuts like this would be devastating to its essential work, not to mention our country’s standing in the global scientific community.

NOAA’s satellite resources at risk

Just last week, NOAA celebrated 50 years of its Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) program. GOES satellites are the agency’s “eyes in the sky,” helping to monitor and track severe weather, environmental hazards and space weather. GOES-19, the latest model in the series, just became operational as GOES-East and is slated to provide critical new information to weather forecasters across the nation.

Just in the last month, this incredible satellite system has helped monitor two powerful storm system and tornado outbreaks—one that affected central and eastern US, and another that stretched from Texas to the Great Lakes—and provided early warnings to communities in their path that undoubtedly helped save lives. NOAA has plans to expand these capabilities through the Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) satellite system, scheduled to begin operation in the early 2030s, which would provide enhanced information on emerging threats including climate change.

Yet, the leaked document indicates a plan to make major cuts in NOAA’s satellite program, including cancelling contracts associated with the GeoXO program and contracts for NASA collaboration on it. Unfortunately, it’s not too far-fetched to imagine that changes like this could be aimed at trying to deliberately gut agency capabilities so as to privatize critical satellite systems and hand large contracts to companies that will then take advantage of taxpayers financially in the years to come.

NOAA cuts are cruel, dangerous—and premeditated   

The Trump administration’s assault on NOAA—including the reckless mass firings of career scientists and other experts, targeting of climate-related work for elimination, and threats to precious, long-standing resources and data—are all reprehensible. They will harm people across the country and could leave the nation at a scientific disadvantage for decades to come.

Much of what is happening was previewed in Project 2025, whose chief architect, Russell Vought, is now executing his master plan from his powerful perch at the OMB. Project 2025 chillingly said:

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.

It took specific aim at OAR, calling for it to be downsized and for its climate-related research to be disbanded, falsely disparaging it as “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism.”

And here we are, not even three months into the term of this administration, watching the destruction unfold as planned.

Refusing to accept the scientific reality of climate change and gutting the nation’s ability to understand those changes won’t make climate impacts go away. Instead, cities, states and our country will be left flying blind into this oncoming disaster, without the information they urgently need to get out ahead in responding to worsening risks.

This is not efficiency; this is not going to save money. This is, quite literally, going to cost lives and lead to mounting, incredibly expensive damage to our economy. Congress, please stand up to these attacks and defend NOAA.

According to a leaked internal budget memo, the Trump Administration is planning to end climate research at both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). If this goes ahead, it would be an illegal escalation by the Trump Administration against the United States’ scientific enterprise and will directly hurt American livelihoods, leading to more deaths and greater economic damage from extreme weather events. Congress holds the power of the purse in our democracy and should step up to oppose harmful cuts to NOAA and NASA.  

While the proposed cuts claim to only be directed at climate change research, which would be disastrous on its own, the scientific institutions on the chopping block are imperative for the prediction and research of extreme weather events, including tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods. The memo proposes closing all 16 Cooperative Research Institutes in 33 states, every one of the 10 research labs, all 6 regional climate centers, slashing the budget for the NASA Goddard Space Institute, and ending $70 million in grants to research universities. Thousands of seasoned scientists, early career scientists, and young scientists in graduate schools will lose funding. These folks have spent their livelihoods conducting research that improves climate and weather prediction that directly affects every American. 

But what does this mean? Why should you care? Here are just some examples of how these cuts will affect you, if they go ahead: 

1. Significant decrease in hurricane forecasting accuracy

The proposed cuts include closing the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (CIMAS) at the University of Miami and the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML). This would end support for NOAA’s hurricane hunter missions as we know them, which provide invaluable data for hurricane forecasting models that predict the path and strength of hurricanes making landfall in the United States. Further, improvements in hurricane forecasting by these institutions have led to nearly $5 billion saved per major US-landfalling hurricane. The total budget cuts that would close these institutions? $485 million. These 2 institutions alone save the American taxpayer tens of billions of dollars annually, far more than what they cost. Closing them makes zero financial sense, and will cost us dearly, including in lives. 

2. An end to climate monitoring for farmers

If this budget passes, the NOAA Regional Climate Centers (RCC) would shut down operations, which provide critical decision tools for farming communities across the United States. This includes products that factor long-term climate data into decisions for frost, drought, extreme precipitation, and even turf grass for golf courses. The RCCs further archive weather and climate data that are used for understanding trends in temperature and precipitation extremes. 

3. Coastal communities will be left on their own

The memo calls for a slashing of the budget that supports the National Ocean Service, which provides information on tides, flood risk from extreme weather events, sea-level rise due to climate change, and water pollution for coastal communities. 

4. An end to US climate science leadership

The proposed budget would close the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) in Princeton, New Jersey, which is the birthplace of weather and climate modeling. If this occurs, the US would be abdicating its leadership in the advancement of our understanding of the atmosphere, especially under climate change. If we can no longer predict the effects of climate change, communities in the United States will be left on their own, with no help in how they should adapt to changes in extreme weather events. 

5. Young scientists under threat with nowhere to go

Graduate students and early career scientists across the country depend on funding from NOAA grants and Cooperative Institutes to conduct their research. These projects are vital for the future of the US economy and include anything from predicting tornado outbreaks using machine learning to studying how hurricanes undergo rapid intensification. If this funding is cut, we lose the ability to fund these projects that benefit every American, and we lose the ability to support curious young scientists who want to better the world with research. Furthermore, international graduate students and professors across the country are fearful of having their visas revoked due to small administrative errors or by exercising freedom of speech as is protected under the US constitution. In order for the US to attract the world’s brightest minds, we must be creating a space for scientists to flourish in, rather than causing panic and spreading fear through deportations.

On a personal note, my path to getting a PhD would not have been possible had these cuts been made previously. My undergraduate and master’s research was funded by the Northeast Regional Climate Center, where I conducted research on drought risk in the Northeastern United States and applied a statistical model to weather model forecasts for improved predictions of temperature and precipitation. And now, friends in the field who are just leaving graduate school are struggling to find jobs and worried about anything that’s federally funded. Scientists should feel safe and secure in their curiosity of the climate and weather system; that’s how it always used to be in the United States. 

The American scientific enterprise is under attack and being sabotaged by the Trump Administration. This is not about making the government more efficient, as it will drastically affect our ability to predict and research extreme weather events, which will have devastating effects on our country’s economy.

It is critical that we stand up and fight for these institutions at this crucial moment. We must contact our representatives and name how these institutions, which we’ve been investing in for decades, benefit our livelihoods. Luckily, we’ve seen some US Representatives stepping up: here is a letter organized by Representative Wesley Bell, press releases from Representative Tonko and Senator Cantwell, and a letter organized by UCS and signed by 2,500 scientists calling on US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to protect the work of NOAA.  

For decades, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the federal government has recognized that safeguarding all communities requires a deliberate effort to enforce environmental regulations, monitor pollution, and implement programs aimed at those most affected by environmental harm. Despite decades of progress in environmental protections, the Trump administration aims to systematically roll back these safeguards. Upon taking office, President Trump immediately rescinded a suite of Executive Orders that directed federal agencies to prioritize environmental justice— including one that had been in effect for more than thirty years. 

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has doubled down on this effort by announcing plans to cut 65% of the agency’s budget. He further detailed his plan by announcing a suite of more than 30 actions aimed to weaken or eliminate longstanding protections for air quality, water quality, chemical safety, greenhouse gas regulation and much more. This plan undermines the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to fulfill its mission, to “protect human health and the environment.”  

The Role of Environmental Justice at the EPA 

As a former Environmental Health fellow at the EPA during the first Trump administration, I witnessed the importance of environmental justice programs in action. Environmental justice, as defined by the EPA, is “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of race, color, culture, national origin, income, or educational levels, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of protective environmental laws, regulations, and policies.”  

The EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and Civil Rights (Office of EJ) advocates for community-led solutions to environmental issues, coordinating these efforts across the agency and enforcing civil rights protections. This office has played a crucial role in addressing environmental injustices in over-polluted communities, such as Cancer Alley in Louisiana, where high cancer rates are linked to the region’s petrochemical industry, and Flint, Michigan, which suffered from the infamous lead-contained water crisis.   

During my fellowship, I worked in the Office of Air and Radiation in the Indoor Environments Division. Our office integrated environmental justice and equity into programs that reduce asthma triggers indoors, reduce exposure to harmful gases such as radon, and improve air quality in schools.  On average, Americans spend 90 percent of their time indoors where concentrations of some pollutants can be as much as five times higher than outdoors. Older adults, children and people with cardiovascular and respiratory disease face a greater health risk from exposure to pollutants indoors. Black individuals in the US are 1.5 more likely to diagnosed with asthma. The EPA works to ensure that all communities have access to a healthy environment by reducing environmental risks and improving public health in overburdened areas.  

EPA’s Environmental Justice Efforts are Making Communities Healthier

EPA’s Office of EJ develops policies and provides guidance to help federal, state, and local agencies incorporate environmental justice principles into their programs. The office also addresses environmental disparities by identifying and rectifying areas with higher pollution levels or limited access to green spaces. One place where EPA’s intervention has helped to address community pollution is North Birmingham, Alabama. North Birmingham, Alabama has faced decades of residential contamination due to its close proximity to heavy industry. The area includes asphalt plants, cement facilities, coke production, and lumber manufacturing, many of which are located near homes and schools. The neighborhood’s population is predominantly Black, a direct result of racial redlining, a discriminatory practice that historically confined Black residents to certain areas.  

The contamination from these plants includes chemicals in soil such as Benzo(a)pyrene (BaP), lead and arsenic which are known carcinogens. In 2011, EPA decided that immediate action was needed to address the contamination and underwent an effort to sample the soil in residential properties and at schools. Based on the results, the EPA Superfund program removed about 90,000 tons of contaminated soil and replaced it with clean soil to reduce residents’ exposure to harmful toxins.  

North Birmingham is just one example where the EPA has focused on improving public health by identifying and addressing areas with elevated pollution levels. By slashing environmental justice, the administration is cutting programs designed to ensure equal protection for clean air, water, and land, endangering vital research into environmental health risks. Furthermore, cuts to funding, resources, and community engagement jeopardize strategic efforts to address public health issues and promote local economic growth. 

EPA Programs Are Revitalizing My Community 

In addition to my role as Senior Campaign Manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists, I also serve as a County Commissioner in Macon County, Alabama. In this position, I am deeply committed to ensuring that our community, along with others across the country, receives the support needed to keep our governments functioning and our residents safe. This can be especially challenging for small, rural counties with limited budgets. The EPA’s justice programs and resources have been vital for counties like mine, providing grants, technical assistance, and enforcement support.  

Communities nationwide, including those in my home state of Alabama, have long struggled to access the funding and support needed for life-saving infrastructure upgrades. Alabama is home to several of the nation’s worst environmental disaster sites, along with numerous Superfund sites. As a result, federal resources have been crucial in helping us make the necessary improvements to our infrastructure.  

My hometown of Tuskegee, AL has experienced years of underinvestment and economic stagnation. We have benefitted from the EPA’s Brownfields Program, a program designed to assist communities, states and tribes in assessing, safely cleaning up and reusing contaminated properties. Known for its power to clean up and revitalize communities, the EPA Brownfields programs has received bipartisan support. As a part of a larger effort to “improve the environmental, public health, economic and social impacts associated with contaminated and abandoned sites,” Tuskegee applied for and received a $300,000 grant from the EPA Brownfield’s program. 

This award is intended to develop seven cleanup plans and conduct community engagement activities in the City of Tuskegee. Notably, the grant provides funding to assess the level of contamination in soil and groundwater for sites, including a former oil distribution center, former hotel, and former gas station. The funding will also support examining contamination on properties with dilapidated buildings. Rehabilitating properties like this is tough for local leaders like me because no one otherwise would want to take on the liability risks to redevelop them. This program, and programs like this, support communities in remediating and reusing sites with legacy pollution which can be vital for economic development and community improvement.

The Brownfields program is just one of the EPA’s countless programs revitalizing small communities while making people healthier across the country. While Brownfields has historically enjoyed bipartisan support, reports of the administration’s desire to slash the EPA’s funding by 65% amidst broader attacks on environmental justice leaves me deeply concerned for the future of vital programs like this.  

Counties across the country rely on many EPA funding programs to provide basic services and protect public health. To provide safe drinking water, we rely on the support of programs like the Clean Water State Revolving Funds program which is administered by the EPA to finance projects to upgrade wastewater treatment plants and/or repair old pipelines. A drastic reduction in funding could lead to delays in maintaining and upgrading these facilities, resulting in lower water quality or the unreliability or failure of critical infrastructure.  

The Enduring Need for Environmental Justice

It is clear that the Office of Environmental Justice and Civil Rights helps EPA connect people and communities to government resources needed to solve problems and protect health and the environment. Moreover, that EPA at large has an important mandate, to protect all people. Whether it is in my community or any other part of the country, EPA’s programs help communities and local officials by providing the technical support and funding needed to address long standing environmental pollution challenges.

There is broad cross-cutting support for the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and Civil Rights. Recently, 170 organizations signed-on to a joint letter to urge Congress and the EPA officials to reverse steps to dismantle the Office of Environmental Justice and Civil Rights. In a parallel show of support, more than 500 individuals from across the United States signed on to a similar letter urging the EPA to keep the Office of Environmental Justice.  

The environmental justice movement emerged as a response to years of evidence showing that low-income and communities of color were disproportionately affected by environmental and health harms. Industries that others were unwilling to have near their homes, such as toxic landfills, polluting fossil fuel plants, and hazardous chemical manufacturing companies, were often placed in marginalized communities of color lacking the political power or capital to block such decisions.  

The recognition of EJ in the federal government fulfilled a distinct need, backed by science. Without the safeguards, our nation is on track to exacerbate environmental issues that disproportionally impact low-income communities and communities of color and local officials around the country will have to figure out how to navigate the challenges without the support of the agency charged to lead the way. 

Esta nota fue publicada originalmente en EFE Verde.

Es un disparate que con la temporada de huracanes a la vuelta de la esquina y con el alza en la frecuencia de desastres climáticos de gran magnitud, el gobierno del presidente Trump haya ordenado al Servicio Nacional de Meteorología (NWS por sus siglas en inglés) suspender la traducción de sus alertas meteorológicas al español y otros idiomas. Sumado a la reciente orden ejecutiva que declara el inglés como idioma oficial de Estados Unidos (y que de paso deroga una orden ejecutiva del año 2000 para impulsar el acceso a servicios gubernamentales para personas que no dominan el inglés), se le cierra el acceso a información vital a millones de personas en los Estados Unidos cuyo idioma principal no es el inglés.

Esta decisión–por una supuesta falta de presupuesto–no es un mero ajuste administrativo: es una movida cruel y peligrosa que pone en riesgo la vida de millones de hispanohablantes y otras comunidades en Estados Unidos cuyo idioma principal no es el inglés. ¿Cómo puede una familia prepararse ante un tornado, un huracán, un incendio forestal o una ola de calor si no entiende lo que dice una alerta?

Decisiones discriminatorias

Desde mis años como estudiante de geografía en Arizona hasta mi trabajo actual como científico social en la Unión de Científicos Conscientes, he estudiado cómo los peligros ambientales y las decisiones racistas y discriminatorias en materia de política pública afectan de forma desigual a comunidades de bajo ingreso y, en particular a las y los Latinos y a las personas de raza negra. Las acciones recientes para debilitar al NWS y suspender su servicio de traducciones forman parte de una tendencia alarmante: el abandono de los principios de equidad, transparencia y servicio público en favor de intereses económicos y políticos particulares.

El NWS ha sido, desde sus orígenes en 1849, un bastión de la seguridad pública. Sus pronósticos, alertas y datos meteorológicos son financiados con dinero público y tienen un propósito claro: salvar vidas. Sin embargo, el permitir el lapso del contrato con LILT (la empresa privada encargada de traducir las alertas al español, chino, francés, vietnamita y samoano) pone en riesgo esa misión, especialmente en estados y territorios como Arizona, Texas, Florida, California y Puerto Rico, donde millones de personas hablan español como su primer idioma.

Justicia ambiental

Esta suspensión no es un asunto menor. La capacidad de recibir una alerta por calor extremo, entender una advertencia de tornado o una orden de desalojo ante un huracán o inundación repentina puede depender, literalmente, del idioma en que se emite la información.

No se trata de una exageración. Es una cuestión de justicia ambiental y climática, tanto como de equidad en la preparación ante desastres. La eliminación del contrato de traducción ignora el impacto real sobre las comunidades que ya enfrentan barreras estructurales como bajos ingresos, discriminación y acceso limitado a servicios de emergencia y recuperación luego de un desastre.

Estas decisiones reflejan un patrón preocupante del desmantelamiento del NWS, en línea con presiones de ciertos sectores para privatizar el servicio y restringir el acceso libre y público a los datos meteorológicos. Peor aún, existe el riesgo de que esta información–generada con fondos públicos–acabe en manos privadas y nos pongan a pagar por segunda vez por un servicio por el cual ya pagamos con nuestros impuestos. Esto ampliaría una brecha ya existente: quienes pueden pagar por datos precisos estarían mejor preparados, mientras que el resto de nosotros quedaría desprotegido.

Poblaciones tradicionalmente desatendidas

La equidad no es un concepto abstracto. El propio exdirector del NWS, Ken Graham, fue muy claro al afirmar que el servicio de traducción “mejorará la equidad de nuestro servicio para las poblaciones tradicionalmente desatendidas y vulnerables que tienen un dominio limitado del inglés”. Esta visión es esencial, y su abandono es, francamente, aborrecible.

La ciencia del clima y la meteorología no reconocen fronteras ni idiomas; en cambio, las decisiones humanas sí. Y cuando esas decisiones priorizan la eficiencia económica sobre la salud y vida de la gente, las consecuencias caen más fuertemente entre quienes tienen menos voz y representación.

Sabemos que el cambio climático está intensificando los eventos meteorológicos extremos. Comunicar de manera clara, accesible y multilingüe es hoy más urgente que nunca para proteger nuestras vidas, nuestros hogares, nuestras escuelas y lugares de trabajo. El acceso equitativo y libre de costo a la información meteorológica no debe ser optativo: es tanto un derecho como necesidad pública. Después de todo, los contribuyentes en Estados Unidos ya han pagado por éste servicio público y tienen derecho al mismo.

El gobierno federal debe rectificar esta decisión cuanto antes y buscar soluciones sostenibles para garantizar que todos, sin importar el idioma que hablen, tengan acceso a la información que necesitan para estar a salvo del sin número de eventos meteorológicos extremos que nos acechan.

I’ve had too many close calls with increased tornado activity here in Louisville, KY, and the summer heat seems more unbearable each year. After a winter that brought terrible storms, I’m bracing for “Danger Season,”—the period between May and October when North America experiences its worst climate impacts. It seems to be starting earlier and lasting longer.

Danger Season 2025 may bring even more extreme impacts as the climate crisis intensifies—this information makes me fear for the safety of my family and my loved ones. I allow myself to feel fear and grieve for what is lost. I think of the words in Frank Herbert’s Dune:

“Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.”

This helps me remember that I won’t allow fear to keep me from finding courage and fighting for a safer world—for my son, for my community, for all of us.

When climate change comes knocking at our door, we need to be prepared. That is why we must tackle the climate crisis and the affordable housing crisis at the same time.

Home looks different for all of us, and because of that we must pursue equitable solutions to make people safer where they live.

From flooded trailers in KY

People clear out a trailer neighboring the Perez home at Ramsey Mobile Home Park following rain storms that caused flooding on February 17, 2025 in Pikeville, Kentucky. Jon Cherry/Getty Images

…to fallen trees in South Carolina when Hurricane Helene cut an 800 mile path across the southeast…

Photo provided by the author of her cousin’s home after Hurricane Helene.

and mobile homes destroyed by hurricanes.

FEMA search and rescue efforts in N. Carolina after Hurricane Helene. Sept. 2024. FEMA

When the lack of air conditioning behind prison doors makes extreme heat a death sentence,

Create Image/Getty Images

and when people who are experiencing homelessness must find relief where they can when a heat dome encompasses Portland.

A man who asked to not be named tries to stay cool near a misting station in Lents Park during an extreme heat wave August 13, 2021 in Portland, Oregon. Nathan Howard/Getty Images

When the sea has forced its way right through the doors of Summer Haven homes,

Drone view of homes in Summer Haven, Florida. Aerial_Views/Getty Images

and when fire consumes everything that a family has worked for.

Sisters Emilee and Natalee De Santiago sit together on the front porch of what remains of their home on January 19, 2025 in Altadena, California. Brandon Bell/Getty Images

When families must pack up what they can and evacuate,

People walk down a flooded street as they evacuate their homes after it the area was inundated with flooding from Hurricane Harvey on August 27, 2017 in Houston, Texas. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

and renters and public housing are hit particularly hard…

Diamond Dillahunt, 2-year-old Ta-Layah Koonce and Shkoel Collins survey the flooding at the Trent Court public housing apartments after the Neuse River topped its banks during Hurricane Florence September 13, 2018 in New Bern, N. Carolina. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

even if we’re safe in our doorway, we won’t thrive if our community is not prepared

A person walks past downed power lines as people deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on October 05, 2024 in Greenwood, South Carolina. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

…because we can’t do this alone.

Volunteer rescuer workers help a woman from her home that was inundated with the flooding of Hurricane Harvey on August 30, 2017 in Port Arthur, Texas. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

“The measure of whether or not a community is resilient is how it protects people from the inevitable.” –Andreanecia Morris, Executive Director for Housing NOLA

Climate-driven risk will make the ongoing housing crisis worse and would have disproportionate impacts on low-income families and communities of color, including people who are incarcerated or experiencing homelessness.

Right now, we need elected officials and government agencies from the local to the federal level doing everything possible to ensure people have safe, affordable, climate-resilient housing and resources to recover from disasters. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is an essential agency for meeting our housing needs, yet Elon Musk is attempting to cut staff and render HUD inoperable in his illegal grab for power.

Thankfully, he’s facing pushback. The Government Accountability Office has committed to investigating the impact on fair housing enforcement in response to a petition led by Senator Elizabeth Warren, Ranking Member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. We’ll need sustained action to keep Elon’s hands off HUD and to invest in affordable, climate-safe housing nationwide.

Call your Senators today and tell them to keep Elon’s hands off HUD and to invest in affordable, climate-safe housing.

For talking points, refer to this national letter signed by UCS and housing justice organizations.

In a blitz of destructive actions announced by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin last month, he specifically called for a reconsideration of the 2009 Endangerment Finding. A formal proposal for reconsideration of the Finding (and all the agency regulations and actions that depend on it) is expected this month. The science underpinning the Endangerment Finding is airtight, but that won’t stop the Trump administration from setting up a rigged process to try to undo it and give a blank check to polluters. The Union of Concerned Scientists will fight back to defend climate science and protect public health safeguards.

In an earlier post, I laid out some of the history and context for the 2009 science-backed Endangerment Finding and the Cause or Contribute Finding. These findings followed from the landmark 2007 Mass v. EPA Supreme Court ruling which held that greenhouse gas emissions are unambiguously air pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act. Together, these establish the clear basis for EPA’s authority and responsibility to set pollutions limits for heat-trapping emissions from vehicles, power plants and other sources of these pollutants, under the Clean Air Act.   

Attacks on the Endangerment Finding and EPA’s Clean Air Act authority from industry interests are nothing new. Importantly, courts have repeatedly upheld both, including in a resounding 2012 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals–D.C. Circuit in Citizens for Responsible Regulation v. EPA. But those who have long sought to overturn or weaken regulations to limit heat-trapping emissions now have Administrator Zeldin in their corner. And he has shown himself to be an unbridled purveyor of disinformation and proponent of harmful attacks on bedrock public health protections, as my colleague Julie McNamara highlights.

The details of what will be included in the reconsideration proposal are unclear at this point. But we do know some of the trumped-up lines of attack the Zeldin EPA could advance to try to invalidate these Findings because many of these tired arguments are outlined in EPA’s reconsideration announcement.

Here are the facts:

Fact #1: The science backing the Endangerment Finding is beyond dispute

Every major scientific society endorses the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change driven by GHG emissions. The Fifth National Climate Assessment and the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report are two major recent authoritative summaries of peer-reviewed climate science, which show that the science on climate change has only become more dire and compelling since 2009.

The impacts of climate change on human health are also starkly clear and backed by overwhelming evidence. Here’s the main finding from the NCA5 chapter on public health, for instance:

Climate change is harming physical, mental, spiritual, and community health through the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events, higher incidences of infectious and vector-borne diseases, and declines in food and water security. These impacts worsen social inequities. Emissions reductions, effective adaptation measures, and climate-resilient health systems can protect human health and improve health equity.

As just one example, climate change is contributing to worsening extreme heat which exerts a punishing toll on people’s health, including that of outdoor workers. Heat is already the leading cause of extreme weather-related deaths in the United States and studies show that heat-related mortality is on the rise.

Looking around the nation, with communities reeling from extreme heatwaves, intensified hurricanes, catastrophic wildfires and record flooding, climate impacts are the lived reality of all too many people. To deny that or obfuscate about the underlying causes is not only disingenuous, but actively harmful and outright cruel.

Fact #2: The law requires an independent scientific determination of endangerment, unhindered by cost considerations

A Finding of Endangerment under the Clean Air Act is specifically focused on a threshold scientific determination of whether the pollutant under consideration harms public health or welfare. Costs to industry of meeting any subsequent regulations are not relevant per the statute.

The original Endangerment Finding was reached in the context of the vehicle emissions, per section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act, partially excerpted below:  

The Administrator shall by regulation prescribe (and from time to time revise) in accordance with the provisions of this section, standards applicable to the emission of any air pollutant from any class or classes of new motor vehicles or new motor vehicle engines, which in his judgment cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.

In its 2012 decision, the DC Circuit was also clear is noting that “By employing the verb “shall,” Congress vested a non-discretionary duty in EPA.” That duty is not circumscribed by cost considerations.

Of course, the impacts of climate change are themselves incredibly costly and those costs are mounting as heat-trapping emissions rise. Unsurprisingly, the social cost of greenhouse gases, a science-based estimate of those costs, is another metric that the Trump EPA is seeking to undermine in yet another blatant attempt to put a thumb on the scale in favor of polluting industries.

Fact #3: EPA used well-established methodologies in its assessment of six GHGs

As noted in the 2009 endangerment finding, the EPA defined the pollutant contributing to climate change as “the aggregate group of the well-mixed greenhouse gases” with similar attributes. The attributes include that they are sufficiently long-lived, directly emitted, contribute to climate warming and are a focus of science and policy.

The EPA used a very well-established scientific methodology to combine emissions of GHGs on the basis of their heat-trapping potential, measured in CO2 equivalents. In the case of passenger cars, light- and heavy-duty trucks, buses, and motorcycles—the transportation sources EPA considered for the original endangerment finding—they emitted four key greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and hydrofluorocarbons.

False, glib claims in the reconsideration announcement baselessly accuse the 2009 Endangerment Finding of making “creative leaps” and “mysterious” choices. There is nothing mysterious about the heat-trapping attributes of greenhouse gases, nor their impact on public health. It’s called science. Once again, relying on the mountain of evidence in the peer-reviewed scientific literature would make that readily apparent.

Fact #4: EPA has the responsibility and authority to regulate major sources of GHGs

The Cause or Contribute Finding—which specifically established that greenhouse gas emissions from new vehicles contribute to the pollution that harms public health—may   also come under attack. This finding has been extended to other major sources of GHGs, including power plants and oil and gas operations. However, the Trump administration could attempt to use accounting tricks to avoid regulating emissions—as it has tried before.

In its first term, the administration attempted multiple underhanded maneuvers along these lines, including in the context of methane and VOC regulations in the oil and gas sector . For these regulations, the administration split up segments of the source category, designated them as separate source categories, used that manipulation to claim inability to regulate certain segments, and asserted that methane emissions from the remaining segments were too small and regulating them would not provide additional benefits, so those too could not be regulated. Separately, in the final days of the administration, EPA released an absurd framework attempting to set thresholds for determining “significance,” trialed in the context of power plants.

This irrational approach could be used to artificially segment components of power plants or the power system, for example, and then claim no regulations are required. This kind of rigged math wouldn’t fool a kindergarten child but there’s no telling where this administration might go in its desperate attempt to undo or weaken regulations on greenhouse gas emissions.

Zeldin’s relentless subversion of EPA’s mission

Under Administrator Zeldin, EPA’s mission to protect public health and the environment has been completely subverted. His shocking rhetoric lays bare how far he will go to protect polluters at the expense of the public. Here he is, for instance, crowing about going after 31+ EPA regulations and guidance, as well as the enforcement of pollution standards meant to protect all of us:

“Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen. We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion…”

EPA even set up an email address for polluters to send an email to get a presidential exemption from complying with regulations on toxic pollution, such as mercury emissions, regulated under the Clean Air Act!

Zeldin is fervently committed to dismantling public health protections and rolling back enforcement of existing laws passed by Congress. Going after the Endangerment Finding is an integral part of this all-out assault because, in the Trump administration’s harmful calculation, revoking the Finding is a potential means to rolling back all the regulations that depend on it.  

Ironically, some utilities and oil and gas companies have spoken out in favor of keeping the Finding intact, as they fear a greater risk of climate damages lawsuits in the absence of EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gases. Of course, this just exposes that they know their products are causing damage. What they seek is the weakest possible exercise of EPA authority so they can continue to reap profits while evading accountability for those harms.

We can fight back with science

But none of this is a foregone conclusion. The legal and scientific basis for the Endangerment Finding is incredibly strong. The false claims Zeldin and other opponents have trotted out are full of bombast but weak on substance.

The science on climate change is so indisputably well-established, that it’s hard to see how any court would uphold a challenge to it. That’s not to say Zeldin won’t try to find a cabal of fringe “scientists” to try to attack it, but they’re unlikely to succeed on the merits.

Public comments on the proposal to reconsider the Endangerment Finding can help set the record straight on facts. And if the Zeldin EPA ignores them and finalizes a sham Finding or revokes the Finding with a faulty rationale, that will be challenged in court.

UCS will be closely following the details of EPA’s proposal to reconsider the Endangerment Finding when it is released. And we will let you know how you can add your voice to bolster this crucial science-based Finding, and the public health protections that flow from it. So, stay tuned!

Last month, I was invited to speak at a press conference alongside Wisconsinites from across the state for the launch of the Climate Accountability Act. At just sixty words, it’s a simple but powerful bill with the potential to make our communities healthier, advance racial equity, and drive our state’s economy forward: 

In the 2025-26 legislative session, the legislature shall pass legislation creating a viable plan to reduce carbon emissions in this state by 52 percent by 2030 and creating a viable plan for achieving carbon neutral emissions in this state by 2050. Any plan enacted under this subsection shall maximize the impact of the plan on improving economic and racial equity.  

The bill, introduced by State Representative Supreme Moore Omokunde and State Senator Chris Larson, creates an enforceable timeline with specific objectives, allowing flexibility for discussions of the various technology and policy approaches to come later. With nearly 20 legislative cosponsors and a broad coalition of partners—including the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS)—signed on in support, Wisconsin has the unique chance to prove that states can, and should, take the lead in preparing communities for a more resilient future. 

From technical details to personal stakes 

As a Senior Energy Analyst with UCS, my work typically involves diving deep into the details of specific pieces of regulation and legislation in Wisconsin and surrounding states: working on comments about archaic electric metering requirements in Wisconsin, writing testimony about interconnection rules in Michigan, or modeling the role of energy storage in Illinois’ clean energy future. 

So, when I first heard of the Climate Accountability Act—at a mere two sentences—I could have brushed it off as too high-level. Call me when we get to the nitty gritty! But in reality, as I pointed out in my remarks at the press conference launch, I have a huge stake in Wisconsin’s climate—this state is my home. 

I came to Madison ten years ago to pursue a master’s in electrical engineering. Eventually, I met my wife, bought a home, and welcomed a son into the world who is now three years old. Madison is our home. That’s why I believe the Climate Accountability Act is a critical step for Wisconsin, especially given all the ways the federal government is trying to move us backward  on addressing climate change.

The cost of inaction 

In my own comments, I highlighted some of the ways that the lack of a climate plan affects Wisconsinites, drawing on my colleagues’ research. I highlighted the UCS analysis of the negative health and economic impacts of new fossil gas plants that We Energies is proposing in Oak Creek and Paris, WI.  

My colleagues recently led an analysis showing that pollution from these proposed plants could result in nearly $6 billion of health and economic costs over their thirty year lifespan. That’s a big, scary number—but it translates to an even scarier reality: nearly 400 premature mortalities, 300 ER visits, and 900 new cases of asthma. 

Since the press conference, our Wisconsin coalition partners RMI released additional analysis about the proposed Oak Creek plant finding that it will cost ratepayers more than $1.25 billion in higher energy costs compared to cleaner alternatives. 

To underscore the negative impacts of fossil fuels on our grid, I also pointed to key research around resilience. In a study we completed last year, we found that during five major power outages around the U.S., gas plants were more likely to fail while resources like wind and solar helped keep the lights on. 

While the Climate Accountability Act doesn’t directly address the proposed plants, the setting in which the utility proposed them is important to understand. Despite being one of the first states to enact a renewable portfolio standard (RPS) requiring 10% of the state’s energy to come from renewables, the requirement expired in 2015 with no meaningful updates since. And unlike most of our neighbors in the Midwest, Wisconsin is also unique in lacking a requirement for a detailed, public, forward-looking planning process known as integrated resource planning. 

Within this context, Wisconsin utilities are unique in their dogged pursuit of new gas capacity—EIA data indicates that natural gas made up only 7% of U.S. planned capacity additions in 2025, with the bulk of these new plants planned for states without a current clean energy standard (the proposed Wisconsin plants won’t show up in the EIA data unless they are approved by the state). With a robust climate plan, Wisconsin utilities would have to look beyond their legacy preference for fossil fuels and consider cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable alternatives.  

Climate change threatens Wisconsin’s future 

While I focused on the energy sector in my comments, the impacts of climate change—and the importance of the climate accountability act—are far-reaching for Wisconsin and other Midwest states. 

Our 2019 Killer Heat report found that without action on climate change, the number of days each year with a heat index over 100°F will jump 783%, from six to 53 in the Midwest. The impact will be felt most acutely by outdoor workers and vulnerable populations including children, the elderly, and those who are pregnant. The report also highlights how centuries of social and economic discrimination have increased the exposure of BIPOC communities and individuals to the risks of heat-related illnesses and injuries. 

In 2020, we highlighted research finding that the combined effects of rising temperatures and increased CO2 concentrations lead to reduced yields from corn and soybean crops in the Midwest, harming local economies. 

That’s just a handful of examples focused on the Midwest—at a higher level we know that climate change will also make winter storms worse, increase the risk of wildfires, and lead to more floods. 

And, as the sponsors of the Climate Accountability Act recognized with the inclusion of the critical second sentence, these impacts will most acutely affect environmental justice communities and others who have been historically marginalized. Any plan addressing climate change in Wisconsin must focus on addressing these historic harms. 

Source: Matt Brusky/Citizen Action “The fierce urgency of now” 

In his opening remarks at the press conference, the bill’s sponsor in the Assembly, Representative Supreme Moore-Omokunde, quoted the words of Martin Luther King Jr while reflecting on “the fierce urgency of now.”  I’ll close with his call to action: 

“We cannot continue to burn fossil fuels with no plans to seek alternatives that are best for urban and rural Wisconsinites. We must develop a plan now that centers racial and class equality, and gets us on a path to net zero.”

Click here to find out more about the bill and how you can support it. 

¡Feliz Semana del Agua!

¿Has visto alguna vez la Sierra Nevada de California desde el Valle de San Joaquín a principios de primavera en un día despejado? Cuando la Sierra tiene nieve y la calidad del aire nos permite verla desde aquí, esa vista no tiene igual.

Cada año en esta época, cuando miro la Sierra desde el Valle, sé que si veo poca nieve será un año seco. Cuando hay bastante nieve como ahora, sé que habrá menos dificultades con el suministro de agua durante el verano, pero puede haber inundaciones. Las inundaciones pueden ser causadas por lluvia sobre nieve y por altas temperaturas primaverales que derriten la nieve más rápido y antes de lo habitual. El cambio climático está provocando un deshielo más temprano y rápido.

Para nosotros, los apasionados del agua, esta vista es más que un hermoso paisaje. El manto de nieve es nuestra reserva de agua principal en California después del agua subterránea. Esta es una foto de la parte sur de la Sierra Nevada en 2023 vista desde el condado de Tulare. Foto por Angel S. Fernandez-Bou.

El estudio de niveles de nieve de la semana pasada confirmó lo que vemos en las montañas. El Departamento de Recursos Hídricos de California informó que el manto de nieve del estado midió el 96% del promedio en su punto máximo el 1 de abril. Hay matices, ya que el norte recibió el 120% y el sur solo el 84%. Podemos decir que estas son noticias relativamente buenas, pero también debemos recordar que los últimos tres años de manto de nieve promedio fueron seguidos de una severa sequía desde 2020 hasta 2022, el período de tres años más seco registrado en California.

Estos extremos climáticos y los cambios meteorológicos bruscos que experimentamos aquí son cada vez más frecuentes con el cambio climático, y es por eso que necesitamos planificar tanto para las inundaciones como para el próximo período seco que podría estar a la vuelta de la esquina.

Manto de nieve de la Sierra Nevada (norte, centro y sur) presentado como porcentaje de nieve comparado con el promedio histórico el 1 de abril. Mientras que el norte tiene más que el promedio histórico, el sur tiene menos. A escala estatal, el manto de nieve es aproximadamente el promedio histórico, pero habrá más agua en el norte y menos en el sur que el promedio.

En esta Semana del Agua 2025 tenemos que recapacitar sobre cómo prepararnos para los extremos climáticos modernizando nuestra gestión del agua. En años anteriores, el deshielo rápido ha provocado inundaciones y preocupaciones sobre la integridad estructural de algunas presas. Por ejemplo, en 2017, casi 200,000 residentes tuvieron que ser evacuados aguas abajo de Oroville debido a la probabilidad de un colapso después de un evento de lluvia sobre nieve.

Daño en el aliviadero de Oroville en 2017. Fuente: DWR

Por eso es vital que el estado esté trabajando con la comunidad científica en una nueva estrategia de gestión para reducir el riesgo de inundaciones para las comunidades río abajo y beneficiar los suministros de agua durante los períodos secos. Esta estrategia se llama FIRO, por sus siglas en ingles que significa “operaciones de embalses informadas por pronósticos meteorológicos”, y es un nuevo enfoque que puede ayudarnos a manejar de manera más flexible los extremos del agua.

Numerosas presas en California están diseñadas con un doble propósito: disponer de capacidad para capturar aguas de crecida y prevenir inundaciones, mientras simultáneamente funcionan como reservorios para el almacenamiento hídrico. Tradicionalmente, sin FIRO, estas presas se operan siguiendo normas rígidas basadas en el calendario, que determinan el volumen de agua que debe mantenerse en el embalse según la época del año.

Lo que FIRO aporta es permitir a los gestores de presas utilizar pronósticos meteorológicos para tomar decisiones más inteligentes sobre los niveles de agua. Pueden liberar agua preventivamente antes de tormentas significativas para crear capacidad adicional, o conservarla cuando los pronósticos no indican riesgos inminentes de precipitación. Esta aproximación flexible optimiza la gestión hídrica en ambos frentes: minimiza los riesgos de inundación y maximiza la disponibilidad del recurso.

En esencia, FIRO posibilita que los operadores conserven más agua en los embalses para utilizaciones futuras. Es decir, FIRO elimina ese “miedo a perderse oportunidades” (FOMO) respecto al agua que podría haberse almacenado si se contara con mejores herramientas de predicción.

FIRO: de California al mundo

Érase una vez (y persiste aún) una megasequía en California que alcanzó su punto crítico durante el período de severa escasez hídrica entre 2012 y 2016. Los entusiastas del agua de California tal vez sepan que esta sequía fue el catalizador que impulsó la Ley de Gestión Sostenible del Agua Subterránea (SGMA), la cual a su vez evidenció la necesidad de reusar estratégicamente cerca de un millón de acres de tierras agrícolas irrigadas en el estado. En aquel momento, los operadores de embalses observaban con preocupación cómo se liberaba agua de valor incalculable desde las presas como medida preventiva contra inundaciones, incluso cuando no existían pronósticos de lluvia ni acumulación de nieve por derretir. Esta situación exigía una solución.

El proyecto pionero de FIRO se implementó en el Lago Mendocino, en la cuenca del Río Ruso al norte de California. Allí convergió un equipo multidisciplinario de científicos, gestores hídricos e ingenieros que colaboraron con el Cuerpo de Ingenieros del Ejército, la Administración Nacional Oceánica y Atmosférica (NOAA), la Institución Scripps de Oceanografía y el Departamento de Recursos Hídricos de California para desarrollar una solución innovadora. El elemento decisivo fueron los avances en pronósticos hidrometeorológicos, que permiten predecir con mayor exactitud la temperatura, las precipitaciones y los caudales de los ríos. Este conocimiento científico sobre clima, meteorología e hidrología se perfecciona continuamente gracias a la labor de agencias federales como NOAA y NASA, en estrecha colaboración con la comunidad científica.

La precisión de los pronósticos meteorológicos ha experimentado avances significativos en décadas recientes. Actualmente, alcanzamos una fiabilidad extraordinaria en previsiones a tres días. Con mayor investigación y el desarrollo de supercomputadoras más potentes, ampliaremos nuestra capacidad para realizar pronósticos con mayor anticipación, lo que permitirá gestionar de manera óptima las operaciones de nuestros embalses.

A partir de esta experiencia inicial, metodologías similares a FIRO han surgido en diversas regiones del país. En Seattle, por ejemplo, se prevé lograr un mejor equilibrio entre la protección contra inundaciones y la disponibilidad hídrica mediante la implementación de FIRO en la presa Howard Hanson de la cuenca del Río Verde. En la región del Medio Oeste, el Lago Erie cuenta con LEOFS (Sistema de Pronóstico Operativo del Lago Erie) para administrar eficientemente los niveles de agua afectados por variaciones estacionales y el cambio climático. Por su parte, la Autoridad del Valle de Tennessee también ha adoptado este enfoque de gestión de inundaciones para afrontar eventos de precipitación extrema, particularmente ante la creciente frecuencia de huracanes y otros fenómenos climáticos extremos que afectan el sur del país.

Esta revolución en la gestión hídrica trasciende fronteras. Fuera de Estados Unidos, países como Australia y Japón, así como la región mediterránea, están incorporando progresivamente los pronósticos meteorológicos en la planificación y operación de sus sistemas de embalses.

Los beneficios transformadores de implementar FIRO

El poder de FIRO reside en su capacidad para revolucionar múltiples aspectos de la gestión hídrica. En primer lugar, optimiza la disponibilidad del agua precisamente cuando más la necesitan las comunidades, el sector agrícola y los ecosistemas. Al conservar el agua en los embalses hasta que los pronósticos meteorológicos señalen una auténtica necesidad de prevención de inundaciones, aseguramos reservas hídricas vitales para nuestros característicos veranos mediterráneos.

Este sistema representa un salto cualitativo en la gestión de inundaciones respecto a los métodos tradicionales basados en calendarios con fechas predeterminadas. Con FIRO, las decisiones de liberación de agua se fundamentan en la convergencia de pronósticos meteorológicos y modelos hidrológicos (la ciencia hidrometeorológica) que identifican riesgos reales de inundación, superando así la dependencia de meras estadísticas históricas.

Una ventaja significativa del sistema FIRO es su capacidad para incrementar el almacenamiento hídrico sin requerir construcciones adicionales. En un contexto donde los nuevos proyectos de presas enfrentan crecientes obstáculos ambientales, sociales y económicos, FIRO permite extraer el máximo rendimiento de la infraestructura ya existente mediante una operación más inteligente. Adicionalmente, la precisión que proporcionan los pronósticos hidrometeorológicos facilita la programación de descargas ambientales estratégicas, garantizando que se atiendan las necesidades ecológicas de los ríos y las especias acuáticas en momentos precisos.

Por último, FIRO constituye una herramienta fundamental para fortalecer la resiliencia frente a sequías, una preocupación cada vez más acuciante conforme el cambio climático intensifica los períodos secos en numerosas regiones. Al conservar agua durante los intervalos sin riesgo de inundación dentro de la estación húmeda, tanto comunidades como agricultores pueden asegurar reservas hídricas estratégicas para afrontar episodios de sequía que, de otro modo, agotarían rápidamente los recursos disponibles y provocarían restricciones severas en el consumo.

Desafíos en el horizonte de implementación

A pesar de sus evidentes beneficios, la implementación de FIRO presenta diversos desafíos que requieren consideración. Si bien la fiabilidad de los pronósticos meteorológicos es notablemente alta, especialmente en la Costa Oeste de Estados Unidos, no todas las regiones del país o del mundo cuentan con este nivel de precisión. Siempre hay un grado de incertidumbre inherente a cualquier predicción. Aunque la exactitud de los pronósticos mejora anualmente, los operadores de embalses deben contemplar ese margen—pequeño pero existente—de incertidumbre al tomar decisiones sobre la gestión de riesgos por inundación.

Para abordar esta incertidumbre, resulta fundamental el uso de pronósticos probabilísticos y sistemas de ensambles. En situaciones donde la prudencia dicta liberar volúmenes de agua superiores a los óptimos para la protección contra inundaciones, existe la posibilidad de mitigar este impacto canalizando estos excedentes hacia proyectos de recarga de acuíferos. Estos sistemas de recarga no solo proporcionan almacenamiento subterráneo adicional, sino que también contribuyen a contrarrestar problemas de subsidencia del terreno, proteger nuestros acuíferos para que no se sequen nuestros pozos domésticos, preservar ecosistemas dependientes de aguas subterráneas y prevenir la intrusión salina en zonas costeras.

FIRO enfrenta, además, barreras técnicas e institucionales significativas. Desde la perspectiva técnica, requiere conocimientos especializados en meteorología, hidrología y gestión de embalses—competencias que no siempre están disponibles en los organismos responsables de la administración hídrica. En el plano institucional, implica una transformación cultural que abandone las operaciones basadas en calendarios predeterminados para adoptar un modelo de toma de decisiones dinámico fundamentado en pronósticos, lo que puede generar resistencia en organizaciones habituadas a metodologías convencionales. Si bien estas transiciones transformadoras requieren tiempo, es alentador que tanto el Cuerpo de Ingenieros del Ejército como la Oficina de Reclamación estén respaldando activamente las iniciativas FIRO.

Las marcadas diferencias climáticas, topográficas y de características de embalses entre distintas regiones imposibilitan la simple replicación del modelo FIRO de una cuenca a otra. Cada implementación requiere adaptaciones específicas basadas en condiciones locales. Esta diversidad subraya la importancia de integrar a las comunidades locales en los procesos decisorios, pues frecuentemente poseen un conocimiento invaluable sobre las dinámicas de la cuenca y tienen intereses legítimos en la gestión de los embalses que deben ser considerados para garantizar una implementación exitosa.

El futuro pertenece a FIRO

Los avances en ciencia climática y supercomputación continuarán perfeccionando los pronósticos meteorológicos. La inteligencia artificial (IA) está potenciando este enfoque, incrementando la efectividad de FIRO. La integración de IA en modelos meteorológicos augura una precisión sin precedentes, facilitando decisiones más acertadas sobre almacenamiento y liberación de agua. En un futuro próximo, las previsiones meteorológicas de alta precisión podrían extenderse de días a semanas, otorgando a los operadores de embalses un margen temporal más amplio para prepararse ante eventos extremos.

Conforme el cambio climático intensifica tanto las inundaciones como las sequías extremas, FIRO y metodologías afines se vuelven indispensables para la gestión hídrica moderna, como reconoce la legislación reciente en California mediante el Programa de Investigación y Mejora de Pronósticos de Ríos Atmosféricos: Habilitando la Adaptación Climática a través de Operaciones de Embalses Informadas por Pronósticos y Resiliencia ante Peligros (AR/FIRO). La ley AB30 (2023) actualizó el marco normativo para incorporar explícitamente a FIRO como herramienta estratégica en la gestión de la escasez hídrica y prevención de inundaciones.

Sin embargo, la auténtica revolución que representa FIRO trasciende el ámbito tecnológico; es una nueva concepción sobre infraestructura. En lugar de limitarnos a construir presas más grandes o diques más elevados, FIRO demuestra que, en ocasiones, las soluciones más efectivas surgen de la optimización inteligente de recursos existentes. Este paradigma refleja el pensamiento adaptativo necesario ante un clima cambiante, reminiscente de nuestras iniciativas de reconversión de tierras agrícolas hacia usos múltiples más sostenibles.

FIRO aporta la flexibilidad esencial que las operaciones hídricas requieren para adaptarse al cambio climático y sus múltiples consecuencias: deshielo prematuro, eventos extremos más frecuentes, calentamiento de aguas fluviales, mayor evaporación en lagos, intrusión marina, subsidencia y sobreexplotación de acuíferos. En el incierto panorama climático que enfrentamos, enfoques como FIRO—que abrazan la incertidumbre mediante avances científicos—resultarán determinantes para la sostenibilidad de comunidades, economías y ecosistemas. Aunque los desafíos hídricos y ambientales que aguardan son formidables, mantengo el optimismo: si confiamos en la ciencia y atendemos las voces de la ciudadanía, podremos construir un futuro hídrico caracterizado por su resiliencia y sostenibilidad.

Happy Water Week!

Have you ever seen the Sierra Nevada of California from the San Joaquin Valley in the early spring on a clear day? When the Sierra has snow and the air quality allows us to see it from here, that view is second to none.

Every year at this time when I look at the Sierra from the Valley, I know if I see little snow, it means it’s a dry year. When there is plenty of snow like now, I know it means less struggle with water supplies during the summer but also potential floods. Floods can come from rain-on-snow events and from high spring temperatures that melt the snow faster, and climate change is triggering earlier and faster snowmelt.  

For us water nerds, this view is more than a beautiful landscape. The snowpack is our main water storage in California after groundwater. This is a photo of the southern part of the Sierra Nevada in 2023 seen from Tulare County. Ángel S. Fernández-Bou

Last week’s snow survey confirmed what I saw in the mountains. The California Department of Water Resources reported that the state’s snowpack measured 96% of average at its peak on April 1. There is nuance, since the north got 120% and the south only 84%. We can say this is relatively good news, but we also have to remember that the last three years of near-average snowpack followed a severe drought from 2020 to 2022, the driest three-year period ever recorded in California.

These climatic extremes and the weather whiplash we experience here are becoming more frequent with climate change, and that’s why we need to plan for both flooding and the next dry period that could be just around the corner.

Snowpack of the Sierra Nevada (north, central, and south) presented as the percentage of the historical average snowpack on April 1st. While the north has more than the historical average, the south has less. At the state scale, the snowpack is approximately the historical average, but there will be more water in the north and less in the south than average.

As we mark Water Week 2025, preparing for extremes is critical for modernizing our water management. In past years, supercharged snowmelt has led to flooding and dam safety concerns. For example, in 2017 nearly 200,000 residents had to be evacuated below the Oroville Dam due to fears of collapse after a rain-on-snow event.

Oroville spillway damage in 2017. DWR

That’s why it’s vital that the state is working with the scientific community on a new management strategy to reduce flood risk for downstream communities and benefit water supplies during dry periods. It’s called Forecast Informed Reservoir Operations, or FIRO, a new approach that can help us more flexibly manage water extremes.

Many of the reservoirs in California are managed so they have space to capture flood water to avoid flooding damage and hazards while they are also used for water storage. Without FIRO, reservoirs are managed with fixed calendar-based rules that tell you how much water to keep in the reservoir for that time of year. FIRO enables reservoir operators to use forecasts to adjust the amount of water in the reservoir before storms, reducing flood risk by releasing water ahead of major events while holding water in the reservoir if there are forecasted precipitation events. FIRO benefits both sides of water management by mitigating flood risk and increasing water availability.

FIRO allows reservoir operators to keep water in the reservoir for future uses. In other words, FIRO avoids the fear of missing out (FOMO) on water that you could have stored if you had better forecasting.

FIRO started in California and has since gone worldwide

Once upon a time, there was (and still is) a megadrought in California that peaked in the acute drought of 2012 to 2016. If you’re a water nerd, you may know that drought triggered the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which itself triggered the need to strategically repurpose about 1,000,000 acres of irrigated cropland in the state. By then, water managers were looking at extremely valuable water being released from reservoirs for flood prevention, even though there were no rainfall forecasts or snow to melt. And they wanted to do something.

The first FIRO pilot project was in Lake Mendocino on the Russian River in Northern California. There, a group of scientists, water managers, and engineers worked with the Army Corps of Engineers, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the California Department of Water Resources to find a solution. The key? Our ever-improving hydrometeorological forecasts, which means more accuracy to predict temperature, precipitation, and streamflow. Our scientific knowledge about climate, meteorology, and hydrology improves every year thanks to federal agencies like NOAA and NASA, and their partnerships with the research community.

The accuracy of weather forecasts has improved a lot over the last decades. At present, we have very high accuracy for a 3-day forecast. With more research and faster supercomputers, we will be able to increase our ability to forecast with greater lead times, which can translate into better control of our reservoir operations.

Since then, FIRO-like approaches have appeared in other parts of the country. For example, Seattle can soon expect a better balance between flood protection and water availability as they are planning to use FIRO at the Howard Hanson Dam in the Green River watershed. In the Midwest, Lake Erie has the LEOFS (Lake Erie Operational Forecast System) to better manage water levels affected by seasonal variations and climate change. The Tennessee Valley Authority is also relying on this kind of flood management during extreme precipitation events, especially because of the more common hurricanes and climate change extremes the South is experiencing.

Outside the United States, countries like Australia and Japan, and the Mediterranean Region are also starting to include meteorological forecasts in their reservoir operations.

The benefits of implementing FIRO

FIRO’s power lies in its multifaceted benefits for water management. First, it can improve water availability when communities, farmers, and the environment need it most. By keeping water in reservoirs until meteorological forecasts indicate an actual need for flood prevention, we preserve our most precious resource for our Mediterranean summertime. This approach also offers more accurate flood management compared to calendar-based releases, as water is released only when meteorological forecasts couple with hydrological models (what we call hydrometeorology) actually indicate a flood risk, rather than based on historical statistics.

FIRO can achieve increased water storage without requiring new infrastructure. In an era where building new dams faces environmental, social, and economic barriers, FIRO maximizes the efficiency of existing infrastructure through smarter operations. The precision offered by hydrometeorological forecasting also allows for more targeted environmental releases, facilitating that ecological needs downstream are met when needed.

Finally, FIRO can contribute significantly to drought resilience—a critical concern as climate change intensifies dry periods in many regions. By retaining water during nonflood periods in the wet season, communities and farmers can save valuable water to protect themselves against drought conditions that might otherwise deplete water availability faster and trigger water use restrictions.

Potential challenges

Despite its clear advantages, implementing FIRO comes with several challenges that need to be considered. Forecast reliability is very high, particularly along the US West Coast, but not in all areas of the US or world, there is always uncertainty in any forecast. While meteorological forecasts become more accurate each year, dam operators must still account for the small-but-not-zero uncertainty in these predictions when managing flood risks. To account for the uncertainty in forecasts, the use of ensembles and probabilistic forecasts are important. When uncertainty means releasing more water than might be optimal for flood protection, we can mitigate this by directing releases to aquifer recharge projects. In addition to providing underground storage, recharge projects can be used to combat subsidence impacts, protect groundwater levels for domestic wells, help groundwater-dependent ecosystems, and prevent seawater intrusion in coastal regions.

FIRO also faces implementation barriers on both technical and institutional fronts. Technically, it requires specialized expertise in meteorology, hydrology, and reservoir operations—skill sets that may not always be available in water management agencies. Institutionally, it demands a culture shift away from calendar-based operations toward more dynamic, forecast-based decision making, which can meet resistance in organizations accustomed to traditional approaches. Although transformative changes like FIRO can take time, both the U.S. Army Corps and Bureau of Reclamation are now actively supporting FIRO efforts.

Additionally, the significant variations in climate, topography, and reservoir characteristics across different regions mean that FIRO can’t simply be copied from one watershed to another. Each implementation requires tailored approaches based on local conditions. This variability also underscores the importance of bringing local communities to the decision-making table—they often hold valuable knowledge about watershed behavior and have important stakes in reservoir management outcomes that must be addressed for successful implementation.

The future is FIRO

Meteorological forecasts will continue improving through advances in climate science and supercomputing. Artificial intelligence (AI) is now enhancing this approach, making FIRO more effective. AI integration with weather models promises greater accuracy, enabling more precise decisions about water storage and releases. Highly accurate forecasts may soon extend from days to weeks, giving water managers even more time to prepare for extreme events.

As climate change intensifies both flood and drought extremes, FIRO and similar approaches are a necessity for water management, as recent legislation in California acknowledges in the Atmospheric Rivers Research and Forecast Improvement Program: Enabling Climate Adaptation Through Forecast-Informed Reservoir Operations and Hazard Resiliency (AR/FIRO) Program. AB30 (2023) updated current legislation to explicitly include FIRO as an emerging tool to better manage water scarcity and floods.

But the true revolution of FIRO extends beyond technology—it represents a fundamental shift in how we think about infrastructure. Rather than simply building bigger dams or higher levees, FIRO shows us that sometimes the most powerful solutions come from a smarter use of what we already have. This approach embodies the kind of adaptive thinking required in our changing climate, and reminds me a lot of our cropland repurposing work for smarter multiple uses of the land.

FIRO gives flexibility to water operations, and that flexibility is essential to adapt to climate change and its consequences in our water systems, such as earlier snowmelt, more frequent and extreme floods and droughts, warmer river water, more evaporation from lakes, seawater intrusion, subsidence, and overdrafted aquifers. As we face an uncertain climate future, approaches like FIRO that embrace uncertainty through better science will be crucial to sustaining our communities, economies, and ecosystems. Our water and environmental challenges ahead are immense, but if we trust science and we listen to people, I am optimistic that we can build a more resilient and sustainable water future.

Bit by bit, President Trump has been chopping away at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) downsizing it through cuts to the agency’s staff, programs and mission. Reports last week revealed a daunting threat from Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Noem, who announced in a cabinet meeting: “We’re going to eliminate FEMA.”

Neither Secretary Noem nor President Trump has the legal authority to abolish FEMA—that power lies with Congress. Furthermore, dismantling or eliminating FEMA will endanger millions of people who rely on the agency to help prepare for and recover from disasters.

In fact, legislators from both parties signaled the need for FEMA by introducing legislation to transform it into a stand-alone, cabinet level agency as it once was before the Department of Homeland Security was formed. Republican Representative Byron Donalds and Democrat Representative Jared Moskowitz, both of Florida, introduced the bill on March 24, 2025.

Days before the DHS Secretary’s statement, on March 19, the president signed an executive order (EO) titled “Achieving Efficiency Through State and Local Preparedness.” This action follows his earlier EO in January establishing a FEMA review council. While sparse on details, this new order prompts a major change in federal policy.

While details are scarce in the EO, there are two clear themes that emerge: shifting the burden of disaster response from the federal government to state and local government—even for major disasters that overwhelm states’ capacities—and using frames like “streamlining” and “efficiency” which this administration is already disingenuously using to decimate agency staffing and budgets to the point that they cannot fulfill their missions. Both of these will create significant risk and harm for communities in the path of and reeling from disasters.

Below I provide a summary of the EO including the new policy, initiatives and updates to current federal policies and the takeaways for each.

1. Shifting the national resilience and preparedness burden to state and local governments

The most significant piece of policy in the executive order seems to simply put in writing what he has been saying he wants all along: to shift more responsibility for disaster resilience, preparedness and response onto the shoulders of state, local, tribal, territorial governments.

If it comes to pass, disaster response and recovery will be more chaotic and ineffective, endangering more lives—especially the elderly, youth, those who have disabilities and others with fewer resources to prepare or evacuate. States, even larger states, don’t have the resources to handle catastrophic disasters. In those cases, governors will ask for a presidentially declared disaster.

Key takeaway: What will change for states?

Effective and well-resourced emergency preparedness and disaster response can mean the difference between life and death. Given that, the lack of details in the executive order (and fact sheet) is baffling, particularly considering the planning, time and level of funding that is needed for disaster preparedness and resilience. States will be unprepared to respond to major disasters on their own. That’s particularly dangerous during the summer months (May-October) when the risks of extreme heat, hurricanes, wildfires and floods tend to peak and collide—a time UCS calls “Danger Season.”

What level of coordinating capabilities, boots on the ground, financial resources and technical expertise can these state and local jurisdictions expect from FEMA when a major disaster is declared? This NPR article speaks to what will be at stake if FEMA is taken out of the equation:

“Without FEMA, states would need to find thousands of additional personnel to inspect damage, distribute disaster aid and plan the rebuilding of public infrastructure. Without federal funding, states would face billions of dollars in recovery costs. After Hurricane Irma in 2017, Florida relied on more than $5.5 billion dollars from the federal government.”

Of course, FEMA also helps with preparedness, as the article points out. And while there is a lot more that Congress and this administration could do to incentivize more emergency readiness by state, local, tribal and territorial governments, this administration hasn’t shown it understands the concept of reducing risk.

2. Develop a national resilience strategy

Section 3 of the executive order calls for a national resilience strategy to be developed within 90 days of the order. Specifically, it calls for the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Michael Waltz, in coordination with the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy Kevin Hassett, to develop “a national resilience strategy that articulates the priorities, means, and ways to advance the resilience of the Nation.”

Key takeaway:  While a national resilience strategy sounds great under any other administration, I am extremely wary of what such a strategy could mean for Trump 2.0. Furthermore, this strategy already exists! In January 2025 the Biden administration released a National Resilience Strategy which was one of the many pieces of climate change resilience-related initiatives the Trump administration revoked. It’s hard to imagine a national resilience strategy that doesn’t address the climate crisis front and center.

A recent Forbes article underscores how climate change has ripple effects throughout the economy and is forcing how and where people live, shaking up real estate and insurance markets, and wreaking havoc on local governments and challenging their ability to provide basic services. And those who are hurt first and worst by climate change-related impacts are often those who live in the riskiest areas with the least resources. This is where and why decision-makers include an equity lens in any kind of disaster assistance, adaptation or resilience strategy.

My colleague Melissa Finucane explains that “without a focus on racial equity, disaster policies don’t just leave these communities behind, they in fact compound the health, environmental, and economic challenges being faced.”

It’s hard to imagine a valuable national resilience strategy being developed within a three-month timeframe. Based on what we’ve seen so far, one thing is for sure: we can expect the Trump administration’s national resilience strategy to be radically different from the Biden administration’s plan. It will also likely be in stark contrast to how climate scientists, policy and planning experts, emergency and floodplain managers understand resilience and how such strategies should be developed and informed by the latest science and public input, prioritizing the needs of communities that have the fewest resources.

3. Review and revise national critical infrastructure policies

Section 3(b) directs the President’s National Security Affairs Assistant, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and heads of relevant agencies, to review all critical infrastructure policies within 180 days and recommend “revisions, recissions, and replacements necessary to achieve a more resilient posture; shift from an all-hazards approach to a risk-informed approach; move beyond information sharing to action; and implement the National Resilience Strategy…”

Key takeaway:  Important policies that could be revised include the National Security Memorandum 22 “NSM-22” of April 30, 2024 (Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience) which replaced Presidential Policy Directive 21 (PPD-21). What I am particularly concerned about is what this administration might do to NSM-22, which was updated after a decade to address new complex threats, and while it has not been revoked, it has been taken down from the White House website. The modernized policy builds on PPD-21 and strengthens it by: 1) encouraging the private sector to comply with minimum resilience standards; 2) adding key new developments such as transitioning energy and transportation sectors away from fossil fuels; and 3) includes emerging threats such as climate change and supply chain disruptions.

Given the fact that this president has dismantled many federal advisory councils, I hope the administration will maintain and include the National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) in this process, as it has been very productive in producing “30 in-depth studies” with many important recommendations—including this related one that the nation must “Better prepare and respond to disruptions (like Superstorm Sandy) that can ripple across multiple infrastructure systems and paralyze services to entire regions.”

I will keep an eye out for how the administration will implement the “shift from an all-hazards approach to a risk informed approach” as the language leaves emergency manager-types scratching their heads. The NSM-22 updates the term all hazards “as all threats, all hazards” and defines this term as “a threat or an incident, natural or manmade, that warrants action to protect life, property, the environment, and public health or safety, and to minimize disruptions of Government, social, or economic activities. It includes, but is not limited to: natural disasters, cyber incidents, industrial accidents, pandemics, acts of terrorism, sabotage, supply chain disruptions to degrade critical infrastructure, and disruptive or destructive activity targeting critical infrastructure.”

A risk informed approach is one that evaluates all potential threats and hazards, identifies exposure and vulnerability. So could this be the administration’s “streamlined” and “efficiency” approach to removing any climate change-related risk such as sea level rise? Or, is instead a throwback to a time prior to the PPD-21’s “all-hazards” risk approach to one that is more focused on the risk of counterterrorism and infrastructure assets?

4. “Streamlines” the national continuity policy

Section 3(c) of the executive order calls for a review of all national continuity policies and recommendations to the president from this review within 180 days of this order. Specifically, it states that the President’s National Security Affairs Assistant, in coordination with the heads of relevant agencies, “shall review all national continuity policies and recommend to the President the revisions, recissions, and replacements necessary to modernize and streamline the approach to national continuity capabilities, reformulate the methodology and architecture necessary to achieve an enduring readiness posture, and implement the National Resilience Strategy described in subsection (a) of this section.”

Key takeaway: Continuity policies are just what they sound like, they provide a coordinated approach in the case of an emergency whether a natural hazard, or other type of disaster. Each of these different pieces of policies tie into each other and highlights that the administration could indeed be dismantling FEMA policy by policy, in this case by FEMA’s continuity policy and toolkit which helps ensure FEMA’s essential functions continue in the case of emergencies but also helps communities understand how to maintain their functionality.

I’m concerned that a so-called “streamlined” approach to continuity policies could mean some critical pieces of budgets could be cut and interagency projects and initiatives won’t be supported, all of which will make communities less resilient.

5. Review and revise preparedness and response policies

Section 3(d) of the executive order calls on the President’s National Security Affairs Assistant and other relevant agencies’ heads to review national preparedness and response policies and recommend revisions, recissions, and replacements necessary to the President to “reformulate the process and metrics for Federal responsibility, move away from an all-hazards approach,” and implement the National Resilience Strategy within 240 days of the order.

Key takeaway: Instead of building on the many years of plans and guidance on preparedness, this administration is underscoring the desire to downsize the federal responsibility and ensure this “reformulation” is reflected in the new national resilience strategy. In under eight months or sooner, the Trump administration will have developed new policies and metrics on what the federal role is in national preparedness and response and what this will look like for states and other jurisdictions.

If the administration takes a hatchet to the current policies, we’ll likely see changes in policies and guides such as the National Disaster Recovery Framework that outlines five main areas including federal support to states and local jurisdictions and emphasizes the need for resilient and sustainable recovery planning and the National Response Framework which helps communities, citizens, business, and others to build response plans. We will also have a better idea about what moving away from an “all-hazards approach” will look like —which doesn’t sound good no matter how you slice it.

6. Develop a national risk register

Section 3 (e) of the executive order calls for a national risk register to be developed within 240 days of this order. Specifically, the order charges the President’s National Security Affairs Assistant, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the heads of relevant agencies, to coordinate the development of a national risk register “that identifies, articulates, and quantifies natural and malign risks to our national infrastructure, related systems, and their users. The quantification produced by the National Risk Register shall be used to inform the Intelligence Community, private sector investments, State investments, and Federal budget priorities.”

Key takeaway: To my knowledge, a national risk register does not exist, however the NSM-22 establishes a coordinated approach to federal risk management for critical infrastructure, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has a national risk management center and FEMA developed a National Risk Index (NRI) which, while it has its flaws, is a tool for communities to see the level of risk for 18 hazards and overlays of social vulnerability, community resilience and expected annual loss. FEMA also had a climate change risk tool as well called the Future Risk Index that FEMA under the Trump administration (of course) removed, but fortunately scientists recovered and is available for free on GitHub.

The bottom line is, if the Trump administration does not account for climate change within the new risk register, it’ll fail to do its job to quantify the risks to the nation’s infrastructure and will cause a moral hazard.

7. “Streamlines” preparedness and continuity organizational structure

Section 3(f) calls on the Secretary of Homeland Security to “streamline” the federal governments’ current national preparedness and continuity organizational structure that spreads across five major functions within one year “to ensure State and local governments and individuals have improved communications with Federal officials and a better understanding of the Federal role.” The functions include: 1) the National Essential Functions, 2) Primary Mission Essential Functions, 3) National Critical Functions, 4) Emergency Support Functions, 5) Recovery Support Functions, and 6) Community Lifelines.”

Key takeaway: Each of these functional categories plays a role in FEMA’s mission.  Similar to changes in the related policies above, a simplified and streamlined version would do a disservice to FEMA’s ability to fulfill its mission. Agency staff know what to do, so it would take time and resources away from other efforts to train the federal family in learning and implementing a new organizational structure in time for hurricane season. 

What’s next?

UCS will closely watch the outcomes of this executive order and this administration’s continued attacks on FEMA because it’s crucial that communities are protected and not sacrificed in the name of harmful and disingenuous efforts purported to advance “efficiency” and “streamline” the federal government’s response to disasters.

We’ll have to wait to have many questions answered as much of the implementation of the EO will be reviewed, written and decided behind closed doors. In the interim, the FEMA Review Council just released a request for information to the public to provide comments on improvements to, and overall experience with FEMA during disasters, which are due May 15, 2025. This is a critical opportunity for the public  to weigh in on how important FEMA is in coordinating a “whole-of-government response in the period immediately after a disaster” – as two former FEMA administrators wrote.

Genuine reforms to FEMA should be informed by science, expertise, and the experiences of disaster survivors. Instead, this administration seems hell-bent on a cruel campaign of decimating an agency that millions of people rely on to stay safe and get back on their feet after floods, fires, hurricanes and more.

Given the actions planned to continue to downsize FEMA, including reducing staff even further, streamlining the mission and staff roles and the geographic footprint of the 10 FEMA regional offices, we need bipartisan defense of the agency. This should be a clarion call for lawmakers to keep communities safe by preserving resources meant for FEMA and making science-informed and evidence-based changes to the agency.

Growl. Sigh. Rinse. Repeat.

Yet another resource that belongs to us, the US public, has disappeared down the Trump administration’s memory hole. I just learned from the valiant Environmental Data and Government Initiative that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has removed the 2024 Climate Literacy Guide from its website (though a data savior has preserved it here). Now, no one can access a fundamental federal resource that helps the public understand climate change via its proper home at https://www.climate.gov/.

Who needs the Climate Literacy Guide? Trump’s Signal crew, that’s who

Anyone who wishes to understand what’s happening to our world—why we keep stacking hottest year on hottest year, why wildfires are so intense, why some hurricanes strengthen so rapidly—can learn from the Climate Literacy Guide.

But some key national security officials could use a new Signal chat, this time discussing the literacy guide to better understand essential principles of climate change science, impacts, and solutions. Bonus: None of this information is classified! And if an accidental invitation is available, I’d love to join officials who notably do use Signal:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has just ordered the “elimination of climate defense planning,” scrapping years of Pentagon policy that identified climate as a major and mounting threat to national security.

Vice President JD Vance, who does not acknowledge human-caused climate change.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who again can’t quite figure out where he’s supposed to be in the (climate) conversation.

Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard, who apparently okayed the omission of climate change from the US intelligence community’s annual threat assessment report for the first time in 11 years.

Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, who during the previous Trump administration wasn’t “interested in climate change” even after an internal report showed it was a driver of migration to the US (along with driving enormous human suffering). At the moment, Miller “is more powerful [on immigration] than ever.”

No one seems to understand why Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was included in the Yemen military attack Signal chat, so I propose swapping him out for Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who promised in his confirmation hearing that he would not dismantle NOAA.

Literacy versus lies

It so happened that NOAA disappeared the guide while I’m at the Climate Information Integrity Summit in Brasília, Brazil. The summit, organized by members of the Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) coalition, was a next step in the Brazilian government’s work with the UN and other member states to further progress on the Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change.

More than 120 key actors from governments, multilateral organizations, and local and international non-profit organizations discussed concrete steps towards safeguarding the integrity of climate information in the lead-up to the next round of international climate negotiations, COP30.

CAAD members (including UCS) clearly see that climate disinformation undermines elections, renewable energy, science, and human rights. That’s why other nations are already taking action to limit the harm disinformation can do, whether the lies for profit come from fossil fuel companies, agribusiness, and Big Tech companies that run social media platforms or search engines. Climate denial and deception in turn lead to a delay in climate action that we simply cannot afford.

Climate literacy is fundamental to climate information integrity. A public armed with that science, plus an understanding of the disinformation playbook that corporate actors keep on running, is a key pillar of defense against the corporations who profit as people suffer.

No wonder the Trump administration, intent on enacting the fossil fuel agenda, doesn’t want us to know and understand what they’re doing to our climate. Authoritarians prefer an uncritical public that lives in ignorance. Heads up—we’re paying attention and we know.

In December 2024, state and local governments across the nation were allocated disaster recovery funds to help address the impact of extreme weather on affordable housing, local economies, and public infrastructure.

These funds, known as Community Development Block Grants for Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) flow through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and have the extraordinary potential to re-shape communities for the better. Unfortunately, the Trump administration is already undermining this valuable investment program.   

Influencing recovery

Positive recovery outcomes aren’t guaranteed, especially given the growing politicization of disaster recovery.  One counter to that politicization, which can delay or divert funds from reaching the most impacted communities, is robust local attention to recovery programs from design to implementation. A recent memo from the Trump administration both clarified points of confusion and rescinded previous guidance to state and local governments that was influenced by years of advocacy from disaster survivors.  

Right now, state and local governments, referred to as grantees, are in the process of submitting draft recovery plans to the federal government for initial approval.  I’ve previously written about principles these plans should embody. Once plans are approved by HUD, state and local governments must hold a public comment period. The exact dates of public comment will vary by each grantee, but this is a crucial opportunity in the disaster recovery process to shape programs and build community with other disaster survivors.  

We’ve compiled a spreadsheet that lists the amounts allocated to each grantee and links either to the initial plan for spending CDBG-DR funds or to the grantee website for disaster recovery. Most of the public comment periods are still open and last week’s memo floated the possibility of an extension of the current timeline.  

We encourage residents in impacted communities to engage in the public comment process to shape recovery plans and demonstrate the urgency of advancing resilience. Once public comment periods have closed, feedback is considered for incorporation for a final plan that is submitted to HUD for approval before programs are stood up and long-awaited funds begin to flow. Recent executive orders—and the agency’s insistence that state and local governments abide by them—are complicating an already complex process.

Disaster recovery and executive orders

A week before the memo that rescinded Biden-era guidance to grantees, HUD Secretary Scott Turner rejected the City of Asheville’s initial plan for spending Hurricane Helene recovery dollars on the grounds that the plan’s mention of supporting minority and women-owned businesses in economic recovery efforts contradicted President Trump’s executive order on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Asheville, which has a 15-million-dollar revenue shortfall after Helene, has since amended its plan.

Cities and states trying to help residents and local economies recover shouldn’t have to spend precious time balancing recovery needs against legally spurious executive orders to access critical funds.  As plans are submitted, we’re tracking both how they address housing and infrastructure needs and the potential for politically motivated interference in the recovery programs.   

In addition to the anti-DEI executive order, HUD is also requiring compliance with the executive order on English as the Official Language of the United States. Depending on how state and local governments choose to interpret this guidance—recovery may be placed further out of reach for non-English speakers.  Ignoring equity in disaster recovery is costly and deadly. 

It’s important to remember that many of the Trump administration’s executive orders conflict with federal law and the constitution. The prevailing wisdom of the courts, and the reason for this administration’s rebukes by the judiciary, is that federal laws passed by Congress and approved by the executive branch supersede executive orders.  

These recovery funds are allocated for six years, survivors engaging with the CDBG-DR process should keep in mind that disaster recovery is a long process.  Survivors from places as different as Texas, New Jersey, and Hawaii have demonstrated the power of residents to shape state, local and national recovery processes.  

As authoritarianism ramps up, we should expect that everything from formal processes like public comment on disaster to recovery to direct action to come with risk. But as anyone on the climate frontlines can tell you, storms and fires are continuing no matter the political whims—a fact that makes getting recovery and mitigation right even more important.

On February 27, 2025, over 1,000 employees at the National Weather Service (NWS) were illegally fired by the Trump Administration under the premise of “making the government more efficient,” even though the agency was already severely understaffed. That same day, due to the job losses, weather balloons were suspended at the NWS Office in Kotzubue, AK. But it didn’t end there. On March 7, Albany, NY and Grey, ME announced partial suspension of their weather balloon launches. And just last week, on March 20, NWS offices in Omaha, NE and Rapid City, SD announced the suspension of their weather balloons. Six other NWS offices in states like Nebraska and Wisconsin revealed a reduction in weather balloon launching capacity that same day. 

This might not sound like such a big deal, but as we’re gearing up for tornado season, which peaks between April and June, taking weather balloons offline in the Heartland of the United States, also known as Tornado Alley, will directly affect the NWS’s ability to predict severe weather, including tornado-producing thunderstorms. This could lead to more severe weather-related deaths that could have otherwise been avoided. 

The current coverage of weather balloon launches in the United States (not including one in Puerto Rico and other launch locations in the Pacific Ocean). The orange dots denote NWS Offices with less balloon launch capacity (one per day instead of two), and the red dots denote NWS offices with balloon launch suspensions. Figure used with permission from the creator, Chris Vagasky (@coweatherman.bsky.social).  Why do weather balloon observations matter? 

Weather balloons are a critical piece of the NWS’s observations infrastructure and have been for nearly a century. They carry radiosondes, instrument packages that report back temperature, pressure, wind, relative humidity, and GPS data to NWS offices, giving us a three-dimensional view of the atmosphere. In the United States, there are 92 NWS locations that release weather balloons, providing data to the NWS and their weather forecasting models. 

Weather models use data collected by weather balloons 

But why do we care about what’s going on in the upper atmosphere? Well, first of all, this data is invaluable for our weather forecasting models. As you may know, meteorologists use weather models to help predict what will happen to the atmosphere in the future. Models anticipate things like winter storms, severe weather outbreaks, flood-inducing rains, or conditions favorable for wildfire development. 

For a weather model to predict the future, it needs an accurate representation of what’s currently going on in the upper atmosphere. By suspending weather balloon launches at multiple locations, we lose data for the weather model, leading to a decrease in its predictability that negatively affects daily forecasts and outlooks for extreme weather events. 

In fact, out of eight types of observations by the NWS (including airplanes and station observations), weather balloons are the second most important in improving prediction of weather models. They also only cost about $10 million per year to launch (assuming each balloon is $200), compared with the total cost of GOES-R satellite—another critical piece of the NOAA observations infrastructure—of $350 million per year. Weather balloon launches are so useful for the prediction of severe weather events that NWS offices often launch more than the usual 2 balloons per day to better inform modeling of a potential tornado outbreak. 

Knowing what’s going on in the upper atmosphere could save lives 

Weather models aside, if we know what’s going on in the upper atmosphere, it makes weather forecasting in general a lot easier in the short-term. What goes on in the upper atmosphere is reflected by weather conditions at the surface. 

Imagine you live in central Oklahoma and wake up one morning in mid-May. For the past several days, the NWS and their weather models have been predicting the possibility of a tornado outbreak to the east of where you live. However, observations retrieved by a weather balloon launch that morning revealed favorable conditions for a tornado outbreak to start where you live, rather than to the east of you.  

Immediately, the NWS issues a tornado watch for your area, and you and your neighbors prepare for a potential tornado later that day. So, yes, the models were slightly wrong, but at least the NWS was able to provide some prep-time given the observations collected by the weather balloon that morning. If the NWS didn’t release a weather balloon, they may have missed the impending tornado outbreak, and you and your neighbors would have been caught completely off guard. 

Ok, it sounds like I’m exaggerating, right? Actually, not at all. On October 3, 1979, a devastating F4 tornado struck Windsor Locks, CT with no warning. According to a study in 1987, the lack of warning was determined to be due to a lack of upper atmospheric data (no nearby, timely weather balloon launches), which led to an underestimation of the strength of the thunderstorm that produced the tornado.  

Three people lost their lives in that tornado. It’s not science fiction to say that more people could lose their lives in the future given a lack of observation of the upper atmosphere. Because of this, and especially as we head into peak tornado season, it is critical for the NWS to remain fully staffed and fully funded. American lives are on the line.

Neither Lee Zeldin, nor Elon Musk, nor President Trump could possibly look Brian Kelly in the eye to tell him to his face that he is lazy.

They cannot tell Kayla Butler she is crooked.

They dare not accuse Luis Antonio Flores or Colin Kramer of lollygagging on the golf course. 

If Zeldin, Musk, or Trump knew a scintilla about them, they would dare not froth at the mouth with their toxic stereotypes about federal civil servants. All four work in Region 5 of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), responsible for pollution monitoring, cleanups, community engagement, and emergency hazardous waste response for Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

The Midwest is historically so saturated with manufacturing that just those six states generated a quarter of the nation’s hazardous waste back in the 1970s, and it is still today home to a quarter of the nation’s facilities reporting to the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory Program. When I recently visited Region 5’s main office in Chicago, one enforcement officer, who did not give her name because of the sensitivity of her job, told me there are still toxic sites where “we show up [and] neither the state nor the EPA has ever been [there] to check.”

With irony, I visited the office the same week the Trump administration and Zeldin, President Trump’s new EPA administrator, announced they planned to cut 65% of the agency’s budget. Zeldin has since then dropped even more bombshells in a brazen attempt to gut the nation’s first line of defense against the poisoning of people, the polluting of the environment, and the proliferation of global warming gases.

Zeldin announced on March 12th more than 30 actions he plans to undertake to weaken or cripple air, water, wastewater, and chemical standards, including eliminating the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights and getting the EPA out of the business of curbing the carbon dioxide and methane gases fueling global warming. Despite record production that has the United States atop the world for oil, Zeldin said he was throttling down on regulations because they are “throttling the oil and gas industry.”

Last week, the New York Times reported the EPA is considering firing half to three-quarters of its scientists (770 to 1,155 out of 1,540) and closing the Office of Research and Development, the agency’s scientific research office. Zeldin justifies this in part by deriding many EPA programs as “left-wing ideological projects.” He violently brags that he is “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”  

Impact of cuts at EPA felt deeply, broadly

Kelly, Butler, Flores, Kramer, and many others I talked with in Region 5 said all these plans are actually a bayonet ripping out the heart and soul of their mission. They all spoke to me on the condition that they were talking as members of their union, Local 704 of the American Federation of Government Employees. Nicole Cantello, union president and an EPA attorney, said the attacks on her members are unlike anything she’s seen in her more than 30 years with the agency. As much as prior conservative administrations may have criticized the agency, there’s never been one—until now—that tried to “fire everybody.”

Flores, a chemist who analyzes air, water, and soil samples for everything from lead to PCBs, said a decimated EPA means less scrutiny for another Flint water crisis, less eyeballs on Superfund sites, and limited ability to investigate toxic contamination after train derailments, such as the incident two years ago in East Palestine, Ohio. He added, “And we have a Great Lakes research vessel that tests the water across all the lakes. It’s important for drinking water, tourism, and fishing. If we get crippled, all that goes into question.”

Butler is a community involvement coordinator who works through Superfund legislation to inform communities about remediation efforts. She was deeply concerned that urban neighborhoods and rural communities will be denied the scientific resources to tell the full story of environmental injustice. Superfund sites, the legacy of toxic chemicals used in manufacturing, military operations, mining and landfills, are so poisonous, they can have cumulative, compound effects on affected communities, triggering many diseases. A 2023 EPA Inspector General report said the agency needed stronger policies, guidance, and performance measures to “assess and address cumulative impacts and disproportionate health effects on overburdened communities.”

Butler is deeply concerned cumulative impact assessments will not happen with cuts to the EPA, denying urban neighborhoods and rural communities the scientific resources to fully expose the horror of environmental injustice. “It’s a clear story that they’re trying to erase.” Butler said of the new administration.

For Kelly, an on-site emergency coordinator based out of Michigan, the rollbacks and the erasing of the story of environmental harms have an obvious conclusion. “People will die,” he said. “There will be additional deaths if we roll back these protections.”

What these workers also fear is the slow death of spirit amongst themselves to be civil servants.

Start with Kelly.

I actually talked to him from Chicago by telephone because he was out in Los Angeles County, deployed to assist with the cleanup of the devastating Eaton Fire that killed 17 people and destroyed more than 9,400 structures.

Between the Eaton Fire and the Palisades Fire, which took another 12 lives and destroyed another 6,800 buildings, the EPA conducted what it said was the largest wildfire hazardous materials cleanup in the history of the agency, and likely the most voluminous lithium battery removal in world history—primarily from the electric and hybrid vehicles and home battery storage people were forced to leave behind as they fled.

During a break, Kelly talked about how nimble he and his colleagues must be. He has worked cleanups of monster storms Katrina, Sandy, and Maria, and the East Palestine trail derailment. Based normally out of Michigan, he recalled a day he was working in the Upper Peninsula on a cleanup of an old abandoned mine processing site. He received a call from a state environmental emergency official asking him to drop what he was doing because 20 minutes away a gasoline tanker truck had flipped over, spilling about 6,000 gallons of gasoline onto the roads and down through the storm sewer into local waterways.

When he arrived, Kelly asked the fire chief how he could help. He was asked to set up air monitoring. But then he noticed anxious contractors who were wondering if they were going to get paid for their work. “They’re ordering supplies, they’re putting dirt down to contain this gasoline from getting any further,” Kelly said. “But they’re like, ‘Are we going to get paid for this?’”

“I found the truck driver who was talking to their insurance company. So I get on the phone with the insurance company and say, ‘Hey. This is who I am. This is what’s happening here. You need to come to terms and conditions with these contractors right now or EPA’s going to have to start taking this cleanup over!’”

The insurance was covered. Kelly said he could not have been so assertive with the insurance company without a robust EPA behind him.

“It’s one thing to be able go out and respond to these emergencies, but you have to have attorneys on your side,” Kelly said. “You’ve got to have enforcement specialists behind you. You’ve got to have people who are experts in drinking water and air. You can’t just have one person out there on an island by themselves.”

“Cruel for the sake of being cruel”

Butler wonders if whole communities will become remote islands, surrounded by rising tides of pollution. The very morning of our interview, she was informed she was one of the thousands of federal workers across the nation who had their government purchase cards frozen by Elon Musk, the world’s richest human and President Trump’s destroyer of federal agencies. In launching the freeze, Musk claimed with no evidence, “A lot of shady expenditures happening.”

Butler threw shade on that, saying the purchase system is virtually foolproof with multiple layers of vetting and proof of purchase. She uses her purchase card to buy ads and place public notices in newspapers to keep communities informed about remediation of Superfund sites.

She has also used her card to piece together equipment to fit in a van for a mobile air monitor. The monitor assists with compliance, enforcement, and giving communities a read on possible toxic emissions and dust from nearby industrial operations.

“I literally bought the nuts and bolts that feed into this van that allow the scientists to measure all the chemicals, all the air pollution,” Butler said. “I remember seeing the van for the first time after I bought so many things for years. And I was like ‘Wow this is real!’”

Not only was the van real, but air monitoring in general, along with soil monitoring— particularly in places like heavily polluted Southeast Chicago—has been a critical tool of environmental justice to get rid of mountains of petcoke dust and detect neurotoxic manganese dust in the air and lead in backyards.

“Air monitoring created so much momentum for the community and community members to say, ‘this is what we need,’” Butler said.

Kramer is a chemist in quality assurance, working with project planners to devise the most accurate ways of testing for toxic materials, such as for cleanups of sites covered in PFAS—aka ‘forever chemicals’—from fire retardants, or at old industrial sites saturated with PCBs from churning out electrical equipment, insulation, paints, plastics, or adhesives. His job is mostly behind the scenes, but he understood the meaning of his work from one visit to a site to audit the procedures of the Illinois EPA.

The site had a small local museum dedicated to the Native tribes that first occupied the land. “The curator or director told us how the sampling work was going to bring native insects back to the area and different wildlife back to the streams,” Kramer said. “It was kind of a quick offhand conversation, but it gave me a quick snapshot of the work that’s being done.”

Kramer wonders how many more scientists will follow in his footsteps to see that the work keeps getting done. He remembered a painful day recently when a directive came down that he could not talk to contractors, even those who happen to work in the same building as he does.

“I see them every day,” Kramer said. “They come say hi to me. They know my child’s name. Being told that I couldn’t respond if they came to my desk, looked me in the face, and said, ‘good morning,’ is just such an unnecessary wrench into our system that just feels cruel for the sake of being cruel.”

Staff stifled, heartbroken

The culture of fear is particularly stifling for one staffer who did not want to give her name because she is a liaison to elected officials. Before Zeldin took over, she would get an email from an elected official asking if funding for a project was still on track and “30 seconds later,” as she said, the question would be answered.

Her job “is all about relationships,” keeping officials informed about projects. Now, she said just about everything she depends on to do her job has basically come to a halt. “Everyone’s afraid to say anything, answer emails, put anything in writing without getting approval. Just mass chaos all the way to the top.”

Relationships are being upset left and right according to other staffers. One set of my interviews was with three EPA community health workers who feel they are betraying the communities they serve because their contact with them has fluctuated in the first months of the Trump administration. They’ve had to shift from silence to delicately dancing around any conversation that mentions environmental justice or diversity, equity, and inclusion.

They did not want to be named because they did not want to jeopardize the opportunity to still find ways to serve communities historically dumped on with toxic pollution for decades because of racism and classism.

“Literally since January 20, my entire division has been on edge,” said one of the three. “We kind of feel like we’re in the hot seat. A lot of people working on climate are afraid. If you’re working with [people with] lower to moderate income or [places] more populated by people of color, you’re afraid because you don’t want to send off any flags to the administration.”

The tiptoeing is heartbreaking to them because they see firsthand the poisoning of families from chemicals the EPA has regulated. One of the health workers has painful memories of seeing the “devastated” look on mothers’ faces when giving them the results of child lead tests that were well above the hazardous limit. “I feel like I made a promise to them that I would be there for what they needed,” she said. “And I feel like I’ve been forced to go back on that promise.”

Remembering their mission boosts morale

Despite that, and despite President Trump’s baseless ranting, which included saying during the campaign that “crooked” and “dishonest” federal workers were “destroying this country,” these EPA staffers are far from caving in. Nationally, current and former EPA staff last week published an open letter to the nation that said, “We cannot stand by and allow” the assault on environmental justice programs.

Locally in Region 5, the workers’ union has been trying to keep morale from tanking with town halls, trivia nights, lunch learning sessions, and happy hours. In a day of quiet defiance, many of the 1,000 staffers wore stickers in support of the probationary employees that said, “Don’t Fire New Hires.” Several of the people I interviewed said that if Zeldin and the Trump administration really cared about waste and inefficiency, they would not try to fire tens of thousands of probationary workers across the federal system. 

One of them noted how the onboarding process, just to begin her probationary year, took five months. “It wastes all this money onboarding them and then eliminating them,” she said. “That’s totally abusing taxpayer dollars if you ask me. It’s hard enough to get people to work here. We’re powered by smart people who went to school for a long time and could make a lot of money elsewhere.” Federal staffers with advanced degrees make 29% less, on average, than counterparts in the private sector, according to a report last year from the Congressional Budget Office.

Individually, several said they maintained their morale by remembering why they came to the EPA in the first place. Flores, whose public service was embedded into him growing up in a military family, said, “I didn’t want to make the next shampoo,” with his chemistry degrees. “I didn’t want to make a better adhesive for a box…the tangible mission of human health and environmental health is very important me.”

The enforcement officer who wanted to remain anonymous talked about a case where she worked with the state to monitor lead in a fenceline community near a toxic industry. Several children were discovered to have elevated levels of lead in their blood.

“People’ lives are in my hands,” she said. “When we realized how dire the circumstance was, we were able to really speed up our process by working with the company, working with the state and getting a settlement done quick. And now all those fixes are in place. The lead monitoring has returned back to safe levels, and we know that there aren’t going to be any more kids impacted by this facility.”

One of the community health workers I interviewed said her mission means so much to her because at nine years old she lost her mother to breast cancer after exposure to the solvent trichloroethylene (TCE). That carcinogen is used in home, furniture, and automotive cleaning products. The Biden administration banned TCE in its final weeks, but the Trump administration has delayed implementation.

“The loss of her rippled throughout our community,” the worker said of her mother. “She was active in our church, teaching immigrants in our city how to read. The loss of her had such a large impact.” She said if the EPA were gutted, so many people like her mother would be lost too soon. “We play critical roles beyond just laws and regulations,” she said. “We do serve vital functions for communities based on where the need is the most.”

The same worker worried that if an agency as critical to community health as the EPA can be slashed to a shell of itself, there is no telling what is in store next for the nation. “I know people don’t have a lot of sympathy for bureaucrats,” she said. “But I think what is happening to us is a precursor to what happens to the rest of the country. We’re supposed to be this nonpartisan force that’s working for the American people, and attacks to that is a direct attack on the American people.”

One of her co-workers seconded her by saying, “We’re fighting for the American people and we are the American people. We all began this job for a reason. We all have our ‘why.’ And that hasn’t changed just because the administration has changed, because there’s some backlash or people coming after us. Just grounding yourself with people whose ‘why’ is the same as yours helps a lot.”