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Trump’s National Climate Assessment: No funding and all authors cut loose

The assessment is required by law, but the administration is not noted for caring.

John Timmer – | 101
Image of a neighborhood of single-family houses, with water infall the yards. A street sign with a speed limit on it is in the foreground, with its pole partly submerged.
An accurate climate assessment can be useful for communities that want to plan for future problems, like sea level rise. Credit: Cavan Images / Peter Essick
An accurate climate assessment can be useful for communities that want to plan for future problems, like sea level rise. Credit: Cavan Images / Peter Essick

As part of the Global Change Research Act of 1990, Congress mandated that every four years, the government must produce a National Climate Assessment. This document is intended to provide an overview of the changing state of our knowledge about the process itself and its impact on our environment. Past versions have been comprehensive and involved the work of hundreds of scientists, all coordinated by the US's Global Change Research Program.

It's not clear what the next report will look like. Two weeks after cutting funding for the organization that coordinates the report's production, the Trump administration has apparently informed all the authors working on it that their services are no longer needed.

The National Climate Assessment has typically been like a somewhat smaller-scale version of the IPCC reports, with a greater focus on impacts in the US. It is a very detailed look at the state of climate science, the impacts warming is having on the US, and our efforts to limit warming and deal with those impacts. Various agencies and local governments have used it to help plan for the expected impacts of our warming climate.

But past versions have also been caught up in politics. The first Trump administration inherited a report that was nearly complete; it chose to rush the report out on the Friday after Thanksgiving, hoping it would be largely ignored. The administration did not start work on the subsequent report; as a result, the Biden administration produced a typically detailed report, but it was done slightly behind schedule.

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Biden's team also started preparing the next report (the sixth in the series), which, by law, would need to be completed by 2028. As a result, the second Trump administration inherited a process that was well underway. But in early April, the government canceled contracts with an outside consulting firm that coordinates with the Global Change Research Program and provides temporary staffing to complete the report. This raised questions about whether the report could be completed within its legally mandated timeline.

As it turns out, the Trump administration was not interested in the report that was being prepared. On Monday, all its authors received a notice informing them that the report preparation process was being terminated. A copy seen by Ars thanked authors for their participation but said, "The scope of the NCA6 is currently being reevaluated," and "We are now releasing all current assessment participants from their roles."

There are two possibilities here. The Trump administration, as determined by multiple legal proceedings, has not been very careful about following the law, and it's entirely possible that it will simply fail to produce the required report. The alternative is that the administration plans to complete one that sidelines mainstream science.

Even more so than the first Trump administration, the current one is treating climate science as a mixture of being ideologically motivated and scam-adjacent. And there have always been figures at the periphery of the research community who have refused to accept the evidence for climate change and would happily contribute to a report that rejects mainstream science. It's entirely possible that we'll see these individuals step up to produce a radically different assessment than the one that had been in the works.

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John Timmer Senior Science Editor
John is Ars Technica's science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.
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