The Trump administration’s assault on climate science is entering a new phase.
Until recently, President Donald Trump and his team have focused much of their attention on cutting climate programs and personnel. They’ve fired or let go thousands of employees at climate-relevant agencies such as NASA, NOAA and EPA. And they’ve frozen or cut funding for a variety of grants, programs and partnerships.
Now, though, the Trump administration is turning its attention to something new, critics say: helping to elevate the voices of those who disagree with the scientific consensus that humanity’s burning of fossil fuels is heating the Earth to dangerous levels.
This approach is subtle. It’s being done through changes in federal guidelines and under the guise of rebuilding public trust, scientists say.
But the consequences are no less severe, they add — as they risk putting fringe climate conspiracy theories on equal footing with the kind of peer-reviewed research that has long served as the foundation of federal policy.
And climate science is far from the only area of research that would be affected.
“Much of the new guidance is remarkably UNremarkable,” wrote Gretchen Goldman, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a June 26 blog post. It “restates many of the goals that the scientific community has for increasing the rigor, accessibility, and transparency of science produced and used in federal contexts.
“But behind this facade is concerning language that sets the stage for the administration to undermine science-based policy — the same playbook followed by the first Trump administration (and Congress before that, and the tobacco industry before that),” she added.
The bulk of the new White House strategy rests on a June 23 memorandum put forward by Michael Kratsios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. The document tells federal agencies how they should respond to a May 23 executive order signed by Trump that demands a new “gold standard” in federal science protocol.
The overarching goal is to “ensure the United States continues as the global leader in rigorous, evidence-based science,” Kratsios wrote in the memo.
But the seven-page document raises several red flags, scientists say.
Chief among them is the administration’s focus on “reproducibility” — the ability of scientists to recreate test results to ensure they’re accurate.
On its face, reproducibility makes sense because the constant testing of theories and assumptions is central to good science, said Andrew Rosenberg, a senior fellow at the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School for Public Policy.
But opponents of regulations have a history of using the term to attack sound research, said Rosenberg, who served as a senior NOAA official in the Clinton administration.
For example, during Trump’s first term, EPA put in place rules that limited the use of science in rulemaking. The move was an attempt to block what conservatives dubbed “secret science” — or the use of scientific data that isn’t publicly available and reproducible.
But those restrictions can be problematic when dealing with research such as air pollution studies, which rely on private health information. It’s also extremely difficult to reproduce the conditions of the decadelong studies, Rosenberg said.
“You’re never going to be able to go back to that time and place until, you know, they invent a time machine,” Rosenberg said. “And so reproducibility doesn’t make any sense, it’s meaningless for a lot of the science that is used for public policy.”
Another directive in the White House memo that caught the attention of critics was its insistence on “viewpoint diversity” when evaluating scientific endeavors. The guidelines call on federal agencies to incorporate this approach when awarding contracts and grants.
As with the reproducibility issue, viewpoint diversity sounds good in theory but in practice it can open the door for climate conspiracy theories and allow industry-affiliated researchers to be given “more weight than they would otherwise get,” Rosenberg said.
That’s problematic because it can generate artificial uncertainty around established, peer-reviewed science.
“Anytime you create uncertainty, industry can say, ‘Well, there’s some other views here, maybe we shouldn’t take action until we’re absolutely sure,’” Rosenberg said.
In a similar vein, the White House memo calls for “adversarial collaborations where teams with differing hypotheses design studies to rigorously test results, minimizing confirmation bias.”
Goldman, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the move is a throwback to Trump’s first term, when a similar idea was floated.
“This is a nod to the climate science ‘red team blue team’ exercise, in which ‘climate skeptics’ are given equal standing to climate scientists as they unnecessarily debate,” she wrote in her blog post. “This is a tactic for undermining climate science in policy settings that received widespread pushback from the scientific community in the first Trump administration.”
The real goal of these kinds of efforts is to devalue or destroy research that could hinder the ambitions of Trump and his team, said David Michaels, an epidemiologist and professor at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health.
The guidelines will be used to “control what science is available and usable,” he said.
“The administration is working very hard to kill research that provides inconvenient results in climate change, vaccines, LGBTQ health, air pollution and toxic chemicals,” said Michaels, author of the book “The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception.”
Asked for comment, White House officials directed questions from POLITICO’s E&E News to a NOAA spokesperson, who did not respond. But Kratsios, the OSTP director, defended the Trump administration’s approach in a June 24 opinion piece published in Science.
He wrote that the new guidelines are necessary to preserve “both the freedom of science from partisan politics and democratic government from the excessive influence of the scientific establishment.”
Chilling effect on federal research
The White House directives aren’t limited to scientific protocols.
Trump’s executive order also shifts more power to his political appointees — and makes clear there will be consequences for federal employees who step out of line.
The order instructs agency heads to “establish internal processes to evaluate alleged violations of the requirements of this order and other applicable agency policies governing the generation, use, interpretation, and communication of scientific information.”
These processes will be overseen by a senior appointee who will have the authority to take “appropriate measures to correct scientific information in response to violations” and “forward potential violations to the relevant human resources officials for discipline.”
Those rules could have a chilling effect on federal research, warned Michaels of the Milken Institute School of Public Health.
“It gives political appointees a final say over the interpretation [of] studies,” Michaels said. “You can’t talk about scientific integrity if scientists feel that they can be fired for the wrong interpretation that their boss doesn’t agree with.”
Signs of the new approach already are popping up.
Hours after the OSTP released its June 23 directive, NOAA removed its climate.gov website to remain “in compliance” with the new gold standard guidelines, according to a note on the NOAA website.
“Future research products previously housed under Climate.gov will be available at NOAA.gov/climate and its affiliate websites,” the note added.
More recently, the Trump administration pulled the plug on the website that houses the nation’s top climate reports — though the move was not accompanied with a similar note.
In spite of the criticisms that have stalked Trump’s approach to science, Kratsios suggested that other research institutions follow the administration’s lead.
“Ideally, this effort will set an example for the rest of the research enterprise to do the same, especially the nation’s universities, scientific professional societies, and publishers of the scientific literature as they continue their own efforts to improve the quality of research,” he wrote in the Science essay.
But Jacob Carter of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a close observer of federal science policy, said this kind of advice rings hollow.
“You can’t slash funding, sideline experts and push political agendas and then claim you’re the champion of rigorous science,” Carter said.
