On Nov. 14, Rep. James Comer (R-KY) — the Republican chair for the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and a longtime climate science denier — sent a letter to the Democrats asking for information about government scientists accused of preventing “views that challenge the existing consensus” from coming out. Less than three weeks later, Comer claimed that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has employees who “hamstring the incoming Trump administration’s ability to implement their own executive agendas.”
Comer didn’t reference Trump by accident. Since his first term, the once-and-future president has attacked environmental science at every opportunity, suppressing information about how human activity causes climate change and opposing scientists’ suggestions on the regulation of common chemicals known as PFAS linked to infertility and cancer. Dr. Kyla Bennett, director of senior policy at the activist group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), saw the writing on the wall almost as soon as Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. She believes this scrutiny of scientists reflects overt anti-science sentiments — and the American public will pay a terrible price.
Bennett heard stories from EPA employees across the country during Trump’s first term, detailing how their contributions to scientific knowledge were politicized and ignored. She warned that “every single employee” at the EPA is “at risk” right now. Having worked at the EPA for almost 10 years as wetlands enforcement coordinator in New England, Bennett understands EPA workers’ plight viscerally as well as intellectually. Perhaps that’s why she is unapologetically frank when speaking on behalf of government scientists, especially about the millions of American voters who share Trump’s hostility to science.
“When 98% of climate scientists say that climate change is human-caused and it's here, it's bad. We've blown past the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold,” Bennett said, a reference to the carbon emissions cap established in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Those who support Trump's anti-science views "have no understanding of ecology or science whatsoever, full stop, and they should not be in decision-making positions,” she added.
"It will remain to be seen whether we'll be able to say the blindingly obvious scientific truth that fossil fuels are the main cause of irreversible planetary overheating."
Bennett compared humanity’s current predicament to famous disaster movies like “The Day After Tomorrow,” a 2004 film in which climate scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are disregarded and threatened with job cuts despite warning of an impending superstorm. She argued that “every disaster movie starts with somebody ignoring a scientist. We are living in a disaster movie, and we are going to get screwed.”
Numerous current and past government scientists spoke with Salon (some only on background to protect themselves from Trump’s promised retribution), expressing similar concerns about the incoming president’s Agenda 47 and Project 2025, policy platforms which call for laying off thousands of government scientists at agencies like the EPA, NOAA, the Department of Interior and the Department of Energy. Claiming this will boost America’s business interests, Trump has also justified his agenda largely by promoting the pseudoscientific claim that human-caused climate change is a “hoax.” It is a falsehood that can be traced back to President George W. Bush’s administration, which spurred the resignation of his first EPA head in 2003.
Over the years, an entire cottage industry has emerged, churning out misinformation and alternative explanations for global heating aside from humanity’s burning fossil fuels — all of them variables scientists have established do not cause the current extreme warming temperatures — from natural cycles to volcanic activity.
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Overwhelming scientific evidence points to the reason planet is overheating is primarily because humans are burning fossil fuels at an unsustainable rate, and to a lesser extent because of other commercial activities like agriculture and industry. As these actions release greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, water vapor and fluorinated gases into the atmosphere, trapping excess heat, which in turns leads to extreme weather events like wildfires, hurricanes and droughts, as well as rising sea levels. Trump and his supporters reject this damning evidence, and have openly planned to further suppress the gathering and presentation of this scientific data.
That is why federal workers at places like the EPA, NOAA, the Department of Energy and the Department of the Interior are bracing for the worst. Indeed, government employees are already seeing this anti-science philosophy trickle down into official policy, and Trump has not even taken office yet.
“There's already talk within NASA of a pivot toward not saying ‘climate’ in public messaging, and it will remain to be seen whether we'll be able to say the blindingly obvious scientific truth that fossil fuels are the main cause of irreversible planetary overheating,” Dr. Peter Kalmus, a NASA climate scientist who speaks only for himself, told Salon. “As a scientist, this hurts my soul.”
Bennett said the type of science that the Republicans are pushing “isn't science.”
"Science is not the type of thing where you have alternative facts and opinions on both sides."
“Like Kellyanne Conway's 'alternative facts' [claiming] climate change is a hoax or PFAS are not toxic or we don't need endangered species or wetlands are not important,” she said. “Science is not the type of thing where you have alternative facts and opinions on both sides.”
The thousands of scientists who work for the government, whether at the EPA and NOAA or at the Department of Interior or Corps of Engineers, “don't do it for the glory. They don't do it for the money. They do it because they care,” Bennett said, recalling how they were “traumatized” during Trump’s first term. It will likely be no different under his second term, given how Trump has hired anti-science promulgators like Twitter CEO Elon Musk, anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy to fire thousands more and lead the rest, she reflects that “it's horrific that our country has reached a place where science is no longer respected or valued, and that we are a country run by corporations. Corporations have infiltrated the EPA and under the new Trump administration, they are going to take it over.”
Marie Owens Powell, the president of the Council 238 chapter of American Federation of Government Employees (a union that includes EPA members nationwide), told Salon that their union plans on fighting back.
“Our contract has a new article that protects against an administration that is hostile to sound scientific principles,” Powell said. “It allows an independent arbiter to hear a case if an employee feels they’ve been retaliated against for insisting on scientific integrity. So if the agency is captured by an administration that does not value science, there is still a way for employees to remain protected for using scientific principles in their work.”
While these rules may provide some protection, many at the EPA remain apprehensive about how effective these rules will be in practice, especially as Republicans become more assertive in pushing their agenda. These scientists survived the first Trump Administration and are bracing themselves for many of the methods used on that occasion to be intensified.
Take Dan Costa, who left his career as a government scientist precisely because of those tactics. He had been a lead research scientist for 20 years in cardiopulmonary toxicology, focusing on the health effects of air pollution. Within less than a year of the start of Trump’s first term, though, Costa had left, despite having planned to retire years later. He says he experienced too much pushback from business-oriented Trump appointees who didn’t like his calls for stricter air quality controls.
“I felt we had a bullseye on us because, obviously, the national air quality standards were constantly challenged,” Costa said. “People objected when I felt that this administration coming in would number one, go after that regulatory program, and number two, because climate was in there, that it was just going to paper over the whole situation.”
Even though Costa provided the government with detailed research to perform his duties to the best of his ability, it quickly became apparent that his worst fears were well-founded. Trump’s pick to lead the EPA, Scott Pruitt, “really had no interest whatsoever in the mission of the agency,” Costa said, which is in theory (if not always in practice) to protect the environment.
"I felt we had a bullseye on us."
Over time, the problem was not just getting the current scientists to stay; it was also finding reputable scientists who would willingly replace the originals, given the incumbent’s apparent hostility to their occupation. Meanwhile things did not improve at the top, even when Pruitt resigned amidst ethics scandals. Pruitt’s replacement Andrew R. Wheeler still shared Trump’s and Pruitt’s apparent hostility to environmental science.
Another EPA official who left during Trump's first term, who requested to remain anonymous, experienced this hostility directly. The official explains that a lot of their work “pretty much stalled” during all four years when Trump was in office. Even though Trump, Musk, Kennedy and others in the MAGA camp characterize themselves as champions of free speech, this official noted a chilling effect against all references to climate change being caused by the fossil fuel industry.
“We kind of had to talk about the work differently,” they told Salon. “No one used the word ‘climate.’ Everybody kind of just talked about, ‘What are the outcomes of climate work?’ and not necessarily name ‘climate’ just as it is, if that makes sense.”
On a practical level, this made it essentially impossible for scientists to do their jobs, all of which require dispassionate analysis of empirical data without regard to any special interest groups their conclusions might offend. Many scientists, who entered the field out of passion for knowledge and a desire to protect nature, became demoralized and quit. Others were determined to do what good they could in the newly-restrained working conditions, whether saving the environment to the best of their ability or preserving research that would otherwise be purged. Things somewhat improved after President Joe Biden took office and attempted to rebuild what his predecessor had attempted to destroy, but much of the damage had already been done. Now this ex-official expects Trump to finish in his second term what he started in his first.
“You don't feel like you can do your job,” the official said. Similarly an anonymous EPA scientist recalled a Trump official asking during his first term where in the Clean Water Act it stated that the government was required to use the best available science. In preparation for his second term, scientists are expected to go through increasingly arduous working conditions, from being forced to work in-office when it is unrealistic to being potentially relocated to a red state like Texas or Oklahoma.
“Most of the 7,000 employees that work [in the EPA and NOAA] will not move because they have spouses, they have children, they have lives and they don't want to pick up and move to Oklahoma or Texas,” Bennett said. “We are going to lose expertise. We are going to lose the true scientists who work there and who care deeply about the environment, and we are going to lose the guardrails of the laws that we have.”
Lilas Soukup, the president of AFGE 1916, which represents union members at the Department of Energy, discussed the high stress being felt by government employees because of the rhetoric used by Trump, Musk and their supporters.
“I think just anxiety amongst the employees of the various agencies that are being targeted strategically, those associated with research and environmental issues, whether they will be employed or not,” Soukup explained, pointing specifically to Schedule F being implemented, which is a provision in the code for the United States civil service that Trump says he will exploit to fire scientists who do not agree with him.
They worry about what PEER Executive Director Tim Whitehouse described as a “very dangerous” anti-science rhetoric that makes these scientists despair for the survival of our species. Their only hope is that ordinary citizens pick up where they are leaving off.
“I think ordinary people that are concerned about climate change need to stay heavily engaged at the federal level,” Whitehouse said. “They cannot give up. They can never give up. This is the most important issue of our time, and they need to also engage at the state and local level.”
Bennett also urged citizens to be involved at the level of state and local government, as well as with nonprofits.
“The EPA contracts are going to go away,” Bennett said. “They're talking about slashing their budget by up to 75%, so the EPA is no longer going to be a player. What scientists around the country have to do is start working at the local and the state level to at least preserve whatever we can in the states that are willing to do that.”
Experts and citizens everywhere must salvage the research that they can to help future generations, Bennett said. She returned to the disaster movie analogy, adding that if Trump and his supporters have their way, agencies like the one which employs the protagonists of those films will no longer exist. Most notably the heroes played by Dennis Quaid, Dash Mihok and Jay O. Sanders in “The Day After Tomorrow” (the only Hollywood blockbuster to focus on climate change, although scientists acknowledge its high rate of inaccuracies) are all NOAA climatologists, and Trump has put NOAA on the chopping block. According to the tropes of the disaster movie genre, people suffer terribly for disregarding scientific expertise. Bennett expects much the same thing in our world.
“Life is imitating art,” Bennett said. “People who are applauding the upcoming slashing of government employees and government regulations have no idea how these employees and these regulations protect them in their daily lives. Zero idea. The ‘find out’ phase of FAFO is going to be pretty stunning to a lot of people.”
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