In April 2025, the Trump administration told hundreds of volunteer climate scientists they were no longer needed, killed funding for the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment, and handed leadership of the whole program to a guy who runs a blog called "Irrational Fear." The scientists said, essentially, fine. Sixteen months later, they published anyway.
What Actually Got Blown Up Here
The National Climate Assessment isn't some liberal wish list. It's a congressionally mandated scientific report, required by the Global Change Research Act of 1990, that summarizes how climate change is affecting the United States and gets delivered to the president and Congress every four years. It contains localized predictions for different regions of the country so that actual communities can plan for actual risks. It went through peer review. It went through public comment. Hundreds of scientists contributed to it.
In early 2025, the Trump administration halted work on the sixth assessment, cut funding to the U.S. Global Change Research Program that organized its production, and dismissed the scientists who had volunteered to contribute. The USGCRP website, per NBC News, is no longer online. Not restructured. Not under renovation. Gone.
For context: the fifth assessment came out in 2023. The sixth is supposed to be delivered by 2027. The administration has not said whether it intends to produce one. That's not a clerical oversight. That's a choice.
175 Scientists, No Permission Required
So the scientists did what scientists do when governments try to make inconvenient information disappear. They organized. They wrote. They published.
According to NBC News, 175 independent climate scientists, many of them veterans of previous national assessments, produced a new research commentary released Tuesday across journals run by the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. The document is a roadmap: here's what new research needs to happen, here's what's progressed since the last assessment, here's what state and local governments can use right now while the federal government is busy pretending the problem doesn't exist.
"Scientists working on climate change are continuing to do the work," said Melissa Kenney, a lead author and director of research at the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment, as NBC News reports. "We're stepping in to ensure that we have the research that we need." That sentence shouldn't have to exist. It exists anyway.
The research covers compounding disaster risks, which are the scenarios that tend to kill the most people: heat waves following hurricanes, wildfires driving extreme heat, flash floods knocking out power grids during dangerous conditions. "Those risks," Kenney told NBC News, "are commonly overwhelming legacy policies and infrastructures." Which is a very composed scientific way of saying: people are dying and we are not keeping up.
The Man They Put in Charge
Earlier this year, the Trump administration appointed Matthew Wielicki to direct the U.S. Global Change Research Program. This is the program responsible for the National Climate Assessment. The program the administration defunded. The program whose website is offline.
Wielicki runs a personal blog called "Irrational Fear." NBC News reports that on that blog, he has criticized the scientific consensus on climate change and called media coverage of heat waves being intensified by climate change "hysteria." That is the man now nominally in charge of America's official climate science infrastructure. Wielicki did not respond to NBC News's multiple requests for comment about any of this.
Neither did the White House Office of Science and Technology. No comment on the independent report. No comment on the future of the National Climate Assessment. No comment on whether they plan to fulfill the congressional mandate at all. Silence, from an administration that has plenty to say about almost everything else.
They Also Want to Edit the Last One
Here's where it tips from reckless into genuinely Orwellian. The Trump administration has proposed editing the 2023 National Climate Assessment, which is already published, already peer-reviewed, already through public comment, and produced by scientists who are not members of this administration.
According to NBC News, the administration wants to remove discussion of a high-emissions scenario it considers unlikely. Rachel Cleetus, a senior policy director with the Union of Concerned Scientists, called it exactly what it is. "It's a complete violation of basic scientific best practice," she told NBC News. "They're just advocating coming and proposing to make changes to a report that they were not even authors on."
Phil Duffy, who served as an adviser to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under Biden, pointed out to NBC News that the 2023 assessment is technically just an informational document, one that no federal agency is required to act on. Which raises an obvious question: if it has no binding authority, why go through the trouble of editing a three-year-old report? What exactly are they afraid local governments and corporations will do with accurate information about flood risk?
The Mandate Nobody Is Talking About
Here is a fact that deserves more attention than it is getting. The law says there must be a National Climate Assessment delivered to Congress roughly every four years. The next one is due in 2027. The administration has not said it will produce one. It has not said it won't. It has said nothing.
Duffy told NBC News there is "precedent for not putting out congressionally mandated national climate assessments," meaning previous administrations have been late or delinquent too. But this situation is different. Previous administrations didn't defund the organizing body, shutter its website, fire the contributing scientists, and install a climate skeptic to run the whole operation. That's not delay. That's demolition with extra steps.
Communities across the country use these assessments to make decisions about infrastructure, emergency planning, insurance, zoning, and public health. Gutting the federal program doesn't make those communities safer. It just means they'll have to rely on the work of 175 scientists who did this for free, on their own time, because they understood that the alternative was nothing.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe this is all fine. That firing hundreds of volunteer scientists, taking down a federal website, defunding a congressionally mandated program, and handing the keys to a man with a blog called "Irrational Fear" is just normal policy disagreement. A difference of opinion about regulatory priorities. The kind of thing reasonable people can debate.
It is not that. What the Trump administration did to the National Climate Assessment is what you do when you don't want the public to know things. Not because the science is wrong, but because the science is inconvenient for people who profit from pretending otherwise. The edited-by-request, peer-reviewed, already-published 2023 assessment is the tell. You don't edit a finished scientific report over legitimate methodological concerns. You edit it when the conclusions are bad for your friends.
The 175 scientists who published this week deserve credit for doing something most institutions won't do anymore: refusing to disappear on schedule. But let's not make this a feel-good story about resilience. A congressional mandate is being quietly ignored. The federal government's official climate science infrastructure has been effectively mothballed. The communities that depended on localized risk assessments to make decisions about their futures are getting nothing from Washington. What the scientists published is admirable. That they had to publish it at all is a scandal.
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