Fired Climate Scientists Built a Secret Jobs Network the White House Can't Touch

How You Build a Shadow Climate Agency in a Parking Lot

It started, as a lot of important things do, with a group chat. After Trump's second inauguration, Aparna Shrivastava, a former senior climate official in the Biden administration, found herself in private conversations with dozens of experts who had just watched their careers get shredded by executive order. According to Grist, people were "in shock." The funding was gone. The positions were gone. The projects were gone.

So Shrivastava started asking the obvious question out loud: what could they actually do? Last July, more than 30 climate experts gathered at a workshop hosted by the Aspen Global Change Institute in Colorado and came up with an answer. Today that answer has a name, a budget, and Shrivastava running it. They call it the Climate Reserve, and until very recently, they've been operating with the lights off on purpose.

What the Climate Reserve Actually Does

Think of it as a staffing agency for the climate apocalypse. Climate Reserve identifies critical work that lost its federal funding, then finds new homes for both the projects and the people who ran them. Grist reports the group has already funded more than two dozen new positions, with fellows now embedded at nonprofits like the Environmental Protection Network and universities including the University of Minnesota.

The group has also brought dead federal projects back to life. EJScreen, the government's online pollution-mapping tool that showed which communities were getting choked out by industrial pollution, now runs independently after Climate Reserve helped rehire a former Biden environmental justice official to keep it current. There's also a sea level mapping project in Panama, and a greenhouse gas monitoring effort spanning five African countries.

And then there's the stuff they won't tell you about. Grist notes that Climate Reserve is deliberately keeping some of its fellows and projects off the record, because many of them still depend on federal funding in some form, or plan to apply for it in the future. The Trump administration, as Grist puts it, has been "notably punitive" with its funding cuts. Advertising yourself as a direct workaround to federal policy is, to put it gently, a strategy with risks.

The Lyft Driver Was a Climate Expert

Here is a detail that should make you stop and sit with it for a second. Shrivastava was heading to the airport in Washington, D.C., to meet with potential funders this spring. Her Lyft driver, she told Grist, turned out to be a laid-off climate and energy expert. A person with deep, specialized knowledge about the warming planet, now navigating D.C. traffic for gig wages because the federal government decided their work wasn't worth funding.

That one anecdote does more to capture the scale of the Trump administration's scientific brain drain than any statistic could. These aren't people who couldn't find other work. These are people who spent years building expertise that now has nowhere to go inside the institutions that were supposed to need it most.

Why They Called It a Reserve

The name is deliberate. Brittany Janis, executive director at the Open Environmental Data Project, told Grist the group wanted to evoke both a nature reserve and the Army Reserve, specifically that idea of "the emergency group that you can call up to bring people together." Her organization partnered with Climate Reserve to staff the newly independent EJScreen tool.

The underlying philosophy is something the founders call "movement generosity," which is a slightly idealistic-sounding term for a very practical idea: stop competing over scraps and start sharing. One fellow funded by Climate Reserve, for instance, might split their time between two organizations, reducing redundant work and keeping people connected across a community that federal cuts were actively trying to fragment. Ben Poulter, who coordinates an emissions-monitoring program at the climate nonprofit Spark and is in the process of hiring two Climate Reserve fellows, told Grist the group recognized early that scarcity could splinter the entire climate research community. "We're all in the same boat," he said.

Coming Out of the Shadows (Carefully)

Climate Reserve is going more public now, but carefully. The reason is straightforward: they need more money to fund more fellows, and you can't fundraise in secret forever. Grist reports that the group is backed by tens of millions of dollars, but the demand for placements far outpaces what they can currently support.

The secrecy wasn't paranoia. It was rational risk management. When your fellows still need to interact with federal agencies and grant systems, the last thing you want is to show up in a press release as the organized resistance to White House science policy. That's the kind of thing that gets you added to a list. Going public now is itself a sign of confidence, or at least a calculated bet that the network is sturdy enough to survive the attention.