Trump Comes for Climate Research

Making sense of the USGCRP and NCA

So tempting to put a thumb on that scale!

Last week Politico published a scoop related to climate research under the Trump Administration:

The Trump administration is canceling funding for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the entity that produces the federal government’s signature climate change study, according to three federal officials familiar with the move.

The move, which had been widely expected, is a potentially fatal blow to the National Climate Assessment, the study that Congress mandated under the Global Change Research Act of 1990 be issued every four years to ensure the government understands the threats that rising temperatures pose and what is driving climate changes. The report is the U.S. government’s most comprehensive look at climate change and serves as a crucial guide to state and community efforts to prepare for the effects.

The Politico scoop has some errors and misinterpretations, which have been repeated in other media — The USGCRP has not had its funding canceled and the Trump administration’s cancellation of a contract to a Beltway consultancy need not be the end of the climate assessment, which is required in law.

In this post I explain the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and the U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA), and offer some advice on how to fix the NCA.

As chance has it, I actually wrote my 1994 PhD thesis on the 1990 legislation that established the USGCRP. After writing my masters thesis evaluating the Space Shuttle program, I wanted to take on a more complex policy evaluation — So for my PhD dissertation I decided to evaluate the USGCRP.

I could not have possibly imagined that I’d still be writing about the USGCRP more than 30 years later, but here we are.

My 1994 PhD dissertation on the USGCRP. You can read the journal article verion here (and a PDF is linked at the bottom of this post).

In 1990, a Democratic Congress passed the Global Change Research Act of 1990 unanimously and Republican President Geroge H. W. Bush signed the act. The purpose of the legislation was:

. . . to provide for development and coordination of a comprehensive and integrated United States research program which will assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change.

The legislation established the U.S. Global Change Research Program which is actually a roll-up of agency programs, coordinated within the Executive Office of the President (see the table below). The budget for each agency goes through te normal appropriations process for that agency.

The justification for the coordinated program was that because research on “global change” — which today we have largely redefined as “climate change” — took place across multiple federal agencies, there would be value in inter-agency coordination of research, both for better science and greater efficiencies. Interagency science programs we somewhat popular at the time.

Source: USGCRP

The actual legislative and bureaucratic politics of the USGCRP were a little more complex, but they converged nicely leading to overwhelming bipartisan support for the program:

• Scientists in government and academia thought the USGCRP was a route to more funding for programs in federal agencies that supported climate and related research;

• OMB saw the USGCRP as a way to better manage and oversee the rapidly growing science climate science budgets across multiple agencies;

• Democrats viewed the program as a possible stimulus to political action on climate;

• Republicans viewed the program as a substitute for other policy action on climate;

• Congress overall thought a program focused on “usable information for policy” made good sense, rather than just supporting science according to the interests of scientists;

• President Bush wanted to bring the ”White House effect” to counter the “greenhouse effect.”

Thirteen years later, Dan Sarewitz and I concluded that the real winners from the USGCRP were the scientists who saw more funding and Republicans who favored supporting climate research as a substitute for other forms climate action, particularly action on energy policies.

We wrote:

Our position, based on the experience of the past 13 years, is that although the current and proposed climate research agenda has little potential to meet the information needs of decisionmakers, it has a significant potential to reinforce a political situation characterized, above all, by continued lack of action. The situation persists not only because the current research-based approach supports those happy with the present political gridlock, but more uncomfortably, because the primary beneficiaries of this situation include scientists themselves. . . the needs and capabilities of decisionmakers who must deal with climate change have played little part in guiding research priorities.

After writing that article, Dan and I were yelled at when we presented these views in a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences Climate Research Committee — but that is a story for another time!

Within the legislation creating the USGCRP is also a requirement for a scientific assessment. Here is the full relevant text:

On a periodic basis (not less frequently than every 4 years), the Council, through the Committee, shall prepare and submit to the President and the Congress an assessment which— (1) integrates, evaluates, and interprets the findings of the Program and discusses the scientific uncertainties associated with such findings; (2) analyzes the effects of global change on the natural environment, agriculture, energy production and use, land and water resources, transportation, human health and welfare, human social systems, and biological diversity; and (3) analyzes current trends in global change, both human-inducted and natural, and projects major trends for the subsequent 25 to 100 years.

In the 35 years since PL 101-606 became law, there have been 5 national climate assessments, plus a series of reports under the George W. Bush administration, complied in place of a single assessment — in 2000, 2009 {GWB reports), 2014, 2017/18, and 2023. The average report delivery time has been about every seven years, rather than the four required in legislation. Congress has conducted very little ovesight of the USGCRP or the NCA, and has never seemed too bothered about the 4-year schedule in the legislation.

The NCA has always been overseen by a political appointee in the White House, which has made it a an easy target for polticization in the direction of the contemporary administration’s political preferences. Every administration has politicized the NCA — except perhaps the first Trump administration, which seemed surprised to learn that it existed, and then decided to release the report on the friday of Thanksgiving week! At the time, in 2018, Trump explained of the report’s release, “I don’t believe it.”

The Fifth National Climate Assessment, released in 2023 under President Biden was egregiously politicized, having been compiled by a huge group of climate advocates and companies with interests in climate policy. It included multiple errors and was the product of a compromised review process. No one took it seriously.

Affiliations of just some of the authors of NCA5.

Flash forward to now — the Trump Administration has announced that it has canceled the contract of the federal contractor that the USGCRP delegated responsibility to for overseeing the creation of the next assessment report. That does not mean that a report cannot be created — as you can see in the budget table above, there are billions of dollars appropriated to the USGCRP, and an assessment is inexpensive to conduct.

Alternatively, it would be straightforward for members of Congress to request that an assessment be produced by the National Academy of Sciences, or the Academy could initiate an assessment on its own.

Scientific assessment is important — I often say that if the IPCC did not exist, it would have to be created. The same goes for the NCA.

Back in 2020, I offered three suggestions for fixing the NCA, in the context of its almost constant politicization. These suggestions remain current. I now recommend to the Trump Administration and USGCRP Congressional overseers:

To fix the NCA would not be difficult. Three actions are needed.

First, the assessment should be housed within and implemented entirely from a federal agency within the scope of the USGCRP. There should be no oversight or control exerted from the White House.

Second, the report should be led and written by experts chosen by an empaneling team. This team should be selected by a bipartisan group, as is typically done for reports on highly politicized issues. For instance, the majority and minority members of the House Science Committee could each select 6 members of this empaneling committee, with two co-chairs. The empaneling committee would then identify experts to lead and contribute to the report.

Third, before the writing starts, the assessment team should query decision makers — federal, state, local, in business and civil society — to identify what information they perceive to be most useful to their decisions related to climate mitigation and adaptation.

These three steps would ensure that there is no perception of White House influence on the report, that it is authored by experts assembled in a bipartisan manner and that the topics that the report focuses are have direct relevance to decision makers. The NCA is far too important to be politicized, and politicization is a choice.

The only addition I’d make today is to explicitly recognize that any NCA should follow the guidelines of the Federal Advisory Committee Act and OMG and agency guidelines for scientific integrity and information quality.

I do not expect the Trump Administration to take this (very good) advice.

That means that Congress has an opportunity to fix the NCA and for the first time since the legislation was passed 35 years ago by asking the research community to conduct an assessment outside the influence of the White House in service of the needs of decision makers dealing with ongoing and projected changes to climate, environment, and society.

For further reading:

Pielke, R. A. (1995). Usable information for policy: an appraisal of the US Global Change Research Program. Policy Sciences, 28(1), 39-77. (PDF)

Pielke Jr, R. A. (2000). Policy history of the US global change research program: Part I. Administrative development. Global Environmental Change, 10(1), 9-25. (PDF)

Pielke Jr, R. A. (2000). Policy history of the US global change research program: Part II. Legislative process. Global environmental change, 10(2), 133-144. (PDF)

Pielke, R., & Sarewitz, D. (2002). Wanted: scientific leadership on climate. Issues in Science and Technology, 19(2), 27-30.

Sarewitz, D., & Pielke Jr, R. A. (2007). The neglected heart of science policy: reconciling supply of and demand for science. Environmental science & policy, 10(1), 5-16.

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