How Trump Funds Climate Research (Or Doesn’t)
Congress continues to fund climate research. But the Trump administration has found other ways to slow down, undermine, and underfund climate science.
At 12:29 p.m. on Tuesday, September 5th, 2017, John Konkus dashed off an email to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Grants and Debarment. “Please see direction on the grants below,” he wrote in the email, which was obtained by the Natural Resources Defense Council under the Freedom of Information Act. Konkus, the agency’s deputy associate administrator of public affairs and a former campaign official for President Trump, had been tasked with reviewing every E.P.A. grant proposal before it could be awarded. Under particular scrutiny were applications for grants using the phrase “climate change.”
“No to this one please,” Konkus wrote about one proposal to study climate change mitigation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the same email, he rejected another application from the Georgia Tech Research Corporation aimed at understanding land use and wildfire.
Konkus also sought to end an already existing grant for Columbia University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The joint project — to “assess air pollution risks due to climate warming” — had previously been awarded at least $675,000 from the E.P.A. The official start date for the grant was January 1st, 2016, and it was not scheduled to finish until the end of 2018. Konkus, charged with carrying out the agenda of the Trump administration, wanted the project killed more than a year early.
But if anything happened as a result of Konkus’s email, it would be news to Jason West, one of the lead investigators for the joint air pollution project. “We’re actually doing pretty well,” said West, speaking recently from his office in the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering at U.N.C. No funding was lost, and the research has so far led to 16 papers and presentations. “The grant is going forward,” he said.
Despite Konkus’s demand — and authority -, not only was the project not canceled, the E.P.A. granted it a two-year extension. West was notified of the good news in November, by email.
The agenda of the Commander-in-Chief has long influenced federal funding for climate change research. In the two years since President Trump was elected, scientists and advocates have expressed fears that the administration — which has made a public show of its climate change skepticism — would dramatically roll back grants and agency projects studying the warming planet. The case of Konkus’s failed attempt to interfere with climate research grants typifies a broader trend under the Trump administration — one which highlights the complicated web of checks and imbalances that has both maintained the government’s role as the largest financier of U.S. climate science and, in less quantifiable ways, undermined that same research.
KICKING THE CAN
President Trump has been uncharacteristically unwavering in his ambivalence toward climate change and the work conducted to understand it. In October, after 91 leading scientists with the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report warning of environmental devastation as early as 2040, the president reacted by questioning its authors. “I want to look at who drew, you know, which group drew it,” he told journalists. “Because I can give you reports that are fabulous, and I can give you reports that aren’t so good.”
Even when climate science comes directly from the federal government, the president and his supporters have failed to respond with deference. In November, the White House made public the results of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, a congressionally-mandated study from 13 federal agencies. The 1,600-page document found that, if the U.S. fails to respond to climate change with aggressive mitigation and adaptation, it can expect to see more wildfires, crop failures, and a predicted loss of about 10 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. Steve Milloy, the co-founder of BurnMoreCoal.com and a member of Trump’s E.P.A. transition team, dismissed the report, calling it the “Deep State Climate Assessment,” a reference to the conspiracy theory that a secret “deep state” cabal is actively working against the country from inside the government. For Trump’s part, it was notable that he chose to release the study on the Friday after Thanksgiving, a day when millions of Americans were likely doing something other than reading the news. Also notable was his response to the study: “I don’t believe it.”
In his annual budget proposals for fiscal years 2018 and 2019, President Trump twice called on Congress to defund the program responsible for the study. Under President Obama, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, as it is called, received around $2.6 billion in annual funding. Trump wanted the program gone entirely.
Scientific agencies across the board have likewise faced the possibility of drastic reductions. For Trump’s first budget, he called for a 30 percent cut to the E.P.A., a drop from $8 billion to $5.6 billion. The agency’s research and development program, which includes work on safe water, air and energy, and sustainable communities, faced a 45 percent decrease of $216 million. Trump also called for a nearly 50 percent cut to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Ocean, Coastal, and Great Lakes research program, as well as a 57 percent cut to its National Weather Service, which is responsible for collecting climate data, as well as predicting hurricanes. The president’s budget for research at the Department of Energy, Department of Interior, and the National Science Foundation proposed a combined reduction of $3.4 billion. One of the only things that President Trump refused to cut was the military, calling for an additional $50 billion to make a total request of $640 billion in defense spending.
“Clearly … climate change research is a lower priority now than it used to be,” said Kei Koizumi, a visiting scholar at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Koizumi spent eight years on federal research and development at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Obama. One of the main goals of that administration, he said, was to “ensure that the climate change research effort was solid, well resourced, and connected to policymaking.” Trump has other priorities. Still, asked about the state of climate research funding today, Koizumi chuckled. “Not as bad as it could have been,” he said.
Every February, the president unveils his budget. The document is a proposal, read more as a political avowal rather than anything binding. The Senate and House of Representatives will weigh the president’s budget and come up with their own spending bills. The other chamber must then approve those bills before they are sent to the White House to be signed into law.
“Congress has acted in the past budget cycles to restore a lot of the climate change research funding that the administration proposed to cut,” said Koizumi. Instead of acting on Trump’s call to slash spending for research and development at the Energy Department, Interior Department, and N.S.F., Congress settled on an additional $2.3 billion for the fiscal year 2018. A small increase was given to N.O.A.A., while the E.P.A. budget remained flat. (An achievement for the agency, given that both the House and Senate were Republican-controlled at the time.) Trump had also wanted to cancel four Earth science missions at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Congress restored those, too.
Even if the budgetary tug-of-war ends up favoring an agency, however, the president’s proposal could still affect the agency’s operations if Congress does not finalize spending before the start of the fiscal year. “When agencies don’t have a budget on time, they tend to be very conservative in their funding,” said Kasey White, policy director for the Geological Society of America. Budgets get kicked down the road all the time, regardless of the administration. Agencies, she said, “often need to plan for the lowest number that they’ve seen.” In other words, if the president calls for a 30 percent cut to the E.P.A., that could force the agency to pare its spending until a more robust budget bill is passed. “The administration coming in with a very low request has had a real impact on these agencies,” said White.
For the fiscal year 2019, which began in October, President Trump proposed a list of new cuts to federal climate science, including at the U.S. Geological Survey, the research arm of the Interior Department. Under the budget, U.S.G.S. would have to terminate environmental health programs, roll back carbon sequestration efforts, and eliminate five of eight Climate Adaptation Science Centers, which study regional impacts of climate change. The proposal is for a 25 percent reduction to the agency’s total budget, or $860 million. Though the House and Senate bills would mostly ignore the president’s proposal, Congress pushed the deadline for a budget deal to later this month. U.S.G.S., to be conservative, may need to put a hold on some internal projects or on awarding grants. The same goes for other agencies without a final budget, including the E.P.A., N.A.S.A., N.O.A.A., and the N.S.F. And with a new, split Congress, final appropriations may take even longer to hash out, especially when other, more politically contentious, items like border wall funding have yet to be settled.
REDIRECTING GRANTS
One way in which scientists outside the government, including those in academia, have noticed changes to climate research funding is through grants. The federal government spends around $700 billion a year on new and existing grants, a number that has steadily increased under the Trump administration. The vast majority of that money — about $500 billion annually — goes to medical research through the Department of Health and Human Services. The rest is divided among agencies funding work on everything from aircraft design to astrophysics to cryptocurrencies to understanding the behaviors of the greater sage-grouse.
Spending on climate change grants is hard to gauge. Last fiscal year, under President Trump, the government spent at least $380 million on grants that mention the word “climate” in their official applications, though that amount may not include other Earth science grants that study climate change indirectly. Agencies spent about the same annual amount on climate grants during the previous administration, except for President Obama’s final two years, when spending jumped to more than $800 million a year.
Climate scientists say they have needed to be more careful about where and how they have applied for federal funding since Trump was elected. Jason West, the environmental scientist at U.N.C., said that besides his existing E.P.A. funding, he has not been able to apply for new grants at the agency. “They don’t have anything to offer for the things that I do,” he said. The agency has “much fewer calls for proposals in general … and none that they’ve put forward have anything to do with climate change.” Beyond the calls for proposals, others have pointed to the agency’s review process that gave approval power to John Konkus, a political appointee. (As of earlier this year, Konkus was stripped of his grant reviewing duties, according to the E.P.A.) In any case, the amount of funding for climate change-specific research has dropped at the E.P.A. In 2016, the agency awarded $7.6 million to such grant proposals. Trump’s E.P.A. awarded nothing.
In January, the Washington Post reported that, like the E.P.A., the Interior Department implemented a new grant screening process, meant to “promote the priorities” of the Trump administration. An internal memo from Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke listed those priorities; combating climate change was not one of them. Between 2016 and 2018, the annual spending on the agency’s climate-related grants fell from $24 million to $5 million, a nearly 80 percent drop. Joel Clement, a scientist and former policy director at the Interior Department under Obama and Trump, blamed the decline in grant funding on the new review process. “They clearly want a tight grip on the kind of research that gets funding,” he said. “And that’s unprecedented.”
Across scientific disciplines, climate researchers have reported anecdotal evidence about facing more scrutiny for their grant proposals under Trump, which, real or imagined, has serious consequences. Ben Sanderson, once a project scientist at the federally-funded National Center for Atmospheric Research, left his job after struggling to find grants under the Trump administration. In July, he told the publication Yale Environment 360 that agencies were more interested in funding theoretical and purely physical science “without really thinking about how that connects back to society, both in terms of thinking about [climate change] scenarios and what humanity might do moving forward.” Now, Sanderson works in a climate laboratory in Toulouse, France, funded by that country’s Make Our Planet Great Again program.
DON’T ASK DON’T TELL
Almost every policy analyst and scientist interviewed for this article agreed that climate science is likely still receiving federal funding, just under a different name. “I definitely think there is some self-censoring by the scientific community,” said Kasey White of the Geological Society of America. “Many of the scientists are concerned that climate change will be a red flag in their grants and are thinking about ways to portray their research using different words.” An N.P.R. study last year found that researchers applying for grants to the National Science Foundation were self-censoring their proposals — dropping the phrase “climate change” from their titles or summaries. As a result, N.S.F. grants about climate change fell 40 percent.
“That is a big problem,” said Gretchen Goldman, research director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit watchdog group. In August, the organization released a survey of scientists in 16 federal agencies. Eighteen percent of the 631 respondents claimed to have been asked to omit the phrase “climate change” from their reports. “There are people now working for the government that have spent the last decade or more of their lives working on a climate-related problem,” Goldman said. “They’re seeing that work destroyed or neglected in a major way.”
Destruction and negligence come in many forms. When the Trump administration erased references to climate change in official military and national security documents, and when it took down government web pages about the effects of human-made greenhouse gases, critics worried that the president and his appointees might be strategically silencing or interfering with science. However, examples of this kind of censorship are limited. Instead, the administration seems to have taken on a modus operandi of brash denial and cool indifference.
Last year, after Joshua Tree National Park published a series of climate-change-related tweets, Interior Secretary Zinke flew the park’s superintendent to Washington to give him a public dressing-down. (The tweets were not removed because they did not violate any official rules, but that was beside the point.) Vice President Mike Pence, after viewing damage caused by Hurricane Michael in October, told reporters that “the climate is changing, but what the causes of that are, are yet to be seen,” defying the overwhelming scientific consensus that people are to blame. A month later, the Washington Post asked President Trump about the latest federal report on the climate. He replied that people like him “have very high levels of intelligence but we’re not necessarily such believers” in climate change.
Were federal funding for climate research to dry up completely, the country’s understanding of its environment would come to a halt. “There are very few other sources” of funding, said Kei Koizumi. “Foundations play only a limited role. Companies really don’t play any role … so, the federal agencies dominate.” But research is only the first step to combating climate change. The point of all of this scientific work is so that governments can create informed policies, and come to international agreements, such as the 2015 Paris accord, from which the U.S. withdrew in 2017 by order of President Trump. If the leadership refuses even to acknowledge the validity of the science it funds, the hope for climate-aware policies — at least at the national level — are slim to none.
Originally published at http://www.deanr.us on November 28, 2018.
