U.S. President Donald Trump Has No Use for Climate Politics Posing as Science
As reported on Politico.com and the Daily Wire.com, the Trump administration is terminating about $5 billion in funding allocated this year to the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP).
USGCRP was created to produce National Climate Assessment reports mandated by Congress under the Global Change Research Act of 1990 to guide energy and other policies at federal, state and community levels.
One such national agency impacted by the cut is NASA, which is reportedly cancelling a $34 million, five-year contract with ICF, a consulting firm that coordinates the USGCRP’s 14 federal agencies that write the National Climate Assessment reports.
Rather than confirm that the contract had been cut, an unnamed NASA spokesperson only said the agency was "streamlining its contract providing technical, analytical, and programmatic support" for USGCRP.
In essence, ICF functionally runs USGCRP, which has only two listed full-time staff, a National Director of the National Climate Assessment, Ariela Zycherman, and a Deputy Director for Services, Heidi Roop.
Both seemingly have biased political and climate science leanings.
According to campaign finance records, Zycherman last year contributed to the presidential campaigns of Joe Biden, and later, Kamala Harris, while Roop describes herself in an Instagram bio as a "climate scientist focused on preparing for a warmer world."
ICF reportedly supplies all other staff support, therefore having enormous influence on who the money is distributed to and how it is spent in preparing USGCRP’s National Climate Assessment reports which have espoused a strongly alarmist climate change and anti-fossil energy narrative.
As noted by the Daily Wire, ICF is an incredibly partisan firm, with a website boasting about its "corporate citizenship," "culture and belonging," and "environmental justice."
Several blogs posted on its site discuss how to infuse "equity" into "climate discussions" and support EV mandates, and nearly all officials listed on the ICF Climate Team have contributed to Democratic candidates including Biden and Harris, with none to Republicans.
That leftward political leaning has apparently paid off.
An analysis of federal spending data found that ICF has raked in hundreds of millions of dollars each year through federal contracts, and took in over $2 billion during the Biden administration.
However, that partisanship didn’t work out so well for its investors following November 2024's elections when ICF’s stock immediately cratered from $171 per share to just $77, its lowest since the last time Trump was president.
Perhaps little wonder or coincidence then that the funding cuts to USGCRP and its anything-but-scientifically-objective National Climate Assessment reports come at a time when the Trump administration’s EPA has launched an effort to reconsider the climate endangerment finding, the agency’s determination affirming the scientific finding that greenhouse gases harm human health, and which serves as the basis of all U.S. greenhouse gas regulations.
This means that the next assessment edition isn’t likely to move forward even if Congress requires that a new assessment be issued by 2027.
The most recent iteration published in 2023 and still prominently showcased on its government website warns that "severe climate risks to the United States will continue to grow."
The Daily Wire reports that "Trump administration officials have had the USGCRP and National Climate Assessment in the crosshairs for years, contending that its findings constrain the administration’s efforts to slash environmental regulations."
White House Office Management and Budget Director Russ Vought has supported either scrapping USGCRP altogether, or balancing it with objective, non-alarmist voices for the next report due out in 2026 or 2027.
Vought, who also ran OMB during Trump’s first term, has asked for authority to vet the scientists who will work on the next assessment report, arguing that the bureaucrats who write it end up with outsized power over government action.
Vought is additionally calling for an investigation of the political leanings of the contractors assembling it.
Not unexpectedly, Vought’s recommendations to bring in scientists with diverse perspectives –– the very basis of responsible science regarding the existence of a dire climate threat, or that switching from reliable and abundant fossil energy to anemic and intermittent windmills and sunbeams will therefore save the planet –– have come under frantic fire from many claiming to be final authorities.
Celebrated poster boy for such resistance Michael Mann, inventor of the famously failed "hockey stick" graph previously promoted by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicating that global temperatures are skyrocketing, has stated that the goal of the Trump administration: "is to undermine any policies aimed at accelerating the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy."
No one this writer knows doubts that temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere have recently been moderately warming.
These temperatures have variously warmed and cooled countless times for many reasons ever since our planet first had an atmosphere –– but there's certainly no scientific consensus that there is any crisis.
A "World Climate Declaration" made public by the non-profit scientific Global Climate Intelligence Group (CLINTEL) in August, 2023 endorsed by 1,609 well-informed scientists and professionals –– including two Nobel Laureates, John Clauser (USA) and Ivar Giaever (Norway/USA) –– clearly says otherwise.
The declaration states that there is no emergency, that scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming and politicians should count real policy costs as well as imagined benefits of their proposals.
Care to guess how many of those scientists have been given government taxpayer handouts from ICF to write those National Climate Assessment reports that influence energy policy guidelines?
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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