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The Trump administration is stripping away support for scientific research in the US and overseas that contains a word it finds particularly inconvenient: “climate.”
The US government is withdrawing grants and other support for research that even references the climate crisis, academics have said, amid Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg upon environmental regulations and clean-energy development.
Trump, who has said that the climate crisis is a “giant hoax”, has already stripped mentions of climate change and global heating from government websites and ordered a halt to programs that reference diversity, equity and inclusion. A widespread funding freeze for federally backed scientific work also has been imposed, throwing the US scientific community into chaos.
Researchers said work mentioning climate is being particularly targeted. One environmental scientist working in the western US who did not want to be named said their previously awarded grant from the Department of Transportation for climate-adaption research had been withdrawn, until they retitled it to remove the word “climate”.
“I still have the grant because I changed the title,” the scientist said. “I was told that I needed to do so before the title of the grant was published on the US DoT [Department of Transportation] website in order to keep it. The explanation was that the priorities of the current administration don’t include climate change and other topics considered ‘woke’.”
The researcher said they were “shocked because the grant was already awarded and I would have risked losing it. I’m very concerned about science being politically influenced. If researchers can’t use certain words, it’s likely that some science will be biased.”
References to climate are being scrubbed elsewhere, too. Course materials at the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center at the University of Hawaii will delete mentions of “climate change”, leaked emails seen by the Guardian show. The alterations, at the behest of the Trump administration, affect about a dozen different course materials.
“Specifically, references to ‘climate change’ and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) have been removed or revised to align with the new priorities,” an administrator at the center wrote. “Please exercise caution when referencing these topics during instruction.”
The administration’s animus towards climate research has even extended overseas via the US’s Fulbright exchange program, which offers about 8,000 grants a year to American and foreign teachers and scholars.
Kaarle Hämeri, chancellor of the University of Helsinki in Finland, said the descriptions for Fulbright grants had been changed to remove or alter the words “climate change”, as well as “equitable society”, “inclusive societies” and “women in society”.
Hämeri said that one grant to his university had already been withdrawn as a result of changes he said were also being imposed across other countries involved in the Fulbright program. Fulbright and the US state department were asked about the extent of the wording bans.
“I understand that these actions are due to changed priorities in US government,” said Hämeri. “It will harm research in several important fields, especially as in many cases the US researchers are among the best in their field.”
At the National Science Foundation (NSF), a $9bn federal agency that supports research in science and engineering, teams have been combing through active projects looking for dozens of words, including “women”, “biased” and “equality” that may violate Trump’s ban on certain grants.
The NSF, which has just fired about 10% of its workforce, did not respond to questions over whether climate is also on the banned list. Regardless, grants supporting an array of scientific work have been frozen amid this zealous mission to install a newspeak among scientists, despite a court order demanding the freeze be reversed.
“[The] NSF is working expeditiously to conduct a comprehensive review of our projects, programs and activities to be compliant with the existing executive orders,” a foundation spokesperson said.
The freeze on grants has upended scientific work across federal agencies, hospitals and universities, placing the future of hundreds of millions of dollars’ of research into question.
“The people most vulnerable in our society in terms of health and public safety are now even further at risk,” said Jennifer Jones, director of the center for science and democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“This administration doesn’t have a plan to advance science, they have a plan to remove obstacles for the oil and gas industry. They want to return to an era where kids have polio, rivers are on fire and cities are blanketed by pollution.”
Jones said that the US government may be moving in the direction of Florida, where Republicans banned mention of climate change in state laws. “I live in a state where we are under threat more than ever from climate change but state employees can’t mention it,” she said. “This administration wants scientists to feel threatened. We’ve seen this before but Trump is doing it at an unprecedented scale now.”
The attack upon science “feels very personal right now” and may deter a new generation of young scientists from entering their areas of research, according to Joanne Carney, chief government affairs officer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
“We could see a reduction in whole fields of scientific research that will slow down our ability to understand the natural world and craft policies to protect society and national security,” Carney said.
“We’re concerned about the signal this is sending out to any young student interest in Stem [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] who might not think they can see a future in the US,” she said. “We need greater investment in science and technology to be a global leader at this moment. Our adversaries will be very happy with this.”
