Climate & Health Policies Under Attack

originally published September 29,2025

America’s lost science

(New York Times, extract Oct 9th)

In a year already marked by new lows in Donald Trump’s effort to dismantle climate actions and other effective national policies serving the common good, the Trump administration has taken extreme steps to roll back the clock on national progress. Some describe this Administration’s national dismantling policies and upheaval as; a great nation dying from death-by-a-thousand-cuts.

This month, the EPA formally proposed eliminating the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program—the nation’s only consistent public record of emissions from more than 8,000 industrial facilities—a move that would blind policymakers and the public to rising pollution in order to cut compliance costs for big polluters.

By most metrics, 2025 has been the worst year for the American scientific enterprise in modern history.

Since January, the Trump administration has made deep cuts to the nation’s science funding, including more than $1 billion in grants to the National Science Foundation, which sponsors much of the basic research at universities and federal laboratories, and $4.5 billion to the National Institutes of Health. Thousands of jobs for scientists and staff members have been terminated or frozen at these and other federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Park Service.

To thousands of researchers — veteran scientists and new grad students at state universities and Ivy League institutions alike — these sweeping reductions translate as direct personal losses. Each may mean a layoff, a shuttered lab, a yearslong experiment or field study abruptly ended, graduate students turned away; lost knowledge, lost progress, lost investment, lost stability; dreams deferred or foreclosed.

“This government upheaval is discouraging to all scientists who give their time and lend their brilliance to solve the problems beleaguering humankind instead of turning to some other activity that makes a more steady living,” Gina Poe, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote in an email.

Next year looks to be worse. The 2026 budget proposed by the White House would slash the National Science Foundation by 56.9 percent, the N.I.H. by 39.3 percent and NASA by 24.3 percent, including 47.3 percent of the agency’s science-research budget. It would entirely eliminate the U.S. Geological Survey’s $299 million budget for ecosystems research; all U.S. Forest Service research ($300 million) and, at NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, all funding ($625 million) for research on climate, habitat conservation and air chemistry and for studying ocean, coastal and Great Lakes environments. The Trump administration has also proposed shutting down NASA and NOAA satellites that researchers and governments around the world rely on for forecasting weather and natural disasters.

Breaking News

(October 9th 2025)

More than 40 Trump administration picks tied directly to oil, gas and coal, analysis shows: report looks at White House nominees and appointees and agencies dictating energy, environment and climate policy

The analysis comes as The Guardian reported: Trump wages broad attacks on climate and energy policies and on renewable energy. The president’s so-called one big beautiful act, for instance, opened swaths of federal land to drilling and mining and sped the phaseout of renewable energy incentives. The administration has also launched an unprecedented assault on climate science, including with an energy department report on climate change that experts derided as full of misinformation.

Another 12 Trump officials, the Guardian reported have ties to fossil fuel-funded rightwing thinktanks. Among them: former employees and fellows of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative group that has fought renewable energy and made what it calls “the moral case for fossil fuels”, as well as the anti-environmentalist group Americans for Prosperity (AFP), which is backed by the fossil fuel moguls the Koch brothers.

At the same time, the Trump Justice Department is in court seeking to strike down “polluter pays” laws in New York and Vermont, which would require fossil fuel giants to join-in funding climate adaptation and disaster recovery efforts.

In today’s GOP-controlled White House, Congress, and Supreme Court majority, industry interests and their allies are pushing this fossil fuel friendly President and his political agents to ensure Federal regulatory laws are designed to protect oil and gas companies from future climate lawsuits, stripping states and communities of one of their few remaining tools to hold polluters accountable

Climate Science vs. Polluter Politics

By most metrics, 2025 has been the worst year for the American scientific enterprise in modern history.

During his first term and following his inauguration in 2025, Trump has targeted for elimination fundamental climate policies and critical research programs.

Cancellation of Climate Research: In 2025, the administration began canceling numerous federally funded climate science studies, including those focused on greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impacts.
Data collection: The administration ended the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, a comprehensive method for tracking emissions from industrial facilities. Funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Global Change Research Program has also been cut.
Endangerment finding: The most significant proposed rollback is to eliminate the 2009 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “endangerment finding,” which states that greenhouse gases threaten public health and forms the legal basis for regulating these emissions under the Clean Air Act. The administration argues that previous officials overstepped their authority.
Withdrawal from Paris Agreement: Trump formally withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate change in his first term. In his second term, he signed an executive order to again withdraw the U.S. from the pact.
Fuel efficiency standards: Regulations mandating stricter fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks were weakened. The move also eliminated California’s national lead in establishing its long-held ability to set its own, more stringent standards.

The Administration’s 2025 assaults on Climate Science and the advancement of the nation’s transition to Clean Energy have been demonstrated by policy swings with a club, not a pen, and lack justification or merit, and are consistently devoid of scientific, economic and social justifications. Just one example; eliminating the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program—the nation’s only consistent public record of emissions from more than 8,000 industrial facilities—is a move that would blind policymakers and the public to rising pollution levels and the associated pollution costs to public health. It is a question of benefits of compliance vs. big polluter profit priorities which historically come in the form of rising public health costs.

Today, every Federal agency responsible for ubiquitous public protections and regulatory rules and processes, especially those agencies responsible and engaged in mission of serving a greater good, now find themselves on a twisted path of transformation from pubic service-to-public corruption.

On President Donald Trump’s first day in office, he issued a memorandum halting approvals, permits, leases and loans for both offshore and onshore wind projects.

The One Big (bad) Beautiful Bill Act, which passed in July with exclusively Republican support, accelerated the phaseout of tax credits promised under the Inflation Reduction Act for wind and solar projects. Subsequent guidance from the U.S. Treasury Department further constrained eligibility rules. And as bipartisan permitting reform takes center stage in Congress, critics have expressed doubt over whether a technology-neutral bill would still benefit renewable energy development under the current administration.

The actions of this present Administration, altogether, now come just as a wave of new climate-connected studies and reports underscore the social, economic, environmental, and planetary harms of fossil fuel pollution and rising CO2 levels. Recently, scientists has discovered global Ocean Acidity increases, which have risen 30–40% since the industrial era. Changes now pushing marine ecosystems well beyond safe limits and onto the brink of extinction. Ocean breaching has already been occuring at unprecedented levels in seven of nine planetary boundaries that define humanity’s “safe operating space.”

A new study also warns that climate change will drive more lightning-sparked wildfires across 98% of the western U.S., as rising temperatures fuel both increased lightning and hotter, drier fire weather. Recent studies further confirm that wildfire smoke caused more than 41,000 excess deaths per year from 2011 to 2020 and suggests that the mortality and economic costs of smoke could become among the most significant and costly consequences of climate change. (Washington Post, August 2025)

A new Realtor.com analysis found that one in four U.S. homes face severe or extreme climate risks, with hurricane winds, floods, and wildfires threatening property values and driving up insurance costs.

And in a timely counterpoint to proposed federal rollbacks, the nonprofit Climate TRACE has launched a public tool that uses satellite observations, AI, and open datasets to track emissions down to the facility level. Covering more than 660 million sources worldwide, the tool reveals how pollution from the top 10 percent of “super-emitters” exposes nearly 900 million people to dangerous PM2.5 and greenhouse gases. As official reporting systems face dismantling, Climate TRACE offers a vital line of transparency, showing in real time who is polluting, where the plumes travel, and who is breathing the consequences.

A new UN-backed report warns that governments’ planned fossil fuel production for 2030 is more than double what’s compatible with the world’s 1.5°C greenhouse gas target.

Extenuating Circumstances

Amid the U.S. retreat from global climate leadership, China has pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 7–10% and increase renewable energy to 30% over the next decade—its first such commitment—though experts say the goal falls far short of what’s needed.

Additional Resources:

On April 29, 2025, CAC (Climate Action Campaign) released the; 100 Days, 100 Harms Tracker which offers a fairly clear picture of the pain the present administration had already inflicted on the Cclimate Science, and America’s growing Clean Energy Economy. Within these national changes are the public health and coats and wellbeing of the American people, which are now at stake — and all within the first 100 days of current Trump administration and continuing GOP stranglehold on a Congress, now no longer inclined to serve the public interests, but instead to serve as political agents of Trump-designated special interests, who are clearly not serving the America’s interests.