Trump Cuts Harm Agricultural, Science, and Consumers Pay the Bill

In the first days of the new administration, President Trump has suspended various congressional-approved Federal funded reporting systems linked to climate science and environmental protection. Even long established  NASA and NOAA reporting assets covering climate reporting in general, and more specifically direct global heating impacts and prediction have been targeted by Trump. Accompanying these sweeping changes are a set of administration priorities designed to restrict access, eliminate information, and restrict agency reporting resources designed to serve the greater public interest.

From increasing weather disasters to sea-level rise to the accelerating global meltdown of polar ice caps, global heating and associated extreme weather impacts are altogether challenging historic weather assumptions, and have become increasingly costly to society, commerce, and the global environment.

Long established and vital science-based Federal programs ranging from research to reporting serve as essential policy and planning tools for both government agencies, Congress, the private sector, and certainly the American people.

Approved by Congress and overseen by various key science-based Federal agencies, from the Environmental Protection Agency to NASA, NOAA, and other key Federal agencies serving a vital public interest role as science-based information provisioners, each now face increasing degrees of censorship, blocking to varying degrees their scientific missions and factual challenges to present day administration dogma.

In the meantime, funding, approved by Congress and overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency, had been blocked since January, after President Trump took power, when he immediately ordered a targeted pause and review of all climate and clean energy programs which threaten his fossil fuel revival agenda.  Programs managed by the EPA have had their funding blocked, previously approved by bipartisan Congress and overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency.

America’s newly installed President Trump ordered on day-one of his administration a pause and review of all climate and clean energy programs, especially those which challenge his political agenda and false assumptions about a hotter climate now rewriting weather and seasonal climate assumptions.

Trump’s public policy and pronouncements also ignored factual scientific findings, common sense, and the dangers and consequences of increasing levels global heating emissions from the burning and economic dependency on fossil fuels.  All this comes from a president whose personal and public mission is to reverse the global progress and transition to a clean energy economy.

Climate data and guidance disappeared from US Agriculture Department sites in recent weeks, which is important and useful to farmers for business planning.  Farmers and environmental groups sued the Agriculture Department on Monday over its scrubbing of references to Climate Change from its website.

The department had ordered staff to take down pages focused on Climate Change on Jan. 30, according to the suit, filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Within hours, it said, information started disappearing. That included websites containing data sets, interactive tools and funding information that farmers and researchers relied on for planning and adaptation projects, according to the lawsuit.

At the same time, the department also froze funding promised to businesses and nonprofits through conservation and climate programs. The purge then “removed critical information about these programs from the public record, denying farmers access to resources they need to advocate for funds they are owed,” it said.

Wes Gillingham, president of the board of Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, said that farmers were just heading into planning for the summer growing season. He said taking information down because of a “political agenda about climate change” was senseless.  “Right now, because of climate change and because of what farmers are facing in terms of extreme weather events, we need every piece of available information we can get,” he said. “If we don’t have access to that, we’re not going to make it.”

Trump Targets Research, Scientists

At the annual gathering in Boston this past week of one of America’s oldest scientific societies, the discussions touched on threats to humankind: runaway global heating, artificial intelligence, toxic “forever chemicals,” and the even eventual end of the universe.

But the most urgent threats for many scientists were the ones aimed at them, as the Trump administration slashes the federal scientific work force and cuts back on billions of dollars in funding for research at universities.

“Angst and anxiety and, to a certain extent, grief,” is how Sudip Parikh, who leads the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the organization hosting the conference, summed up the mood on Saturday.

Scientists worry that the most far-reaching administration changes are still to come, affecting the cornerstones of public research funding impacting the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Together, the two US agencies fund thousands of projects each year, supporting hundreds of thousands of researchers and other workers at institutions in every state. The agencies provide the financial backbone for American efforts to treat cancer, address rising sea levels, advance quantum computing and much more.

Two federal judges have ordered the Trump administration to end its freeze on federal grants authorized by Congress. On Feb. 10, one of those judges, Judge John J. McConnell Jr., said in Rhode Island federal court that the White House was defying his order by withholding funds.

Other agencies are starting to unfreeze funding. On Thursday, the Department of Agriculture announced it was releasing a “first tranche” of $20 million in conservation spending for farmers that had been authorized by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which contained tens of billions of dollars in climate grants.

USAID, a key agency and tool serving US foreign policy goals

The mission of USAID includes an important global role; stability. That role extends to climate resilience in both developing and developed parts of the world.  Heat, drought and floods are growing security risks, Western defense officials say, feeding instability and violence that proves costly to US interests. Numerous programs aimed at averting violence, instability and extremism worsened by global heating are ensnared in the Trump administration’s effort to dismantle the main American aid agency, U.S.A.I.D.

One such project helped communities manage water stations in Niger, a hotbed of Islamist extremist groups where conflicts over scarce water are common. Another helped repair water-treatment plants in the strategic port city of Basra, Iraq, where dry taps had caused violent anti-government protests. U.S.A.I.D.’s oldest program, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, ran a forecasting system that allowed aid workers in places like war-torn South Sudan to prepare for catastrophic floods last year.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was established on November 3, 1961, making it 63 years old as of February 23, 2025. The agency was created by President John F. Kennedy through the Foreign Assistance Act, which aimed to consolidate various foreign assistance programs under one umbrella to enhance the efficiency of U.S. aid efforts during the Cold War

The fate of these programs remains uncertain.

The Trump administration has essentially sought to shutter the agency. A federal court has issued a temporary restraining order. On the ground, much of the work has stopped.