Trump wants to liquidate climate research by dismantling agencies that study phenomena like El Niño

BarcelonaIn May of last year, workers at NASA's Goddard Laboratory received the order to go home and work remotely. The Trump administration was rescinding the lease on the building where, since the 1960s, this institute has led the climate and Earth research of the North American space agency. It was an attempt to dismantle the center, which preceded the threat of total closure proposed by the White House in its budget for NASA last year. Fortunately, Congress halted that massive funding cut. But that did not prevent the purge of the Office of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by Elon Musk from targeting NASA's Earth science program and other U.S. scientific agencies that are crucial for global climate research.

Since Trump came to power, NASA has lost about 4,000 workers (through incentivized departures and early retirements) and about 880 at NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), the reference center for many meteorological services worldwide, including Meteocat. The new budget for 2027, which is currently being negotiated in Congress, is once again a sword of Damocles. The White House proposal would cut $1.6 billion from NOAA's budget – which would mean the loss of 1,450 jobs – and would also reduce NASA's total budget by 23-24%, which would completely shut down its climate research and Earth science programs to prioritize lunar and Mars exploration.

"This would set back our ability to predict what will happen due to climate change by decades," assures Marc Alessi, a researcher at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in the United States. Losing the data provided by these NOAA and NASA research centers, with series dating back decades, "would drastically affect the ability to predict meteorological and also climatic phenomena not only for the United States but also for any meteorological agency in the world," he remarks. Nevertheless, the researcher is confident that Congress will once again thwart the White House's plans, as it did last year, and explains that members of Trump's Republican Party "allow the attack on science to continue in public, but behind closed doors they are doing things to protect it."

But the Trump administration's actions are already being felt in climate research. "Congress is rejecting the president's proposed cuts, but the agency that distributes the funds is managed through the executive branch, with the Office of Management and Budget, and we have seen that they have been delaying the release of some of the funds approved by Congress, even though this is illegal," explains Alessi.

Just two weeks ago, Trump fired the 20 independent scientists who made up the advisory board of the National Science Foundation, another agency that proposes cuts in its budget proposal. The NSF funds several research centers, such as the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a capital institute for global climate prediction, as it has one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world and provides fundamental data for the reports of the IPCC, the UN's climate scientists.

In fact, since January 2026, the United States no longer officially participates in either the IPCC (they were 18% of the total) or its counterpart for biodiversity, the IPBES, after Trump withdrew his country from dozens of global forums. Furthermore, the budget being debated by Congress also proposes halving the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has also lost 4,000 workers in the last year and has made a Copernican turn in its priorities: it has even revoked the obligation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Trump accuses science of "ideology" and censorship is imposed

Trump justifies all these cuts by accusing these scientific centers, including NOAA and NASA's Earth Program, of conducting "ideologically biased" research and exaggerating the threat of the climate emergency. And this has led to American scientists currently being unable to use the word climate or climate change in their reports. "Definitely, there is a certain level of censorship. If you want federal funding for your research, an unwritten rule is not to write climate change in the proposal, and this is because the government is so funded by fossil fuel companies that they don't want research to be carried out," admits Alessi.

"To avoid the word climate they have to write extended meteorology or earth system evolution", also explains Francisco Doblas, Icrea professor and director of the Earth Sciences department at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Doblas is part of the IPCC and works in a network with colleagues from other supercomputers like NCAR's. According to him, the US government threatens to redirect NCAR's supercomputer "for other uses than climate-related ones," which would result in the loss of invaluable data.

But even more than prediction data, one of the main losses for international science if Trump's cuts are enacted are the Earth observation systems. All consulted experts agree that one of the biggest risks is the potential loss of oceanic observation data provided by the ARGO program, also funded by the NSF and with collaboration from NOAA. This is data that measures changes in the ocean floor through buoys, a significant portion of which is contributed by the United States.

"The disappearance of data from all United States satellites (which primarily come from NASA) would have a very significant impact, but we would not stop, because right now in Europe we have sufficient resources to survive this impact, but without the oceanic data, we would indeed be blind in a part of the world that is fundamental for the study of climate change, such as the oceans," admits the director of the Copernicus Climate Change Program, Carlo Buontempo.

Buontempo explains that there are conversations within European institutions "to try to minimize the negative consequences" that a loss of crucial scientific data arriving from the United States could entail, also regarding CO₂ emissions, such as those monitored by the North American observation station of Mauna Loa. However, he assures that so far no lack of data from the United States has been noted, nor in the prediction of the El Niño phenomenon, although the concern is that in the future the same monitoring as has been done so far may not be possible.

While waiting to see if Congress can once again curb Trump's offensive against climate science, North American scientists and their technology continue to function, albeit with a much lower public profile and in a very unfavorable environment. "We have noticed the impact above all on the meteorological services of the United States, which have lost so many people that they have not been able to launch meteorological balloons into the atmosphere," explains the North American Alessi. The capacity to predict hurricanes in the United States is particularly concerning, as it has been diminished by staff cuts at NOAA. On a global scale, however, all countries continue to do the work: Europe, Canada, Japan, but also China and even Saudi Arabia, remain committed to international climate research. That alone says a lot about the path taken by the country that, until just two years ago, was also a leader in this field.