This article is an edited excerpt from John Holdren’s interview with Bertie Harrison-Broninski for the Land and Climate Podcast, originally broadcast on the 4th July 2025. Listen below:
President Trump previously pledged not to cut Medicaid, not to reduce access to health insurance, and not to increase national debt. Now, he has done all the above.
His ‘Big Beautiful Bill’, passed on 4th July, is really the ‘Budget-Busting Bill’. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that it would increase national debt by $3.3 trillion. Trump is focused on increasing the power of the presidency and on maintaining large tax cuts for the rich – at whatever cost to everybody else.
All federally funded climate research, all climate monitoring, all competitive grants on climate are on the chopping block. President Trump has repeatedly called man-made climate change a hoax. He opposes any federal investment in understanding how and why the climate is changing, and how this will harm the earth. He is not willing to invest in reducing emissions or building adaptation.
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) are now eliminating in total their research arms. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s important role in monitoring climate impacts from space is also ending – this includes monitoring changes to the Earth’s surface, oceans, and vegetation, and the decline of sea ice coverage in both the Arctic and the Antarctic. It’s 100% demolition.
This appears to be part of a much broader anti-information strategy. Trump is trying to dismantle all sources of independent opinion in the United States. This is shown through his intimidation of the media, courts, museums, libraries and primary education, and through his attempt to exert federal control over universities by demanding that the federal government be included in processes of admission, hiring, firing, and curricula. President Trump doesn’t know anything and he’s proud of it – he doesn’t want anyone else to know anything either.
The federal government is the nation’s biggest funder of early-stage applied research – the fundamental research from which future innovations come. We have an unprecedented set of circumstances now afflicting US science and technology. All of it is – if not yet in smoking ruins – on a rapidly descending trajectory. If funding stops for the early stages of applied research, which is too long-range to interest the private sector, ultimately the innovation ecosystem runs out of gas.
Trump is sacrificing US leadership worldwide in environmental science and clean energy technology, with devastating consequences. Cutting US funding for better approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other harmful substances will not only impact the US, but the pace of progress worldwide.
Trump has halted the US National Climate Assessments, which were required by law in the Global Change Act of 1990. The President has no right to terminate these without consultation with Congress. Those assessments are the are the only place where the impacts of climate change on the United States are disaggregated down to specific regions and economic sectors. They are the most useful source of information on the needs for adaptation in American cities, communities, states and tribes.
This information is essential in planning adaptation to the changes in climate which are imminent, irrespective of what investments are made in reducing emissions. Even with the best investments in emissions reduction, we would need increased investments in adaptation to reduce the damage from climate changes that can no longer be averted.
Websites that provided data from these studies have been removed. Though organisations are attempting to archive the data, it cannot make up for the termination of continued data gathering efforts that Trump’s administration has imposed. This will produce a gap in our understanding of how fast the climate is changing, and its impacts on ecosystems and economies.
Current estimates are that 260,000 federal workers will leave by the end of September. That is well over 10% of the entire federal workforce – some via buyouts and other incentives to leave, but tens of thousands have been fired. These people are highly trained, highly experienced, produce highly important work, and are being fired to pay for tax cuts for the rich.
It’s not just these jobs that are at stake: it is the businesses that support those research institutions, and the businesses that are patronised by those people and their families. There’s a reverberating effect through communities when you produce this kind of damage to employment in the science and technology sector.
We need to continue to make the case that science and technology is important not for its own sake, not for the sake of scientists’ jobs, but because of its larger value to society, to the things that people care about.
The argument needs to be made that advances in science have enormously improved the economy and the environment in the United States and around the world. It is those values that matter to people.
As told to Bertie Harrison-Broninski, with additional editing by Anna Spree.
John Holdren is currently a Research Professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and Co-Director of the Science, Technology and Public Policy Program in the School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He previously served as the President’s Science Advisor and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy through both Obama terms.
Further reading:
- Opinion
- By Oscar Berglund
- 21 February, 2025
