Trump’s new reason for canceling grants: ‘Climate anxiety’
But experts said canceling support for one of the nation’s top climate modeling programs would not make young people less anxious about the changing planet — it would just give them less information about the threats they might face.
“The answer to rising levels of climate anxiety is to meet the moment with robust and durable evidence-based solutions,” said Kim Cobb, director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. “It’s not to stick our heads in the sand.”
The cuts at Princeton also coincided with changes to another federal climate initiative, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), that could imperil a key report detailing the escalating effects of climate change in the United States. Both moves, Cobb said, signal the Trump administration’s desire to downplay the effects of rising global temperatures, even as the planet comes off the hottest year in recorded history.
The administration on Tuesday canceled a contract with the company that provides most of the staff for the USGCRP, some of whom had worked at the office for more than 20 years, according to a federal employee familiar with the program. The employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the contract, said the cancellation would make it difficult, if not impossible, for the office to produce the next National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report that was scheduled to be released in 2027 or 2028.
A heading added to the top of the program’s website on Wednesday afternoon read, “The operations and structure of the USGCRP are currently under review.”
Representatives for the Commerce Department and NASA, which administers the U.S. Global Change Research Program contract, did not respond to requests for comment.
Researchers said the actions represented a growing threat to climate research and signaled that more scientific inquiry is on the chopping block as the Trump administration scrutinizes government contracts for any conflicts with its political agenda. Decades of climate study have demonstrated that human burning of fossil fuels has caused the globe to warm faster than at any point in its 4.6 billion-year history, with consequences including more extreme storms, faster-forming droughts and rising sea levels.
Past arguments by Trump and other climate-change deniers have largely focused on the costs of responding to a phenomenon that the president has dismissed as a hoax. But the reasoning for the latest cuts drew skepticism from experts in climate and psychology.
“The idea that research on climate change is contributing to climate anxiety and therefore we should stop doing research is just ludicrous,” said Susan Clayton, a professor of psychology at the College of Wooster and a leading scholar of the link between the natural environment and human well-being. “This is not how you solve a mental health problem, by saying, ‘Don’t do research on the factors that contribute to it.’”
The cuts at Princeton applied to three research programs at the university’s Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System (CIMES), one of 16 “cooperative institutes” that house NOAA science within academic research centers. The projects include groundbreaking models of global climate and weather systems, and efforts to produce long-term and seasonal forecasts of Earth’s water cycle and water availability.
CIMES research has helped improve weather forecasts, allowing communities to better prepare for events like hurricanes and wildfires, Cobb said. It also helps inform agricultural planning, building design and other businesses that rely on multi-month weather projections to make decisions.
Commerce officials said one element of the projects included “educational initiatives aimed at K-12 students” that they said are “misaligned with the administration's priorities.”
Zack Labe, a climate scientist who was a Princeton-based NOAA employee until he was among hundreds of probationary employees laid off in February, wrote on the social media platform Bluesky that he participated in those initiatives and said they included using soda bottles and Legos to teach children about fluid dynamics.
Another research effort “suggests that the Earth will have a significant fluctuation in its water availability as a result of global warming,” the administration officials said.
“Using federal funds to perpetuate these narratives does not align with the priorities of this Administration and such time and resources can be better utilized elsewhere,” they concluded.
Water scarcity as a result of climate-fueled droughts is already causing significant disruptions and inspiring creative solutions in places like the U.S. Southwest. Research has shown climate change is already causing soils to hold less moisture and suggests that billions of people around the world face freshwater shortages in coming decades.
The institute at Princeton is a leading scientific hub for the modeling of how the atmosphere, oceans and other complex Earth systems will respond to the continued rise in average global temperatures. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases — which trap heat like a blanket around the globe — reach new highs every year as humans burn more fossil fuels.
The cooperative institute is linked with NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, also based on the Princeton campus, where research meteorologist Syukuro Manabe developed global warming predictions in the 1960s that earned him a Nobel Prize in physics in 2021.
The cuts do not apply to all of the Princeton research center’s work. Federal spending data show at least $19 million in public money is budgeted to go to the center under a five-year agreement that began in July 2023.
A Princeton spokeswoman declined to comment.
The climate programs aren’t the first that Trump has targeted at Princeton, whose president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, has been among the most outspoken critics in the administration’s battles over protests and academic freedom on Ivy League campuses. The administration has also suspended research grants that Princeton was receiving from the Education Department, Defense Department and NASA.
The climate research community was also reeling Wednesday at news that the government had canceled the contract supporting the Global Change Research Program.
The office, which was established by Congress to coordinate climate research across 15 federal agencies, has few full time federal staff. Most positions are filled by scientists detailed from other agencies, or by employees of the government contractor ICF International, which has supported the program since at least 2006.
Since Trump’s inauguration, all but two of the federal employees at the program have returned to their agencies. The administration has already cut support for other USGCRP initiatives, including the first National Nature Assessment and a working group that was contributing to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
With ICF contractors now gone, too, “I don’t know what’s left,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University who has contributed to four previous National Climate Assessments.
The ICF contractors play the key role of coordinating scientists from around the country who volunteer their time to produce the quadrennial report, she added. She struggled to imagine how a robust assessment could be published without their help.
“The National Climate Assessment serves a unique role in bridging the gap between the global scale information provided by the IPCC and the granular information that people actually need to make decisions,” Hayhoe said. “It is one of the key tools to keep us safe.”
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