The Trump administration has cut funding and staffing at the program that oversees the federal government’s premier report on how global warming is affecting the country, raising concerns among scientists that the assessment is now in jeopardy.
Congress requires the federal government to produce the report, formally known as the National Climate Assessment, every four years. It analyzes the effects of rising temperatures on human health, agriculture, energy production, water resources, transportation and other aspects of the U.S. economy. The last assessment came out in 2023 and is used by state and city governments, as well as private companies, to prepare for global warming.
The climate assessment is overseen by the Global Change Research Program, a federal group established by Congress in 1990 that is supported by NASA and coordinates efforts among 14 federal agencies, the Smithsonian Institution and hundreds of outside scientists to produce the report.
On Tuesday, NASA issued stop-work orders on two separate contracts with ICF International, a consulting firm that had been supplying most of the technical support and staffing for the Global Change Research Program. ICF had originally signed a five-year contract in 2021 worth more than $33 million and provided around two dozen staff members who worked on the program with federal employees detailed from other agencies.
Without ICF’s support, scientists said, it is unclear how the assessment can move forward.
“It’s hard to see how they’re going to put out a National Climate Assessment now,” said Donald Wuebbles, a professor in the department of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois who has been involved in past climate assessments. But, he added, “it is still mandated by Congress.”
In a statement, a NASA spokeswoman said that the agency was “streamlining its contract providing technical, analytical and programmatic support for the U.S. Global Change Research Program” to align with President Trump’s executive orders. She added that NASA planned to work with the White House to figure out “how best to support the congressionally mandated program while also increasing efficiencies across the 14 agencies and advisory committee supporting this effort.”
The contract cancellation came a day after The Daily Wire, a conservative news website, reported on ICF’s central role in helping to produce the National Climate Assessment in an article titled “Meet the Government Consultants Raking in Millions to Spread Climate Doom.”
ICF did not respond to a request for comment. The cancellation was first reported by Politico.
Many climate scientists were already expecting that the next National Climate Assessment, due in 2027 or 2028, was very likely in trouble.
Mr. Trump has long dismissed climate change as a hoax. And Russell Vought, the current director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote before the election that the next president should “reshape” the Global Change Research Program, since its scientific reports on climate change were often used as the basis for environmental lawsuits that constrained federal government actions.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, his administration tried, but failed, to derail the National Climate Assessment. When the 2018 report came out, concluding that global warming posed an imminent and dire threat, the administration made it public the day after Thanksgiving in an apparent attempt to minimize attention.
“We fully anticipated this,” said Jesse Keenan, an associate professor at the Tulane School of Architecture who was an author of a chapter of the National Climate Assessment on how climate change affects human-made structures. “Things were already in a very dubious state,” he said.
The climate assessment is typically compiled by scientists around the country who volunteer to write the report. It then goes through several rounds of review by 13 federal agencies, as well as public comments. The government does not pay the scientists themselves, but it does pay for the coordination work.
In February, scientists had submitted a detailed outline of the next assessment to the White House for an initial review. But that review has been on hold, and the agency comment period has been postponed.
Ladd Keith, an associate professor at the University of Arizona specializing in extreme heat governance and urban planning, had been helping to write the chapter on the U.S. Southwest. He said that while outside scientists were able to conduct research on their own, much of the value of the report came from the federal government’s involvement.
“The strength of the National Climate Assessment is that it goes through this detailed review by all the federal agencies and the public,” Dr. Keith said. “That’s what makes it different from just a bunch of academics getting together and doing a report. There are already lots of those.”
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, said the assessment was essential for understanding how climate change would affect daily life in the United States.
“It takes that global issue and brings it closer to us,” Dr. Hayhoe said. “If I care about food or water or transportation or insurance or my health, this is what climate change means to me if I live in the Southwest or the Great Plains. That’s the value.”
Austyn Gaffney and Lisa Friedman contributed reporting.
