Jessica S. McKenzie

‘Wholesale destruction’: Government shutdown or not, critical science programs are at risk

The United States is hurtling towards a potential government shutdown if Congress does not pass a budget or short-term funding bill by the end of the month, and the fate of the federal government’s Earth and climate science programs may hang in the balance.

President Donald Trump has proposed vast, devastating cuts to these agencies, many of which target programs dedicated to studying and preparing for climate change. In the event of a shutdown, the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, has told agencies to consider layoffs or reductions in force for “all employees” in all “programs, projects, or activities” with lapsed funding that are “not consistent with the President’s priorities.”

As Sophia Cai notes in Politico, this is starkly different from how previous government shutdowns were handled, when federal workers were temporarily furloughed and returned to work when funding was restored. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer characterized the memo as an “attempt at intimidation.”

Bobby Kogan, a former OMB official with the Biden administration, said the direction may not be legal. “It doesn’t seem to me that they would really be able to legally do that additional work during a shutdown—and it doesn’t seem to me that they’d be able to get it all done beforehand,” Kogan told the Federal News Network. “So either this is something they were planning to do anyway, and they are just using this as a pretext, or it’s a threat to try to get what they want.”

Organizations that represent the interests of public workers have been more explicit: “The plan to exploit a shutdown to purge federal workers is illegal, unconstitutional, and deeply disturbing,” Tim Whitehouse, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said in a statement. “A shutdown triggers furloughs, not firings. To weaponize it as a tool to destroy the civil service would mark a dangerous slide into lawlessness and further consolidate power in the Executive Branch.”

But illegality (or possible illegality) would not necessarily stop the Trump administration from choosing the layoff route if a budget deal is not reached. In any case, the memo obviously creates uncertainty and anxiety for the federal scientists whose work has been singled out for steep funding cuts or even elimination by the Trump administration.

“Either we all go home or it’s business as usual … nobody knows what’s going to happen,” one NASA scientist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told the Bulletin.

Republished by Mother Jones here.

NASA missions at risk under the Trump administration

As part of the budget proposal for NASA submitted earlier this year, the Trump administration proposed cancelling more than 40 missions, including at least 14 Earth science missions.

Agency employees have already been instructed to do the preparatory work for ending these satellite and instrument programs, according to a NASA scientist who spoke with the Bulletin.

The Hidden World of the American Oystercatcher

Sculptors often spend a lot of time with their subjects, but Rachel Frank takes that connection to another level. As a rehabilitator at the Wild Bird Fund in Manhattan, she’s cared for an array of creatures that live in or pass through the city, including rodenticide-poisoned owls, kestrels injured by cats, and diseased hawks. Her intimate knowledge of wildlife infuses the ceramic sculptures she creates in her Brooklyn studio.

A perfect firestorm: The social, political, and climate forces that keep Athens burning

On a warm Sunday morning in early June, I boarded a train in central Athens headed towards Kifissia, an affluent suburb to the north of the city. We had just rattled away from the station for the Athens Olympic Sports Complex in Marousi when I spotted a spire of smoke rising in the distance, behind a ridge of mountains.

It was quite the coincidence, since I was on my way to see Giorgos Dertilis, the head of the Volunteer Forest Firefighting and Rescue Team in Ekali, part of the Kifissia municipality.

When Dertilis met me at the station a short time later, I asked him about it. He wrinkled his brow at me in surprise and hopped on the radio to learn more. Back at headquarters, it was confirmed: Someone had been burning tires, probably to recover scrap metal. There’s a blanket ban on outdoor fires during Greece’s fire season, which extends from the first of May to the end of October, but that doesn’t stop people from testing fate. In July 2018, a man burning brush in his yard kicked off a deadly conflagration that swept through the seaside resort town of Mati, 20 miles from central Athens, killing 104 people.

Although the number of wildfires recorded annually in Greece has decreased since 2000, wildfires are getting larger, burning nearly 1,500 acres more on average with each passing year. In 2023, a wildfire broke out in the Evros region in northeastern Greece, near the Turkish border. It burned for more than two weeks, eventually scorching more than 237,000 acres—the largest recorded wildfire in Europe since the European Forest Fire Information Service began keeping track—and killed 20 people, including 18 Syrian asylum seekers.

Fires are also becoming more common outside of the traditional fire season, with the number of fires between November and April increasing by 47 percent since 2012; these fires are also burning larger areas with each passing year. There are myriad factors at play in these dangerous trends; two of the biggest are land-use and climatic changes.

I was in Athens for a little over a week, which was just enough for me to get a taste of the hot and windy climate that can nurture any stray spark into an inferno. I climbed to the top of the Acropolis, sweating in the early evening sun with other tourists. I spent a day with volunteer firefighters, driving around to see the burn scars from blazes they battled last summer. I was buffeted by gusts while visiting an observatory that narrowly escaped the flames last year. I hiked through Parnitha National Park and saw new pine trees growing in the shadow of blackened tree trunks. The threat of fire seemed ever present, especially at the edges of the city, where drones hovered on high-risk fire days, part of Greece’s burgeoning early-detection program.

Some of my taxi drivers, upon hearing of my interests, regaled me with tales of heroism and loss: One told me of a friend who lost his house in a wildfire last year. Another said he evacuated his parents from his childhood home and then went back to personally ensure the building did not burn; the fire came into their yard and consumed all the vegetation, but the house is still standing.

I was left with the impression of a city and country on edge—doing its best to adapt and cope, but in general, and like many other fire-prone regions, ill-prepared for the kind of extreme wildfires that climate change is unleashing. As I was finalizing this story, wildfires driven by gale-force winds broke out at multiple locations around Athens, forcing evacuations, as other fires raged to the west in the Peloponnese and on multiple Greek islands.

Decommissioned, retired, paused: The weather, climate, and Earth science data the government doesn’t want you to see

In the early 1990s, a University of Michigan graduate student named Jeff Masters started working on an internet weather project to share real-time weather information and satellite imagery, something most people take for granted today but was at the time revolutionary. That project was Weather Underground, which claims the honorific of being the “Internet’s 1st weather service.” It had a mission to “make quality weather information available to every person on this planet,” and promised to “provide weather data for those that are underserved by other weather providers.” Although it started as a service for universities and K-12 educators, Weather Underground became a commercial product in 1995, and for a time had more daily page views than the Weather Channel, which acquired the site in 2012.

More than three decades have passed since Weather Underground’s humble beginnings, and Masters left the company in 2019, but he can still rattle off the tools and software that he used to build the site. These include WXP, McIDAS, and LDM, all of which were provided by Unidata, a program started in the 1980s to share meteorological and atmospheric data between universities and to improve access for researchers and educators. To a layperson, these acronyms likely mean very little, but their general purpose is neatly conveyed in the name “Unidata”: a one-stop shop of universal tools for the distribution and management of data, specifically Earth and atmospheric data.

“Our little weather project was completely impossible without Unidata,” Masters told the Bulletin.

On May 12, the Unidata program paused most of its operations due to a lapse in funding from the National Science Foundation. Although it has a five-year grant from the foundation, it receives that funding in one-year increments and was due up for a new infusion shortly after the National Science Foundation instituted a funding freeze at the end of April. Now, almost the entire staff is furloughed, and the program is in limbo. It is unclear how long the funding freeze will be in effect or when the program will be able to resume operations, although a blog post on the website states, “We hope to get back to normal operations and be working with you again soon.”