We (authors of the 6th National Climate Assessment) were just dismissed by the Trump Administration

At 1:03pm PT on Monday (April 28th, 2025), all authors of the congressionally-mandated 6th National Climate Assessment were dismissed by the Trump administration (https://bit.ly/4jIz6cs). This action follows the cancellation of a contract that supplied the incredible leadership, technical support, and staff responsible for the success of this gargantuan effort across 14 agencies with the US Global Change research Program (USGCRP). Now, the administration is acting to seed the Assessment with climate denial (https://bit.ly/4lSWWnn). Not only do these actions undermine the decision-making power of our elected congress, they undermine decades worth of science, and they put American communities in red and blue states in increasingly dire positions in the face of a rapidly changing climate.

Without the rigorous peer-reviewed science that state, local, Tribal, and Territorial (SLTT) governments (and non-profit and community-based organizations, businesses, agencies, and communities) rely on to inform their decision-making, the impacts of climate change will continue to have dangerous, deadly, and costly consequences. This is not hyperbole. On average, the US now experiences 28 events a year with at least $1 billion in damages (https://bit.ly/4lReHU3), up from 6.5 such events a year between 1980-2019 (https://bit.ly/4jWE6dr). The projections show that these numbers will continue to increase, even under the most optimistic greenhouse gas emission (GHG) reduction scenarios.

Our communities are already experiencing the impacts of climate change across the US (and the world), and it is disproportionately impacting Black, brown, and Indigenous communities due to current and historic systems of oppression that have been allowed to continue today. Compounding and overlapping challenges - like housing insecurity, racially-motivated police violence, ongoing mental and physical health crises, the racial wealth gap, legacies of land dispossession, genocide, and settler colonialism, attacks to Tribal self-determination and sovereignty, water insecurity, inequitable disaster relief and recovery services, food insecurity, and the Covid-19 pandemic, among others - present intractable challenges for governments across the US.

Climate change is one of the single most pressing issues of our current generation and the decisions our collective society makes today will have lasting and significant consequences for the wellbeing of communities and the natural world across the globe for generations to come. We cannot afford to let these actions stand.