Opinion | As Los Angeles burns, a Trump Cabinet pick targets the pinnacle of U.S. climate research

The raging wildfires engulfing Los Angeles are just the latest natural disaster made more frequent and more intense by climate change. But buried in the pages of Project 2025, a Trump Cabinet pick has laid out a strategy to undercut the federal government’s most comprehensive and influential climate report.

The man behind the plan is Russell Vought, Trump’s ultraconservative choice for the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Last week, E&E News reported that Vought wants to weaken the next National Climate Assessment, which will be published near the end of Trump’s second term, with perspectives from climate deniers and polluting industries. If successful, the Trump nominee will significantly alter the most comprehensive analysis of how the climate crisis is going to affect Americans for years to come.

For more than three decades, the National Climate Assessment has helped policymakers plan for the devastating impacts of a crisis that is estimated to kill more than 1,300 Americans per year, and costs the U.S. more than $100 billion annually. The NCA’s peer-reviewed climate research informs everything from future building standards and vehicle emissions rules, to coastal housing development and insurance policies.

But Vought and other Republicans view climate science as a threat to the president’s goals. Vought’s ideas are laid out in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s policy handbook for the Trump administration. In his chapter, Vought writes that the climate report reduces the “legally-proper options in presidential decision-making” and “can frustrate successful litigation defense.” In essence, the NCA doesn’t just provide climate data for lawmakers — it has been used as evidence in lawsuits against the first Trump administration.

It also provides a clear warning that the continued burning of fossil fuels will drive global temperatures beyond a livable climate — a message that contradicts Trump’s pro-fossil-fuel agenda. “The Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding,” Vought writes.

The Trump administration can’t actually kill the NCA, which is mandated by law. But Vought can weaken it by cherry-picking which experts work on it and removing the sections written during the Biden administration. The next president should “critically analyze and, if required, refuse to accept any … assessment prepared under the Biden Administration,” he writes. He also proposes that OMB “jointly assess the independence” of the climate researchers, with the goal of introducing more “diverse viewpoints” — including those of known climate science deniers.

Incredibly, Vought’s ideas are some of the less sensational anti-climate proposals in Project 2025, which also recommends gutting the Environmental Protection Agency, privatizing the National Weather Service, eliminating environmental justice initiatives and deregulating “forever” chemicals, to name a few.

And Vought’s own proposals don’t end with the National Climate Assessment. He also wants the military to eliminate climate change from its risk assessments, abolish the Biden administration’s domestic climate policy office and overhaul environmental review of infrastructure projects. Most significantly, he wants to convert at least 50,000 civil servants into political employees, making them easier to replace.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said in private speeches obtained by ProPublica and Documented. “We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.”

The scale of Vought’s ambitions fit his background: Vought is a Christian nationalist who believes that the American people are at war with a “weaponized bureaucracy” that “makes every decision on the basis of climate change extremism and … woke militancy.” But it is disturbing that the man who once helped Trump illegally withhold aid from Ukraine is now being given power over the nation’s top scientific agencies. Given that the world is currently on track to heat by an alarming 3.1 degrees Celsius, that’s not good news. 

But it’s also not the end of the world. Because the Trump administration’s previous attempts to quash the National Climate Assessment spectacularly backfired.

In 2018, Vought and other White House officials brainstormed how to delay, undermine or change the Fourth National Climate Assessment, two White House officials told E&E News. Instead, they published the unaltered report on Black Friday, hoping it would go unnoticed over Thanksgiving weekend. It made headlines, as much for the unusual timing as the Trump administration’s attempts to suppress it.

For now, the Trump administration is expected to at worst alter the NCA to include its own viewpoint — one that may include climate denial or justifications for fossil fuels. That strategy offers a clear insight into exactly how far the incoming administration is willing to go to reshape reality, even as tens of thousands of Angelenos flee climate-fueled wildfires. The effort is not only nonsensical, but potentially deadly to Americans trying to adapt to a changing world.

Some federal scientists, at least, are already getting ready to push back. “You’ve got to be prepared to walk away,” Craig McLean, a former director of NOAA research, told Science magazine, adding that he resisted pressure to focus on discredited research during the first Trump administration.

“The lesson for me was, I can stand between an assault on the science and the law,” he said. “And so can other officials.”