The Trump administration has reconstituted a governmentwide program that tracks how climate change is transforming the country, after having gutted it last year as part of a purge of programs that didn’t line up with its worldview.
The U.S. Global Change Research Program is now headed by Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist, according to his public postings on social media and confirmed by a second person familiar with the program, granted anonymity over fears of reprisal.
Wielicki, who calls himself a “professor in exile” and who frequently critiques climate science on social media, will be in charge of the program’s primary product, the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment, a comprehensive report released every four years that shows how American infrastructure, lives and the economy are affected by climate change.
Reached by phone, Wielicki, who has been soliciting ideas on X for what he should include in the next version of the assessment, said he’d like to speak about his work but only if the White House allows. The White House did not make him available for an interview, but sent a statement.
“For too long, the USGCRP has been used as a vehicle for political agendas instead of sound science,” a White House spokesperson said in a statement. “We look forward to restoring the USGCRP and ensuring it fulfills its legal mandate.”
Previous versions of the assessment have warned Americans about the danger of rising temperatures, increased flooding or deadly wildfires. Drawing on hundreds of peer-reviewed studies, they show how warming temperatures are quickly changing some parts of the country. These assessments are used to help inform infrastructure spending, planning and risk mitigation. Shortly after the program was created in 1990, one of its early successes was to reveal how a depleted ozone layer harmed Americans, which led to regulations that addressed the issue.
It remains to be seen how the Trump administration will approach the newly reconstituted office. But White House Budget Director Russ Vought has long viewed it as a source of “climate alarmism” that the White House should have more control over, as he wrote in the Project 2025 conservative policy handbook organized by the Heritage Foundation.
Wielicki, who said he left higher education because of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, has had multiple appearances in conservative media. He has stated that a “significant portion of the climate science literature is nothing more than stamp collecting.” He has also suggested that climate scientists are faking data to make the world appear hotter.
“Does anyone else find it odd that the region with the highest concentration of climate activists, climate policies, climate conferences, climate taxes, and climate emergency declarations is also the place allegedly warming the fastest?” he wrote on X recently, referring to Europe, where deadly heat waves last month killed more than 2,000.
Climate data shows that Europe is the fastest-warming continent.
The Trump administration has already published one climate report, organized by Energy Secretary Chris Wright last year, that yields clues to how the Trump administration might approach a new climate assessment.
That report was written by a group of researchers who downplayed the effects of climate change, and relied on work by dozens of scientists who criticized the report as misleading and riddled with errors.
Those researchers were invited to participate in the National Climate Assessment process and spent time criticizing previous versions of the report, POLITICO has previously reported. Wright’s hand-picked researchers also proposed a new National Climate Assessment that would emphasize the positive aspects of climate change, according to a document obtained by POLITICO from court filings in a lawsuit over the report. The most recent version of the report, they cautioned, “holds immense power” because it is “frequently cited in climate litigation” and used to justify regulations as well as lawsuits against fossil fuel companies.
Judith Curry, one of the scientists selected by Wright to author the DOE report, said the last version of the assessment “was all but useless” because it relied too heavily on extreme emissions scenarios. She said the forthcoming report would avoid that and expected that it would be an expansion of the work started by the DOE report.
Curry said she would “provide high-level advice” to help craft the next version of the assessment.
Wright told POLITICO in May that he expected to release a broader climate science product in the spring or winter.
“We want to have public engagement, debates on this,” he said. “Much more to come.”
The U.S. Global Change Research Program, created by a law signed under former President George H.W. Bush, coordinates federal climate research across more than a dozen agencies. It helps shape environmental rules, legislation and infrastructure projects. The report details land productivity, flooding risks, water resources, fisheries, ecosystems and more.
The National Climate Assessment was released in the first Trump administration. Trump later said he did not “believe” the report was accurate. That report, as well as all of the previous other versions, were deleted after Trump’s second term began.
In Trump’s first term, political appointees told the program team that “they knew what our mission was, they knew our job was and they weren't going to interfere with us,” said Michael Kuperberg, who was the executive director at the time. He said it’s not hard to find a small group of people who will give an inaccurate assessment of research. The version of the report the current Trump administration is putting together won’t represent the larger field of science, but will degrade public trust in government research, he said.
“The real risk here is the loss of integrity of the federal government,” he said. “If you cherry-pick a group of people that will say the sun's not going to rise tomorrow, how do you believe the next group of people?”
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