President Donald Trump’s promised assault on federal climate policies is sweeping across Washington, state capitals and private industry with a speed that’s surprising even some of his supporters and critics — and could leave an impact on the planet’s future well after his presidency.
His cost-cutting orders have led to the firings of thousands of people from the Environmental Protection Agency and the departments of Energy and the Interior, with even deeper slashing on the way. He’s dammed the flow of billions of federal dollars for energy rebates, low-income solar installations, electric vehicle chargers and more — sometimes flouting courts that ordered the money reinstated.
And he has cast uncertainty over clean energy industries by threatening tariffs on allied nations, pausing permits for wind projects and promising to roll back hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy tax credits contained in former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
Taken together, Trump’s actions mark a vast and coordinated attack on U.S. environmental policy by a president who has spent years denying the tenets of climate science and the reality of rising global temperatures. Analysts and advocates say the administration’s moves threaten to reverse decades of painfully slow progress to curb planet-warming pollution.
“This shock and awe campaign will undo decades of bipartisan and international efforts to curb greenhouse gases and, if left unchecked, will lead to the planet warming far beyond manageable levels,” said Jillian Blanchard, who runs the climate change program at Lawyers for Good Government, a nonprofit watchdog group.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. But Energy Secretary Chris Wright expressed the administration’s view of climate change this week when he described efforts to zero out greenhouse gases as a malevolent goal of governments to acquire power.
“Net Zero 2050 is a sinister goal,” Wright told conservative leaders attending a conference in London. “It’s a terrible goal. It’s both unachievable by any practical means, but the aggressive pursuit of it — and you’re sitting in a country that has aggressively pursued this goal — has not delivered any benefits, but it’s delivered tremendous costs.”
The United States, and the world, were already on the clock when Trump won a second term in November. At current pollution levels, the planet has six years before the industrial-era rise in global temperatures eclipses the crucial threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius, and 27 years before it breaches the even more serious benchmark of 2 degrees, according to the Global Carbon Project, an international team composed of climate researchers.
Trump left little mystery about his intentions during the presidential campaign, railing against electric vehicles, wind turbines and what he called Biden’s “Green New Scam” at rally after rally. He has long ridiculed climate science, joking last year that rising temperatures would lead to more oceanfront property.
Now he’s embedding those doubts into federal action. Researchers in and out of government have been put on notice that bucking far-right orthodoxy on issues like equity and energy “dominance” could get them fired or blacklisted for grants.
The reach of Trump’s actions has blown past those of his first administration — and more moves are coming. He has threatened to make the nation’s disaster response agency “go away.” EPA is expected to release a list of regulations it plans to scrap and replace with weaker standards — or no standards at all.
Even EPA’s core finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health — the cornerstone of all climate regulations under the Clean Air Act — may be on the chopping block, a move that Trump avoided making in his first term.
“There’s been a viciousness that I hadn’t anticipated in tearing everything down without a coherent plan for what to build back up,” said Daniel Cohan, an environmental engineering professor at Rice University.
Firings and furloughs
Trump entered office amid a halting and uneven effort by the U.S. to tackle climate change.
Biden sought to position the U.S. as a climate leader. He approved $1 trillion in clean energy loans, grants and tax credits as part of sweeping legislative packages that included the IRA and the bipartisan infrastructure law.
But Biden’s track record of cutting climate pollution was mixed. U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were 20 percent below 2005 levels when he left office last month, a far cry from the 50 to 52 percent reduction he had promised to achieve by the end of the decade.
Yet Biden made progress in other areas.
At the Department of Energy, Biden stood up new initiatives to bolster grid reliability, domestic manufacturing and EV charging. EPA hired more than 6,000 full-time employees to help carry out the president’s climate initiatives. In the private sector, companies that spent the past several years building factories to make solar panels and electric vehicles have only just begun to see new products roll off the line.
Trump, on the other hand, empowered Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, to dramatically slash the size of the federal bureaucracy through the Department of Government Efficiency.
At the National Science Foundation, staff meetings are no longer recorded because civil servants fear the audio could fall into the wrong hands. Nearly 170 people were fired from NSF on Tuesday, with more layoffs on the way. At EPA, where 388 people were fired last week, civil servants have been told to cut off communication with grantees and some state officials while political leaders get up to speed.
DOE was among the first to see staff cuts, starting with diversity and equity offices days after the inauguration and continuing last week as new workers were let go. Cuts then came at other agencies. The Interior Department cut 2,700 people while the Forest Service, a division of the Department of Agriculture, fired 3,400 employees. The Federal Emergency Management Agency fired 200 people and sent out a directive targeting climate programs.
And when career staff can’t be sacked, they’re sometimes being reassigned to do work outside their expertise. The Justice Department assigned environmental enforcement and civil rights attorneys to work on a team devoted to punishing so-called sanctuary cities for bucking Trump’s immigration policies.
“You can’t do anything in the government unless you have people who are doing it, and not just the numbers, but the quality,” said David Turk, who served as deputy Energy secretary during the Biden administration.
Many of the probationary staff fired in recent days were hired from the private sector for their technical expertise. “In many ways, those are the worst people to get rid of,” Turk said.
‘Psychological tactic’
With a flourish of his black Sharpie, Trump affected families from New Mexico to Africa.
The State Department rescinded $4 billion in pledged funding to the United Nations Green Climate Fund. The Treasury Department ditched a group that studied the financial risks of climate change because it was organized to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, of which the U.S. is no longer a part.
And a host of climate-related programs at USAID have been halted or terminated amid Trump’s attempt to close the agency. They include installing solar panels on hospitals in sub-Saharan Africa, and to alert farmers in Central America of impending extreme weather events, so they can cover their crops.
Programs are disappearing, whether they’re climate-related or not, said one current USAID staffer who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation. It feels like a “psychological tactic,” they said.
“It’s not about aid, it’s not about what we do and it’s not about there being fraud or waste,” the person said. “It’s the narrative that we’re being sacrificed to.”
At home, $8 billion in home energy rebates were thrown into limbo.
New Mexico last year raced to create a rebate program using IRA funding in a bid to lower household energy costs. It will “not only do good things for the climate, but to finally move New Mexico out of the poverty that has endured for generations,” said Rebecca Stair, director of the state Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department.
Now she never knows what her staff will find when they open the federal government’s online payment system. Some days the grants are there. On others, some disappear.
“It seems to change every day or even every few hours,” Stair said. “So trying to operate these big, consequential programs under that much uncertainty is really an enormous challenge.”
Federal workers are not the only ones losing their jobs.
Small businesses and nonprofits that expected to receive IRA grants from the Department of Agriculture or EPA have begun laying off people. School districts that anticipated buying electric buses with grants are holding off for fear that they won’t be reimbursed.
“Communities are paying out of pocket for work that the federal government has a legal obligation to pay in advance,” said Zealan Hoover, EPA’s IRA and infrastructure implementation lead under Biden. “Upstream orders to factories are drying up, forcing companies to pause hiring and prepare to furlough factory workers.”
At the same time, the business world is anxiously awaiting details of Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on imports from allied and adversarial nations alike. Those levies could snarl supply chains for green technologies and reverse falling prices for renewable energy.
The business group E2 said January saw the lowest level of new large-scale clean energy investments announced since August 2022, when Biden and congressional Democrats passed the IRA.
“Right now, what Washington is doing in regard to the future of clean energy in America is about as clear as a midnight snowstorm in D.C.,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, a clean energy business group. “It’s really created a self-inflicted wound to one of the fastest-growing sectors of the American economy.”
‘A ridiculous thought’
Federal agencies and corporate boardrooms are accustomed to Washington shifting its priorities when a new president arrives.
So it wasn’t a surprise when Trump pledged to work with Republican lawmakers to claw back unobligated IRA dollars or directed agencies to move swiftly to roll back regulations on fossil fuels and open public lands to drilling. It was expected that Trump would pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement — as he did in his first term.
But he didn’t stop there, catching even insiders by surprise.
Two weeks after the election, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) — who now chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee — told POLITICO that IRA funding can’t be taken back if it was already obligated.
[T]hat’s a decision that’s final. We’re not gonna go claw back money. That’s a ridiculous thought,” said Capito, who will have a leading role in shaping budget legislation that could jettison IRA programs.
What the establishment did not see coming was Trump’s blizzard of executive orders, his blitz to fire workers and the speed with which he froze federal funding. It was a multidimensional campaign to destabilize the bureaucracy — and U.S. climate policy paid a large price.
Liberal states and federal unions have sued to stop the administration from razing Biden’s climate legacy. They’ve won some preliminary cases — including on the funding freeze.
But those orders amount to putting a Band-Aid on an amputated limb.
Meantime, the spending pause has impacted businesses large and small. A Massachusetts company said last week thatit no longer planned to build a factory for making EV components after receiving a $671 million DOE grant.
TotalEnergies has halted its plans for offshore wind projects in the U.S., while Orsted, the Danish wind giant, announced it is cutting spending 25 percent. In Georgia, a battery maker recently announced it was scrapping plans for a $2.5 billion facility.
“What’s hard for me now is that it feels like it’s not just a situation where we’re going to let the best technology win,” said Rob Jackson, an earth systems professor at Stanford University. “We’re going to actively spite green technologies and clean energy because they’re clean and because they help climate. That, to me, is messed up.”
A small electric vehicle charger startup in New York has been forced to scramble for new funding after a $1.4 million DOE grant was frozen. The freeze comes as part of a wider order to pause a $5 billion initiative supporting the build-out of EV chargers.
The company, named it’s electric, was granted cost-share funding for 60 curbside EV chargers in four cities complete with workforce training. Instead of waiting on Trump, they are pushing through without federal funding.
“We’re not going to fall into this trap of ‘waiting and seeing’ for this funding,” said Tiya Gordon, a co-founder of it’s electric. “We can’t sway opinion with the new administration.”
‘Like it doesn’t exist’
Climate researchers told POLITICO’s E&E News they have been told to self-censor their grant documents for trigger words that might lead to a loss of funding.
Agencies that fund scientific research — including the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation — paused review panels charged with evaluating grant proposals while they grappled with how to comply with Trump’s executive orders on diversity and environmental justice. The move alarmed scientists who depend on the agencies to support their research.
NSF program officers were told to comb through existing grants to see if any were out of step with Trump’s agenda. They were given spreadsheets of grants flagged as possibly pertaining to DEI issues because they contained terms like “barrier,” according to one agency official who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals. The managers were told to look for grants that affect social topics, like barriers to education.
“There is a general feeling of helplessness, confusion and anger,” said one NSF staffer. “Morale is bent.”
One career scientist at USDA said they were considering taking their name off a climate-related study they led to avoid being targeted. Another option: leaving it unpublished until Trump leaves office.
“I think they generally don’t want the information that we provide. They don’t want it to be available because, if it’s not, it’s like it doesn’t exist,” said Jackson, the Stanford professor. “I think people are living in fear in a way that I haven’t seen in my lifetime.”
Sara Schonhardt, Chelsea Harvey, Corbin Hiar, Mike Lee, Lesley Clark, Scott Waldman and Thomas Frank contributed to this report.
