Science and Democracy Under Siege

At the end of 2024, the federal government employed about 3 million people who provided crucial services, including issuing passports; ensuring clean drinking water, safe food, and healthy air; providing medical care to veterans; protecting workers; tracking disease rates; estimating population statistics; exploring and researching outer space; and developing curricula for students, among many other services. Ideally, these services are designed and implemented based on scientific evidence and public input.

It has been difficult to predict, or even follow, the impacts of the vast and disorderly reductions in the federal workforce that have occurred in the first six months of President Trump's second term. Over 120,000 federal employees were laid off or were targeted for layoffs, and there are estimates that federal employee layoffs in the first quarter of 2025 were nearly 7 times greater than the first quarter of 2024. The number of employees in the federal government fluctuates over time, including during turnover between presidents. However, this administration is targeting federal agencies that fund and conduct scientific studies with unprecedented firings and layoffs. Even considering contradictory court orders that hold federal jobs in the balance and staff being mistakenly fired, data indicate the government led all sectors in job cuts in the first quarter of 2025. The Trump administration has stopped federal workers from serving the US public in several ways: mass firing of probationary employees; reassigning them as political appointees under Schedule Policy/Career (formerly Schedule F); reduction in force (RIF) notices; shifting their responsibilities away from independent science; pressuring employees to accept buyouts or early retirements; putting staff on administrative leave; and dismissing those who are "disloyal" in alarming retaliatory actions.

As shown in Figure 2, nine science-focused federal agencies highlighted in our analysis experienced detrimental reductions in their workforce. The Trump administration has reduced HHS employees by 24 percent, DOE by 13 percent, NOAA by 11 percent, and EPA by 5 percent (this number will likely increase as a RIF takes place on July 31) since taking office.

The elimination of federal employees has left many government programs insufficiently staffed, bringing their efforts to a grinding halt. Cuts to both NOAA's workforce and funding have already resulted in disruptions and degradation in weather monitoring and climate modeling that keep the public aware of short-term hazards and inform long-term planning (see case study on the attacks on climate science). This has created immense uncertainty and inconsistency in the processes ensuring the protections, oversight, and science that the federal government is charged with providing. For example, with mass layoffs at HHS, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) lost the entire team tasked with investigating and preventing lead poisoning, which is extremely harmful to children. As a result, schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, closed due to concerns about lead exposure after being denied assistance from the CDC team that no longer existed (HHS claims that these staff have since been reinstated).

While we do not yet know how many scientists, specifically, were laid off, a notable number of employees at these agencies are categorized as having a "scientific occupation:" 49 percent of employees at NOAA, 45 percent at EPA, 21 percent at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), 13 percent at HHS, and 10 percent at DOE. Among the 5 percent of employees laid off from EPA, many were lost from the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights (OEJECR), which coordinates environmental justice initiatives across the agency and provides technical assistance and grants across the country, as well as the Office of Research and Development, the agency's central research arm. Despite broad bipartisan support for this work, reduction in force notices were issued to those employees, in addition to threats to close the entire office. These cuts were part of broader efforts to eliminate environmental justice work across the federal government. OEJECR staff implemented critical work to address cumulative and disproportionate harms in communities across the country, including supporting work that brought updated water treatment systems to communities, abated lead, remediated brownfield sites, and developed web tools that pulled together data to understand the environmental burdens and stressors in communities. Without targeted efforts by offices like OEJECR to address and eliminate disproportionate pollution burdens, these disparities will persist and perhaps even increase over time.

For decades, the United States has been considered a science superpower, in part because of the large amount of research and innovation its federal government funded and facilitated. Since President Trump's return to the White House, scientific funding and capacity has been slashed, leading to a decrease in awarded grants and research activity and threatening the US economy, higher education institutions, and the livelihoods of those whose work is funded by federal monies. Before Inauguration Day, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was the world's largest funder of biomedical research. Historically, NIH has funded innovative, life-saving research on a broad range of topics that has helped people across the world; much of this research is the kind of basic science that the biomedical industry typically does not fund but uses to create products. Research conducted within and funded by NIH has helped medical and public health professionals better understand, treat, and prevent infectious diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis, and COVID-19; illnesses such as cancer; and chronic diseases such as endometriosis. NIH funding is distributed across various sectors and fields, including academic institutions and researchers, medical institutions and hospitals, and other non- and for-profit organizations. Altogether, our understanding of science and medicine and, by extension, the scientific community's ability to treat and detect various health conditions would not be where it is today without NIH's scientists and funding.

NIH research, funding, and general operations have been in chaos since President Trump's return to the White House. The agency not only received a directive to halt all external communications from its parent agency, HHS, but the Trump administration also promptly ordered NIH to halt all grant review panels and travel related to NIH-funded research. Grant review panels facilitate expert review of grant applications to decide which projects and organizations receive the funds. Although the Trump administration rescinded a federal funding freeze two days after it was ordered due to public and judicial backlash, it did not allow NIH to schedule select grant review meetings until the end of February, with more receiving permission to meet at the beginning of April. This meant that the agency was not able to review grant applications, award grants, or disseminate funds to universities, businesses, and nonprofit organizations across the country for months. The Trump administration also illegally attempted to cap indirect costs (money allocated for non-research-related expenses such as electricity costs in laboratories) for NIH grants; a judge blocked this move, but the administration has indicated it plans to appeal. To add insult to injury, the NIH eliminated its scientific integrity policy, which helps combat political interference in federal agency science-based processes. A similar series of events has unfolded at the National Science Foundation (NSF), with grant funding being scrutinized and eventually eliminated for containing "taboo" words, science advisory panels being dismissed, and new funding being constrained by ideological values. The administration has also withdrawn the United States from the World Health Organization and prevented federal scientists from engaging in international collaboration, which will have measurable consequences for the health of the US public and the global community.

Using publicly available data from USAspending.gov, we estimate that NIH awarded an average of 6,563 new project grants per year across a nine-year period (from 2016 to 2024) during January to June. As shown in Figure 3, from January 1 to June 30, 2025, NIH awarded 3,029 project grants total. That is, NIH awarded 54 percent fewer grants during this time compared to the average number of awards over the preceding nine years. This is the fewest new awards made by NIH in a decade, even compared to President Trump's first term. These declines were observed across all sectors, including higher education institutions, non-profit organizations, and small businesses. Reducing or halting funding means less development of innovative cancer treatments, less ability to detect and treat early stage disease, and less understanding of autoimmune disorders, among many other consequences. Moreover, constraining funders such as NSF and NIH will have many long-lasting impacts on academic scientific inquiry. Politicizing, pausing, and cutting federal funding will derail researchers' career advancement and will dictate what universities can teach and who they hire.

Once grant review panels were allowed to resume meeting, the Trump administration began terminating grants across the federal government that contained any of its prohibited words as part of the administration's broader crusade to demonize concepts and words related to justice and equity. Any grants perceived to be related to LGBTQ+ health, vaccine hesitancy, environmental justice, or DEI were defunded. As of June 30, 2,958 NIH grants have been rescinded due to this latest directive; however, on June 17, a federal judge ordered that more than $1 billion in NIH grants be reinstated. This unstable series of events whereby NIH grants have been politicized, paused, cut, and reinstated has already caused deleterious effects on the economy, as well as on academic and medical institutions across the United States. The long-term impacts of these changes will be observed for years to come.

At its most basic level, a healthy democracy is a government system responsive and accountable to the people. Public participation, including the ability of all people to have equal access and influence in government decisionmaking, is not only fundamental to functioning democratic processes, but also required by law. For example, under the Administrative Procedure Act—one of the key statutes that dictates how our government operates—agencies are required to notify the public about proposed regulations, allow people and organizations to submit comments with their feedback, and respond to the substance of those comments. When the people most affected by government policies and programs can access and weigh in on those processes, our nation's policies are more effective and conditions improve for the public.

While there are always ongoing threats to public participation in government, such as corporate lobbyists having undue influence on lawmaking, the Trump administration is openly calling on federal agencies to blatantly ignore public input to government decisions that affect people's lives. In addition to rescinding guidance proposed by the Biden administration to enhance meaningful participation in government decisionmaking, the Trump administration issued executive order 14219,which attempts to give DOGE the authority to pick and choose which regulations can be eliminated—regardless of what public benefits they provide or whether there was strong public support for these regulations. The executive order also tells federal agencies to not enforce regulations unaligned with the administration's priorities. Furthermore, the White House urged agencies to repeal regulations "without notice and comment," effectively ignoring public comments from scientists, affected communities, and other stakeholders. This is one of several executive orders and actions that aim to weaken our public safeguards.

For example, in March, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) eliminated regulations implementing the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)—one of our nation's cornerstone environmental laws—and later removed the NEPA guidance on climate change. NEPA requires any federal agency undertaking an action or project with significant environmental impacts—such as a highway expansion or demolishing a building—to consider alternatives and invite input from people who will be affected before initiating the project. NEPA is also a critical tool for ensuring major projects' environmental and public health harms, including cumulative impacts (the combined environmental and social stressors), are considered and accounted for. The first Trump administration sought to weaken NEPA, an effort the Biden administration reversed. Now, during President Trump's second term, his administration bypassed public comment altogether, issuing an "interim final" rollback of the regulations that implement NEPA. The administration eliminated the regulations before public comments were considered, and CEQ states it will not reconsider the decision regardless of what comments are submitted. Even more, CEQ also issued guidance eliminating requirements to consider cumulative impacts and proposed projects' impacts on nearby communities. Therefore, not only did CEQ eliminate NEPA regulations without public input, but also it removed the processes within NEPA that require proposed projects to consider public input. The message from the Trump administration is clear: your expertise, your life experience, and the impacts that this action will have on you do not matter.

In addition to executive orders issued by the White House, other actions across the federal government are impeding the public's ability to engage in government decisionmaking. For example, federal employees who compile and then provide the public with government records requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) have been cut. Certain federal agencies are also taking unilateral actions to limit public participation. For example, HHS rescinded a 1971 policy that required public notice and comment for regulations related to public benefit programs such as Medicaid and Medicare.

While the Trump administration cuts the US population out of public processes, it is expanding deregulatory actions that benefit corporations. In March, EPA announced that companies subject to certain Clean Air Act regulations could request a "Presidential Exemption" from air pollution controls for up to two years by sending an email, purportedly leaving the decision up to President Trump himself. This is a flagrant and unprecedented abuse of power. This not only would give the US president authority to grant compliance exemptions on agency regulations, but also would completely ignore the regulatory process, tens of thousands of public comments, and countless hours of federal employee time that went into developing and finalizing these regulations. In addition to these two-year compliance exemptions, the EPA has already begun reconsidering these regulations altogether, which could take them off the books entirely.

The exemption applies to nine air pollution regulations, including ones that regulate power plants that emit mercury, an extremely hazardous toxicant that can cause lifelong neurological impairments, particularly when exposures are in utero, to babies, and to children. It also applies to facilities that emit ethylene oxide, a cancer-causing gas used in chemical manufacturing and medical device sterilization. More than 530 facilities across the United States are regulated under these rules and could apply for this exemption simply by sending an email. Several advocacy groups have argued that these exemptions are illegal.

As shown in Figure 4, a UCS analysis found that unregulated pollution from these 532 facilities would disproportionately harm communities of color, communities with low income, and people who do not speak English as a first language. We also found 90 percent of these facilities are within five miles of a school or day care, presenting potential danger to children, who are more susceptible to the harms of air toxics exposure. Furthermore, 60 percent of these facilities are located in the communities most polluted by air toxics nationwide. Allowing these facilities to evade pollution regulations compounds health harms that already exist in predominantly lower-income and in Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities nationwide.

Federal advisory committees are groups of experts who provide their knowledge and consultation to the federal government in policy- and decisionmaking. In a tradition that started with George Washington, experts across sectors (academia, local or tribal governments, and non- and for-profits) provide guidance based on the best available science, evidence, and lived experiences to policymakers on relevant issues and regulations that affect real people. There are FACs whose purpose is to give recommendations on the topics of environmental justice, child health, and local government perspectives, to name a few examples. Under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, or FACA, many FACs are created and protected by Congress and must meet certain requirements in their membership composition and meeting frequency.

Out of roughly 1,000 FACs in the federal government, 208 specialize in science or technical topics. These science advisory committees provide government agencies with scientific information and recommendations on topics ranging from aging and vaccines to air pollution. Including independent experts in the conversation on how best to protect the health and safety of the US public is an important and crucial way to build effective, science-driven policy—and also a way to make efficient use of government resources given that agencies can call on volunteers and/or pay for a few days of experts' time instead of hiring employees having the necessary expertise. Additionally, science FACs help safeguard regulations, policies, and guidance from corporate or political interference by solidifying the inclusion of the best available science in these processes.

Unfortunately, FACs, including numerous science FACs, are currently under attack by the Trump administration. In his second term, President Trump reinstated executive order 13875, which requires at least one-third of FACs across the government to be dissolved. A previous UCS analysis found that during President Trump's first term, there was a clear pattern of dismantling, dismissing, and delaying FAC meetings and members, all actions that sideline science in government policy- and decisionmaking. Our new analysis shows similar efforts taking place in President Trump's second term.

Of the 208 FACs classified as "scientific technical program advisory boards" in the FAC database, 188 were "administratively active" when President Trump returned to office on January 20, meaning that they had members and were actively meeting in line with an approved charter. As of June 30, 51 (27 percent) of active science FACs have been terminated or disbanded. Of the remaining 137, 18 are currently being considered for termination by HHS, 3 are in the process of removing scientific experts and inviting new members with unknown qualifications, and 3 have had their scheduled meetings canceled or markedly delayed.

As shown in Figure 5, the agencies with the most interruptions to their science FACs are HHS (23), NSF (8), USDA (4), and EPA (3). These changes result in a near or, in some cases, total elimination of science FACs in NSF, EPA, the US Agency for International Development (which was dismantled altogether), the Department of Labor, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Of note, changes in meeting frequency, member composition, and FAC terminations are not fully updated in the FAC database until the end of the current fiscal year, meaning these numbers are most likely an underestimate of the changes undertaken by the Trump administration.

Soon after the inauguration, EPA FACs such as the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee and Science Advisory Board—which provide the agency with scientific expertise on air pollution regulations and review scientific information used by the agency, respectively—were "reset," meaning the existing scientist members were dismissed. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which advises CDC on vaccine safety and immunization schedules, initially saw its meetings delayed for weeks, which impacted its ability to make timely recommendations for time-sensitive public health issues such as the annual flu season. In June, all members of ACIP were removed altogether and replaced with members with conflicts of interest on the record. And in line with executive order 13875, many FACs, like those at the Census Bureau that provide guidance on developing and distributing census surveys, have been disbanded. It is now unclear how the Bureau will incorporate data analysis best practices and ensure appropriate representation of historically underrepresented groups in the upcoming decennial US Census. FACs are a critical component of ensuring science and the lived and professional experience of a diverse group of experts is represented in government policy, and undermining their ability to meet and provide guidance will hurt real people.

One of the core functions of the US government is providing the public with free access to information, especially information related to government policies and programs. The public's right to this information is enshrined in the FOIA and other administrative laws that dictate how our government operates. In recent decades, bipartisan efforts were made to expand online access to government information, including federally funded scientific research design and results. These efforts were aimed at ensuring that datasets and scientific reports can be read and downloaded and that government webpages are archived between presidential administrations. Government data, such as the US Census, are not only critical for informing how the government designs and distributes programs and resources; they are also used by academics, legislators, state and local regulators, industry, and the broader public.

The public's fundamental right to this information is currently under attack. The Trump administration has systematically eliminated thousands of government webpages and databases, many of which included critical science-based information, and halted certain government data collection efforts. Although some level of information turnover is expected between presidential administrations, the sheer scale of elimination and distortion of information is unprecedented, even compared to President Trump's first term. These actions originated, in part, from executive order 14151, which directs federal agencies to terminate all programs and activities related to DEI and environmental justice, as well as executive order 14168, which directs federal agencies to recognize only male and female sexes in government documents and websites, plainly attacking intersex, transgender, and gender-fluid people. These politically motivated attacks resulted in thousands of government webpages being taken down, including health guidance for pregnant people and surveys on health disparities among LGBTQ+ youth. Language related to climate and clean energy has also been deleted from federal webpages. In addition, the administration removed a slew of public datasets, including EJSCREEN and the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST), that show how different inequities, including low income, pollution exposure, and chronic disease disproportionately affect communities across the country. In April, UCS sued several government agencies for illegally removing EJSCREEN, CEJST, and other critical datasets that were funded by taxpayer dollars and that the public has a legal right to access.

The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) has been monitoring 4,429 federal webpages related to environmental and climate programs and policies. As shown in Figure 6, between January 20 and June 30, 2025, EDGI documented 847 substantive changes across those webpages. Roughly two-thirds (67%) involved reducing information access, including the removal of at least 176 government webpages altogether. EDGI also documented instances of politicized terms being replaced on government webpages, such as changing "climate change" to "future risks" or "extreme weather" on certain EPA and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) webpages. Of the environmental webpages EDGI monitored, most of the changes were related to climate change (44 percent) and environmental justice or equity (25 percent).

There are ongoing public efforts to preserve and restore access to these webpages and tools. But, concurrently, the administration's widespread elimination of government information is happening amid mass firings, including of government employees responsible for ensuring public access to information, and amid efforts to gut scientific expertise, silence scientists, and halt government-funded scientific research. For example, a leading nutrition scientist at the NIH left the agency due to concerns over political interference and suppression of his groundbreaking research on ultraprocessed foods.

One clear and troubling example of the negative effect of the suppression of science-based information concerns the ongoing measles outbreak. This is the worst measles outbreak in over three decades. As of July 8, 2025, there were more than 1,200 confirmed cases nationwide. At least three people have died—two of them children, all unvaccinated for measles. Yet, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the unqualified secretary of HHS—our nation's leading public health agency—has disinvested from vaccine hesitancy research, propped up disproven links between autism and vaccines, pushed out federal scientists, appointed discredited researchers to leadership positions, and promoted unproven treatments that put kids in the hospital. Amid the flurry of disinformation, a ProPublica investigation revealed that political interference prevented the release of a CDC assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas with lower vaccination rates. This is scientific censorship. By suppressing evidence-based information that may promote measles vaccine uptake, Kennedy is able to continue sowing doubt about vaccines, threatening to accelerate current declines in measles vaccination rates among US children. Research shows that at current vaccination rates, the United States could experience 851,300 cases of measles over the next 25 years, but if vaccination rates decline another 10 percent, then we could see more than 11 million cases, highlighting the life-and-death stakes posed by continued erosion of public trust in vaccine science.

The Trump administration's widespread assault on science has included a concentrated attack on anything to do with climate change. The administration has made clear its deep-seated hostility to climate science and intent to roll back climate action to benefit deep-pocketed fossil fuel interests. This anti-climate agenda flies in the face of decades worth of increasingly sobering scientific studies, data, people's real-life experience of catastrophic climate impacts, and mounting economic toll—all of which underscore the urgency of addressing the climate crisis.

President Trump has withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement; thrown the Sixth National Climate Assessment into jeopardy and taken down the US Global Change Research Program's website, which includes all previous National Climate Assessments;  halted US federal scientists' engagement with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; failed to release the annual US Greenhouse Gas Inventory; and stopped updating data on billion-dollar weather and climate disasters.

EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has launched an all-out assault on regulations, guidance, and scientific research designed to protect public health and the environment. Targets of this assault include power plant carbon regulations, greenhouse gas standards for vehicles, oil and gas methane regulations, the social cost of carbon metric (widely accepted as a measure of the monetary costs of climate damages caused by an additional ton of carbon emissions), and mandatory reporting of heat-trapping emissions. President Trump has also worked with Congress to block California's long-standing ability to set stronger air pollution standards under the Clean Air Act.

At President Trump's directive, Zeldin has also initiated a process to "reconsider" EPA's bedrock 2009 Endangerment Finding, thescientific determination that heat-trapping emissions harm human health and welfare. It provides a legal basis for EPA's authority and obligation to set standards to limit global warming pollution from sources such as vehicles, power plants, and oil and gas operations, following from the 2007 US Supreme Court Massachusetts v. EPA decision. The latest climate science is even more compelling and dire, underscoring that climate change is already causing significant harm to people's health and well-being and that those harms will worsen as emissions rise. Weakening or overturning the Endangerment Finding at the behest of fossil fuel interests would recklessly go against established science and is a strategy to evade EPA's responsibility to help limit the dangerous, costly impacts of climate change.

The administration has illegally frozen and attempted to claw back funding for climate and clean energy investments, such as the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, while attempting to boost coal, oil, and gas use under the guise of a spurious "national energy emergency." DOE secretary Chris Wright and Department of Interior secretary Doug Burgum—both with deep fossil fuel industry ties—have aggressively embraced the president's fossil fuel agenda in defiance of the science showing an urgent need to transition to clean energy. Wright has repeatedly attacked clean energy, rolled back energy efficiency standards, overseen mass staff cuts at the agency, and spouted anti-science rhetoric about global warming. Burgum's actions have included expanding oil and gas leases on public lands, rescinding requirements for environmental impact statements, fast-tracking permits for fossil fuel energy, and arbitrarily pausing offshore wind projects.

The administration has also taken actions that will leave communities less prepared and more at risk from worsening climate impacts, including rescinding the science-informed federal flood risk management standard; causing the loss of at least 2,000 experienced FEMA staff through, layoffs, buyouts, and early retirement; eliminating FEMA's Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities and Flood Mitigation Assistance grant programs; disbanding expert advisory councils and installing a politicized FEMA Review Council; politicizing approvals of disaster aid; and threatening to completely shift the burden of disaster response to states and even to abolish FEMA.

NOAA, the nation's foremost climate science agency, has faced reckless firing of staff, budget cuts, and slashed resources for climate research, satellite programs, data, and modeling. Under Department of Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick's watch, the agency's weather forecasting and climate monitoring capabilities are being undermined and many National Weather Service offices are dangerously understaffed—undercutting critical resources that communities, first responders, farmers, mariners, businesses, and local decisionmakers rely on to protect lives, infrastructure, and economic activity. Critical NOAA data and tools are also being discontinued, including snow and ice data products and climate.gov, a free public portal for essential information on climate science and impacts.

These harmful cuts to NOAA and FEMA come even as the nation is facing another summer Danger Season, when communities across the U.S. tend to experience the worst climate-fueled disasters including heatwaves, hurricanes, wildfires, and floods.

Disinformation and lies about climate science do not change the facts: heat-trapping emissions primarily from burning fossil fuels are driving worsening climate impacts. But trying to bury and erode the evidence is one more way the administration is seeking to evade their responsibility to set policies to limit emissions, thus serving the goals of fossil fuel companies. Without urgent action, the US economy and people will face growing costs and suffering, especially those in communities already overburdened by fossil fuel pollution and on the frontlines of climate-fueled disasters.

As shown in Figure 7, the Trump administration has taken numerous actions to undermine or attack climate and clean energy progress, including by slashing agency budgets, staffing and programs and installing anti-science, pro-fossil fuel agency heads. According to the New York Times, in its first 100 days, the Trump administration announced or implemented at least 43 major actions threatening climate, clean energy, and environmental justice policies and investments. The Sabin Center's Climate Backtracker shows that, as of July 2, 2025, the Trump administration has taken 194 actions to scale back or halt climate and clean energy progress. Federal agencies focused on issues related to climate and energy, such as EPA, DOE, NOAA and FEMA, made up the bulk of the focus of these attacks.