Last year, the Trump administration declared war on climate science.
In the first two weeks of Trump’s second term, the administration started scrubbing critical environmental resources and datasets from federal agency websites and withdrew the United States from international organizations dedicated to combating climate change, dismissing them as a “waste of taxpayer dollars.” Trump himself has dismissed climate science as “woke,” while vowing to “drill, baby, drill” for fossil fuels as our planet stands at the edge of a climate disaster.
Nowhere has that regressive agenda been felt more than at NASA. The agency announced in July that thousands of employees had accepted a controversial deferred resignation program, losing roughly 20 percent of its workforce as a result.
In August, the Trump administration instructed NASA employees to come up with plans to terminate two major missions, including the premature destruction of a greenhouse gas-observing space satellite, dubbed Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2), which is still collecting “exceptionally high quality” data while orbiting the Earth.
According to one former NASA staffer, it all adds up to a ringing failure by the agency as the Earth’s climate approaches a devastating point of no return.
In a “plea to NASA administrator Jared Isaacman” posted to LinkedIn, former NASA Earth public engagement lead Jon Mikel Walton argued that the agency needs to continue funding its Earth Science missions, including a fleet of space-based observatories such as OCO-2. (A NASA spokesperson told Futurism in an email that the agency “cannot speculate regarding any programmatic changes” when asked about the future of the spacecraft. The agency is seeking ideas for “partnerships to continue operations and data collection of the Earth science mission OCO-3.”
The fleet helps scientists translate “observation into public value like better storm and flood forecasting, stronger disaster readiness, safer water and food planning, and clearer visibility into climate risk,” he wrote. “This critical public infrastructure saves lives, protects the economy, and keeps the United States ahead.”
“And yet over the past year, budget uncertainty and political pressure have weakened one of the country’s most trusted sources of Earth intelligence,” Walton continued. “Teams were cut, expertise was lost, and NASA’s ability to communicate clearly about climate and environmental risk was silenced — exactly when those risks are accelerating.”
Futurism reached out to NASA for comment on Walton’s plea but has yet to receive a response.
Lawmakers are actively fighting the current administration over what role NASA should play in the coming years, especially when it comes to climate science. Earlier this month, Congress voted to keep NASA’s budget largely intact for the 2026 fiscal year, an eleventh-hour intervention following the Trump administration’s attempts to deal its science division a devastating blow.
“Congress has reaffirmed NASA’s science mission by restoring its funding,” Walton wrote in his plea. “The question now is whether the agency will lead where it matters most: helping the nation — and the world — understand what’s happening to Earth in real time. NASA is uniquely positioned to provide this shared reality: what’s changing, why it’s changing, and what it means for lives, livelihoods, and national resilience.”
Walton called on the agency to “rebuild” its Earth science leadership and “restore its public voice on Earth.”
“Fund [NASA’s Earth Science] fleet,” he wrote. “Protect the teams. Tell the truth.”
The Trump administration’s damaging effects on NASA’s climate efforts are playing out in ways both large and small. Earlier this month, the agency released its yearly report on global surface temperatures, noting that 2025 was even hotter than 2023 — yet failed to make a single mention of climate change, the disastrous effects of burning fossil fuels, greenhouse gas emissions, or the concept of “global warming,” as Agence France-Presse noted.
For an agency dedicated to studying the planet through its science directorate, it’s a damning omission. NASA’s preceding 2024 report was fleshed out, including graphics, video, and quotes from scientists citing the role of climate change. The press release accompanying this year’s report felt like an afterthought, limited to just six paragraphs of surface-level analysis. That’s despite 2025 squarely being one of the hottest years on record.
As NASA continues to feel the brunt of an administration eager to discount the effects of global warming, other experts have chosen to be far less subtle in their call to action.
“The US government is now, like Russia and Saudi Arabia, a petrostate under Trump and Republican rule, and the actions of all of its agencies and departments can be understood in terms of the agenda of the polluters that are running the show,” University of Pennsylvania climatologist Michael Mann told AFP.
“It is therefore entirely unsurprising that NASA administrators are attempting to bury findings of its own agency that conflict with its climate denial agenda,” he added.
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