Authoritarian Trump Has Given Planet Earth a Horrible Year
From the first day, it was clear that this deeply anti-science administration was intent on blatantly furthering a fossil fuel agenda—people’s health and welfare be damned. We knew it would be bad. It was worse.
As we come up on the one-year mark of the second Trump administration, it’s painful to reflect on all that’s been lost on climate and clean energy progress for our nation and the grave consequences for people and the economy. As families across the nation struggle to pay their rising energy bills, the Trump administration’s efforts to gut clean energy projects and boost volatile, risky, and polluting fossil fuels are a threat to health and pocketbooks. And with the world on the brink of breaching 1.5°C of global warming, this administration’s actions to increase US heat-trapping emissions will have profound implications for years to come.
Fair warning, this blogpost covers some pretty grim ground. But stick with me, please. Documenting the harms and injustices perpetuated by this administration now, as they occur, ensures we bear witness and that the hard work that made prior progress possible is not erased. Let’s make sure we don’t forget the important details as we fight to build a better, brighter future beyond this dark time. A healthier, safer, and more equitable future is ours to create, as UCS President Gretchen Goldman says.
Annus horribilis for people in the United States
From Day One, it was clear that this deeply anti-science administration was intent on blatantly furthering a fossil fuel agenda—people’s health and welfare be damned. President Trump has assembled around him an extremely unqualified, obsequious cabinet and set of advisors, most of whom have no dedication to the public interest and are instead devoted to doing his every bidding.
This increasingly authoritarian regime has operated with impunity to tear up climate and clean energy policies, lie about the scientific realities of climate change and the facts on renewable energy, and ram through measures to boost fossil fuels and the profits of polluters. They have attacked the federal scientific enterprise built up over decades through taxpayer investments, fired or forced out agency experts, and cut funding for critical science. And a compliant Congress has enabled this destructive agenda, including by rubberstamping some of the President’s illegal actions and by failing to exercise its constitutional powers to check his tyrannical power grabs. The passage of the OBBBA, with its multiple provisions directly aimed at undermining clean energy—including wind, solar, batteries, grid infrastructure, and energy efficiency—at the President’s behest was a particularly egregious example of this.
The Sabin Center’s Climate Backtracker shows that, as of January 14, 2026, the Trump administration has taken nearly 300 actions to scale back or halt climate and clean energy progress. UCS’s six-month report on the Trump administration summarized many of the attacks on science and democracy as of July 2025. Many of these actions were previewed in the Project 2025 manifesto, but the magnitude of the harms, and the speed and intensity of the attacks, are shocking, and the impacts have been mounting.
Early destructive actions were taken by DOGE, spearheaded by Elon Musk, taking a hatchet to federal agencies tasked with protecting the public interest and advancing science and innovation. Subsequently, Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025, has taken a personal and vicious role in many of these attacks (see here and here, for example).
And unfortunately, the full weight of the impacts on people and our economy are only going to become clearer this year, as words and cuts are translated into lived realities for communities across the country. At the same time, many of the administration’s unlawful actions are being challenged in court, and it has lost many of these cases, putting some brakes on some of its worst excesses.
Before diving further into details, it’s important to note two key themes: The Trump administration’s destructive actions are a direct threat to our health, our economic well-being, and to our nation’s ability to build a thriving, fair, innovative economy. These actions demonstrate an utterly corrupt government hell-bent on prioritizing the interests of polluters and billionaires over the needs of ordinary people.
While far from exhaustive, here are some of the major assaults on climate and clean energy from the Trump administration that we’ve seen in the last year:
1. Attacking agencies and organizations engaged in life-saving climate science research, data collection and monitoring
This has included threats to dismantle NOAA and NSF-NCAR; disbanding the author team for the sixth National Climate Assessment; taking down the US Global Change Research Program’s website, which includes all previous National Climate Assessments; and halting US federal scientists’ engagement with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 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 have been dangerously understaffed—undercutting critical resources that communities, first responders, farmers, mariners, businesses, and local decisionmakers rely on to protect lives, infrastructure, and economic activity. It’s crucial that the forthcoming Congressional appropriations process rejects the Trump administration’s budget proposals and restores healthy funding levels for federal science agencies.
2. Clawing back renewable energy funding and attacking clean energy projects
The administration has illegally frozen and clawed back billions in funding for climate and cutting-edge clean energy investments, including Department of Energy (DOE) grants and the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. These actions have been challenged in court, and just this week a court has ruled that the Trump administration’s cancellation of some grants based on which states grantees are in violates the law.
DOE Secretary Chris Wright has repeatedly attacked clean energy, rolled back energy efficiency standards, overseen mass staff cuts at the agency, and renamed the world-renowned National Renewable Energy Laboratory to strike “renewable energy” from its name.
In addition to the major harms to clean energy inflicted by the OBBBA, the administration has also repeatedly and arbitrarily intervened in the leasing and permitting of a huge range of renewable energy projects, including pausing offshore wind, onshore wind, and solar projects. Wind and solar developers have just sued the Department of the Interior and the Army Corps of Engineers for “pursuing a concerted and illegal strategy to choke the ability of private developers’ ability to build new and much-needed energy generation projects.” Numerous attacks have been lobbed at offshore wind projects—including projects that were nearly completed—most recently by citing bogus “national security” considerations. The administration just suffered a major setback in a case brought by Revolution Wind, a project of Ørsted, a Danish offshore wind developer. These attacks on renewable energy have been accompanied by a raft of disinformation spouted by the President and his administration, contrary to the facts about the tremendous economic and health benefits of renewable energy, including solar and wind.
3. Gutting pollution standards and boosting fossil fuels
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Lee Zeldin has launched an all-out assault on regulations, guidance, and scientific research aimed at protecting public health and the environment. This has included weakening, rescinding, or delaying EPA regulations to limit heat-trapping pollution from power plants, vehicles and the oil and gas industry, as well as giving exemptions to polluters causing toxic air pollution from coal-fired power plants and other industrial sources.
The agency is also in the final stages of a process to overturn the science-based Endangerment Finding, a bedrock legal determination establishing the health-harming impacts of heat-trapping emissions. And in a major departure from precedent and long-standing best practice, EPA is also moving away from quantifying the public health impacts— including lives lost or saved—associated with agency rulemakings, debuting this egregious practice in a just-released rule for NOx pollution standards for new gas turbines. This alarming action is a complete capitulation to polluter interests and upends the agency’s mission to protect public health and the environment.
They’ve also taken unprecedented steps to cut the public out of the process of weighing in by eliminating the customary notice-and-comment period for regulations they arbitrarily designate ‘unlawful,’ and a sweeping executive order essentially allows agencies to wipe off whatever regulations they want to—as well as enforcement of those regulations in the time between.
The administration has also launched multiple direct attempts 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. Burgum’s actions have included expanding oil and gas leases on public lands, rescinding requirements for environmental impact statements, and fast-tracking permits for fossil fuel energy, all while repeatedly interfering to stop deployment of renewables. The administration’s latest shocking move in this vein is its imperial and illegal grab for Venezuelan oil.
4. Attacking FEMA’s disaster response capabilities and investments in climate resilience
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has overseen the firing and forcing out of more than 20 percent of FEMA’s staff already, with further steep cuts to FEMA’s “Cadre of On-Call Response/Recovery Employees” (CORE) expected imminently. At various points last year, Secretary Noem and President Trump went as far as calling for FEMA’s abolition! The agency has faced unending turmoil and dysfunction, with a series of unqualified acting chiefs quitting or being fired only to be replaced by yet another poor choice. This chaos led to major gaps in responding to disasters like the Texas flash flood last year. As the GAO points out, staffing shortages at FEMA have serious consequences for the agency’s ability to do its job to help communities hit by disasters.
The Trump administration also illegally cancelled FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program grants for states, which a coalition of twenty states took the administration to court over, and recently won their lawsuit. The Trump administration has 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, disbanding expert advisory councils, and politicizing and delaying disaster aid for states. My colleague Shana Udvardy has been carefully tracking the attacks on FEMA, including the recent last-minute cancellation of a recent FEMA Review Council meeting where they were supposed to release a report with recommendations, which has been under threat of interference from Secretary Noem.
5. Taking down or altering climate-related websites and datasets
This includes taking down the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) website and all the previous National Climate Assessments; taking down climate.gov, a free public portal for essential information on climate science and impacts (some of the information is now being curated at climate.us); removing climate science information from the EPA website; proposing to discontinue the GHG Reporting Program and datasets (like NOAA’s billion-dollar weather and climate-related disasters dataset, and its snow and ice data products); and failing to release the EPA’s Annual GHG Inventory for the United States (which the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) successfully retrieved via a FOIA filing).
6. Lying about the facts on climate science
The most egregious example of this is the sham DOE “climate” report, which weaponized disinformation and uncertainty to downplay the risks of climate change and was invoked by EPA as part of its motivation for proposing to overturn the Endangerment Finding. This mirrors a classic strategy of employing disinformation and deception long practiced by the fossil fuel industry, now dangerously being adopted by the US government.
The Environmental Defense Fund and UCS have filed a lawsuit against the administration citing its violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) in the secret, illegal preparation of this report by five handpicked climate contrarians forming the Climate Working Group (CWG). The court has held that the CWG was an advisory committee subject to FACA and had ordered the administration to release all records related to its work. Other examples of this strategy include zeroing out the social cost of carbon (widely used as a measure of the monetary costs of climate damages caused by an additional ton of carbon emissions), directly ignoring the steep and mounting costs of climate change driven by fossil fuel emissions.
7. Withdrawing from international climate agreements and organizations
The most notable examples include withdrawing the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Paris Agreement. The administration also single-handedly prevented the adoption of a major global agreement on reducing emissions from shipping, negotiated in the International Maritime Organization (IMO). Over 100 nations were on the verge of signing, but using bullying tactics—including direct threats to other nations—the administration succeeded in blocking and delaying this agreement.
Together, these actions underscore that this authoritarian, anti-science administration is determined to sacrifice people’s well-being and destabilize global cooperation. But forward-looking US states and the rest of the world recognize that devastating and costly climate impacts are mounting rapidly, and collective global action remains the only viable path to secure a livable future for our children and grandchildren. Withdrawal from global climate agreements and venues will only serve to further isolate the United States and diminish its standing in the world following a spate of deplorable actions that have already sent our nation’s credibility plummeting, jeopardized ties with some of our closest historical allies, and made the world far more unsafe.
As important as these individual attacks are, it’s crucial to also see the administration’s destructive strategy: They are trying to bury the evidence on climate change to advance a pro-fossil fuel agenda that delivers huge profits for a select few while the rest of us suffer the health and economic costs. And we can’t let them because the stakes are too high, for people today and for future generations. The stakes are especially dire for communities that have long been marginalized and discriminated against, those that bear the brunt of health-harming pollution and climate impacts and lack access to affordable clean energy and climate-resilient homes, here in the United States and around the world.
Looking back and fighting for a brighter future
Why look back on such a painful year? Because it’s a way to acknowledge and honor the people who were directly and harshly affected by the actions of this administration, including federal government scientists and frontline communities. Because remembering our shared history is how we build solidarity for the inevitable fights ahead. Because adversity teaches lessons. Because I believe the seeds of the destruction of this administration’s ill-conceived policies lie in their cruel overreach. Because we can take courage and inspiration from all the ways people across the nation showed up for our democracy, for science, for their communities.
This year has also brought extraordinary efforts to expose and fight back against the worst excesses of this unhinged administration. UCS has fought alongside many others by taking the Trump administration to court; advocating with members of Congress to stand up to the administration; filing technical comments with agencies; shining a light on the latest climate science and facts about clean energy; galvanizing the scientific community to get organized, join sign-on letters and call their elected representatives; uplifting the work of environmental justice experts; securing wins in states; joining nationwide demonstrations; and using our voice loudly in every venue we can to speak truth to power.
And as we face down another tough year under the anti-science, authoritarian Trump administration, we’re fired up to keep up the fight for science and for our democracy. We hope you’ll join us—because despite it all, that future is ours to build.
The false ad placed by The Yes Men in The Maritime Executive.