At the US Environmental Protection Agency, scientists say proposed cuts will gut research. Credit: Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty
For 30 years, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has conducted controlled air-pollution studies at a state-of-the-art facility at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The facility is equipped to test numerous airborne pollutants, including ozone, diesel, wildfire smoke and chlorine. Data collected in its chambers have been pivotal to establishing stricter air-quality standards for deadly pollutants, and have been instrumental in protecting the health of people in the United States.
However, in February, shortly after US President Donald Trump took office, the EPA — which is charged with protecting the nation’s environment and its people’s health — notified the university that it would not be renewing its lease. By May, research had ceased. “There are no other places with the capability of doing these studies on the wide range of pollutants that the Chapel Hill facility does,” says Robert Devlin, a former EPA researcher who worked at the facility until recently. In August, after almost 40 years at the agency, Devlin retired when his appointment was not renewed.
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The exposure laboratory was under the purview of the EPA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD), which pursued a broad swathe of independent research into air and water quality, toxicology, homeland security and waste management. It has been hit particularly hard by cuts the Trump administration has made to federal agency science. Internal documents suggest that lay-offs and voluntary early-retirement programmes have already reduced ORD’s 1,600-person staff by one-third.
The remnants of ORD are expected to be folded into a new Office of Applied Science and Environmental Solutions (OASES) that reports directly to the EPA administrator, a presidential appointee. The reorganization has spooked agency scientists, who fear that research priorities might end up being set according to a political agenda. “One value that the EPA’s ORD provided was independent scientific review of proposed regulatory actions,” says former EPA toxicologist George Woodall, who retired in September after receiving a termination notice.
In addition to cuts at the EPA, the administration has already cut or proposed cutting more than US$50 billion in research funding across the nation’s science agencies, with research on climate, ecosystems, renewable energy and health disparities particularly affected. Although the administration characterizes the cuts and reorganizations of federal research programmes as realigning them with the president’s priorities, critics say the aim is to remove environmental and health protections and other regulatory safeguards. The cuts to EPA staffing are “the biggest blow that agency has ever had”, says Christopher Sellers at Stony Brook University in New York, who interviews EPA scientists for the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a watchdog group for US federal environmental data.
“It’s not just EPA. Science is being destroyed across many agencies,” says a senior ORD official who was put on administrative leave in June. It remains to be seen whether Congress will pass Trump’s proposed budget request for 2026.
Meanwhile, a US government shutdown has been in place since 1 October, after lawmakers failed to agree on a funding bill for the current fiscal year. As Nature went to press, the shutdown had stretched into its fifth week, with no end in sight. Some 4,000 federal agency workers have been laid off since it began, with plans to reach around 10,000, according to the Office of Management and Budget.
Demonstrators protest against US President Donald Trump’s plans to slash NASA’s budget.Credit: Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty
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