Harvard Affiliates Anticipate Uncertain Landscape for Climate Research Funding

As the Trump administration dismantles environmental protections and research, Harvard climate experts are bracing themselves — and their research — for an uncertain road ahead.

Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has repeatedly targeted environmental regulation, withdrawing from the Paris Accords, cutting staff at the Environmental Protection Agency, and even issuing an executive order banning paper straws at federal agencies. In late February, the administration cut funding to any research that mentions the word “climate.”

Andrew Mergen, a visiting assistant clinical professor of environmental law at Harvard Law School, called these workforce cuts “catastrophic.”

“The cuts that the Trump administration is doing to the workforce are indiscriminate. They are not thoughtfully executed. They are not being done with any forethought,” Mergen said. “It’s going to cause a huge problem for government environmental science, for management of public lands.”

Mergen, who worked for the Department of Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division for 33 years as an appellate lawyer, went on to critique the administration’s funding cuts and underscored the importance of litigation in countering these regulatory moves.

“Eliminating any sort of discussion of climate, or making it a disfavored scientific inquiry, is just incredibly counterproductive given how much climate affects our economy, how much weather affects our economy, and how important it is to understand these natural systems,” Mergen said.

“These things — climate change, environmental justice, cumulative impacts — these are words that describe actual things that happen on the ground,” Mergen added. “So at a certain point, there will be litigation which will argue that the administration cannot turn a blind eye to facts.”

J. William Munger, senior research fellow in atmospheric chemistry at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, said he has relied on federal funding from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy for his research since the early 1990s.

The research — which studies the net exchange of carbon dioxide, water, and energy between the atmosphere and forest — is partially funded by an NSF grant set to expire this month.

Munger added that the research also receives funding from the Department of Energy through the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The LBHL is currently working to renew the federal grant, which is set to expire in September.

“So far, I haven’t heard about any layoffs at DOE or cuts to the Biological and Environmental Research program that is part of DOE Office of Science, but that is certainly something to watch,” Munger wrote in an email.

Beyond the legal and scientific implications of Trump’s rollbacks, Mergen also cited the emotional challenges he has experienced first-hand in his role as faculty director of the Emmett Environmental Law & Policy Clinic at HLS.

“The biggest thing that I’ve spent my time on since inauguration is helping people navigate an incredibly cruel, needlessly cruel, deliberately cruel landscape,” he said.

Munger said he “wouldn’t worry” about how the Trump administration’s federal funding freeze would impact his research grant renewal request.

“I can imagine that they might say, ‘Well, we don’t really care about carbon and climate. That’s all a hoax, and we’re not going to fund that,’ but I don’t have anything other than just my own sense of what to be worried about,” he said.

“Certainly, it’s a concern that that’s the kind of thing that could happen, and whether it has or will remains to be seen,” Munger added.

—Staff writer Ava H. Rem can be reached at ava.rem@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @avar3m.

—Staff writer Iris J. Xue can be reached at iris.xue@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @iris_j_xue.