WASHINGTON — During the first Trump administration, Virginia Burkett, a senior government scientist, felt like she had a target on her back.
She fought attempts by Trump officials to eliminate climate research programs while also rejecting their requests that she alter the nation’s premiere report on how global warming affects every region of the country.
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But Burkett said she paid a price. In a whistleblower complaint, she said the Trump administration retaliated by demoting her and removing her as chair of the committee overseeing the report.
Her experience was part of a broad assault on science across the federal government during the first Trump administration. Other scientists were also demoted or reassigned, projects were disrupted, and scientists were pressured to delete their research or were blocked from publicizing it. In the end, hundreds of scientists and experts in environmental policy left the government.
But Burkett was reinstated to a senior position by the Biden administration and has remained in federal service, along with thousands of others. And with Donald Trump about to return to the White House, they have pushed for new policies and procedures to guard against political interference.
“I’m most concerned about protecting future scientists from the harms that I faced,” she said, echoing the views of about two dozen current and former government scientists and policy officials interviewed for this article.
“A lot of people in federal science organizations are nervous,” said Mark Sogge, a former research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who retired in 2021 and keeps in touch with former colleagues. “But I have not heard of people looking to retire in droves. A lot of them are saying, ‘I’ve got the experience to help weather this.’”
One senior government official, who works in science and spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation by the Trump administration, said career employees had started building a firewall four years ago. “We’ve been preparing since Day 1” of the Biden administration to better protect science and scientists, the official said.
Steps taken include the creation and expansion of scientific integrity policies at many federal agencies that detail how government scientists should conduct and publish research, note what to do if political appointees try to block that work, and outline the penalties for violations. Scientific integrity officers have been newly installed at several agencies to enforce the policies. And new union contracts carry consequences for political appointees who retaliate against scientists for following the policies.
The goal is to shine a bright public spotlight on the work of government scientists and to guard against any efforts to suppress or manipulate it.
The Trump transition team characterized the efforts as preemptively blocking the incoming president’s ability to enact his policies.
“Biden is going against the will of the American people by doing everything he can to make it harder for President Trump to implement his agenda that they overwhelmingly voted for,” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the transition. “Despite these setbacks, President Trump will quickly deliver on the promises he made when he returns to the White House next week.”
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee agree and are seeking emails and other communications among top officials at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services.
“It is likely that the goal of these scientific integrity efforts is less to ensure the best science is considered when making policy decisions and more to buttress support for and entrench far-left progressive policies in the administrative state,” wrote Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., who leads the committee, in requests for the documents.
Trump, who has called the established science of human-caused global warming a hoax, has promised to erase limits on tailpipe and smokestack pollution. His allies say that soon after he is sworn in, he’ll strip the phrases “climate change” and “clean energy” from every agency website. People working on his transition have prepared a slate of executive orders to reorient the government away from climate change, including withdrawing the United States from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, signed by nearly every country.
Trump’s allies are also discussing moving the EPA headquarters and the agency’s 7,000 workers out of Washington. During his first term, the administration moved the Bureau of Land Management to Colorado and relocated two scientific research arms of the Department of Agriculture to Kansas, leading to an exodus of employees.
During the Obama administration, the White House directed government agencies to create “scientific integrity policies,” laying out standard practices and processes for government scientists to follow. President Joe Biden built on that, instructing agencies to expand and strengthen the policies to “ban improper political interference” and “prevent the suppression or distortion of scientific or technological findings, data, information, conclusions, or technical results.”
The Biden White House also directed every Cabinet agency to designate a chief science officer and scientific integrity officials to enforce the policies. There were fewer than a dozen scientific integrity officials at the end of the first Trump administration. Today, there are more than 30. The White House directive requires that these officials be career civil servants, not political appointees.
A 2023 memorandum from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy defined scientific integrity to mean that research is peer-reviewed, that scientists must be able to openly express dissent without fear of retaliation, and that violations of scientific integrity policies should be treated as seriously as violations of government ethics rules — and come with consequences.
“It was like, OK, folks, let’s strengthen these guardrails,” said Marijke van Heeswijk, a former senior scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, who retired in 2020 but stays in touch with former colleagues. “Up until recently, we had been pretty naive. These rules were put in place to make explicit what before had been understood, and now it is put down in black and white.”
White House officials concede that nothing would stop future administrations from erasing or disregarding those policies.
“Any president can undo any previous president’s memorandum,” said Kei Koizumi, principal deputy director for policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “But we see this as a public compact between the federal government and the American people.”
Some agencies redesigned the system for reporting political interference in scientific work. At the U.S. Geological Survey, scientists are to report suspected misconduct to the agency’s inspector general, an independent watchdog, rather than to senior agency officials, who are usually appointed by the president.
“The inspector generals have provided a much better avenue for serious inquiries into scientific integrity violations because they actually have investigatory powers, and they’re not afraid to take on political leaders,” said Tim Whitehouse, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit group that defends the rights of civil servants.
The Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group, sent a letter signed by 2,405 scientists to Congress asking members to “stand up against attempts to politicize or eliminate scientific roles, agencies, and federal research that protect our health, environment, and our communities.”
Rep. Paul Tonko, D-N.Y. and a member of the House Science Committee, plans to introduce legislation to require government agencies to maintain and enforce scientific integrity policies. “The scientific integrity policies are helpful, but now that we have a Trump repeat coming forward, we need the teeth of the law,” Tonko said in an interview.
But the prospects for passage seem dim in the current Republican-majority Congress.
Employees at some agencies have used labor contracts to lock in new protections. A new union contract for employees at the Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, which was relocated to Kansas from Washington during the first Trump term, says that scientific findings cannot be altered by managers, nonscientists or public relations staff and can be freely communicated outside the agency without political influence.
At the National Institutes of Health, where many employees were distressed by the way the Trump administration understated the risks of COVID early in the pandemic, a union contract finalized this month says that any changes to the scientific integrity policy must be approved by union negotiators.
At the EPA, a union contract finalized in June 2024 allows employees to file a grievance if they have experienced retaliation for reporting scientific misconduct. It says any employee who faces retaliation for adhering to the policy can seek a legally binding decision from an independent arbiter.
“Under the prior Trump administration, we were in an extremely vulnerable position,” said Marie Owens Powell, president of the EPA employees union. “This is one of the lessons we learned. This scientific integrity article creates new protections for scientists.”
Another resource is a nonprofit organization, the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, that offers free legal counsel to climate scientists.
In December, the group offered packed workshops at the annual conference of the American Geophysical Union, a gathering in Washington of about 25,000 earth and space scientists from around the world.
“Compared to the first Trump administration, government scientists are now more comfortable coming to us and using our legal assistance, taking legal action,” said Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the group. “They are less afraid of rocking the boat.”
Some employees are coming up with creative survival strategies.
In a corner of the EPA’s large headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington is the National Environmental Museum, which opened last year. Joanne Amorosi, the project manager, pointed to the top of a display celebrating Trump in large letters for signing a 2020 law that eliminates a sliver of greenhouse pollution.
At the bottom of that display, in smaller letters, it notes that Biden, who has done more than any president to combat climate change, designated a task force to promote climate change in federal agencies.
Amorosi noted the incongruity but added, “If he sees his name there, maybe he will be more inclined to keep it as it is.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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