Trump Administration Removes Controversial Climate Reports

The move comes after PPT and the CO2 Coalition letter pointed out flaws in National Climate Assessments to OSTP and OMB.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced recently that it would not be hosting the previous National Climate Assessments (NCA) on its website. The announcement comes in the wake of a letter from Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) and the CO2 Coalition calling on the Trump administration to reevaluate and fix the numerous flaws in the NCAs.

PPT’s and CO2 Coalition’s joint Request for Correction to the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Director Michael Kratsios and Office of Information and Regulatory Analysis (OIRA) acting Administrator Jeffrey Clark highlighted just a sample of the “the many scientific integrity violations that have been found within NCA 5” and its predecessors. Citing President Trump’s Executive Order 14303 on Restoring Gold Standard Science and the Information Quality Act, the letter warned that the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s (USGCRP) “crown jewel” of climate science, “which informs vast swaths of government policy on climate change, is rife with errors, omissions, and misrepresentations for the apparent unscientific purpose of pushing a predetermined narrative.”

Earlier the Trump administration had cut USGCRP funding and staff and canceled a contract with a consultancy USGCRP had outsourced much of the work of the NCA to, but which had been accused of allowing bias to seep into its reports. In addition, the NCA had cited the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters Project (“Billions Project”) — a federal initiative that was the subject of a scientific integrity complaint from PPT in 2024, a complaint NOAA informed PPT that it would investigate. The Trump administration announced earlier this year that NOAA was no longer updating the Billions Project, effectively scuttling it. Now, it appears NASA and other agencies are taking a hard look at the defects of the NCA.

“The NCA was riddled with questionable science based on faulty assumptions,” said PPT Director Michael Chamberlain. “Despite its use of unrealistic and misleading data and analysis, such as the Billions Project and RCP 8.5, which is a misleading worst-case scenario with exaggerated assumptions, it was a key driver of policy across the federal government and elsewhere. We applaud NASA and its colleagues in the federal government for their steps to restore to government science the integrity the American public expects.”

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