Physicist Ronald Koopman appeared at a Southern California Air District meeting in 2018 to talk about what seemed like an arcane scientific topic: hydrofluoric acid dispersion and water mitigation testing.
Hydrofluoric acid, also known as hydrogen fluoride or HF, is used to manufacture a range of materials, including refrigerants, gasoline, fluorine-based pesticides and fluoropolymers like those used to make Teflon. It’s also one of the most corrosive and dangerous chemicals known. Koopman conducted experiments with the chemical in the 1980s that warned about the potential of deadly accidents at facilities that use the hazardous materials.
With the Trump administration poised to roll back rules intended to protect workers and communities from catastrophic industrial chemical releases, and a new analysis showing rising rates of chemical accidents, Koopman’s presentation on highly hazardous materials has taken on a new urgency.
Over decades, researchers in the US government and programs it sponsored built up a tremendous number of climate resources, from comprehensive analyses to massive datasets to basic explainers meant to inform the public. And people within the government built the climate.gov website to make it all accessible. But if you try to navigate there today, you get redirected to the climate page of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and are greeted with the following message:
In compliance with Executive Order 14303 (“Restoring Gold Standard Science”), the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s June 23, 2025 Memorandum (“Agency Guidance for Implementing Gold Standard Science in the Conduct & Management of Scientific Activities”), 15 USC § 2904 (“National Climate Program”), 15 USC § 2934 (“National Global Change Research Plan”), and 33 USC § 893a (“NOAA Ocean and Atmospheric Science Education Programs”), you have been redirected to NOAA.gov. Future research products previously housed under Climate.gov will be available at NOAA.gov/climate and its affiliate websites.
Climate.gov was essentially gone, and the team that deleted implied that it happened because climate research somehow failed to uphold what the administration was calling "gold standard science."
But the people who put together climate.gov didn't go away. While the government didn't hesitate to delete inconvenient climate information, dedicated volunteers outside the government managed to preserve copies of much of the material, which the federal government is prohibited from copyrighting. The volunteers and former climate.gov admins got together and launched climate.us. On Tuesday, the team announced that it had completed the project to restore everything lost when climate.gov shut down.
WALLOPS ISLAND, Virginia—Just 10 months ago, NASA asked three companies if they could do something nobody had done before. Could they build and launch a satellite to save a $500 million astronomy mission at risk of crashing back to Earth? What's more, could they do it in less than a year on a tight budget?
Katalyst Space Technologies, a startup founded in 2020, presented the most compelling solution. "They came back with a response that was technically and programmatically plausible, and then we were like, 'Yeah, let’s do it,'" said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division.
That was in August of last year. In September, NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract to build, test, and launch a small satellite to chase down Swift and latch onto it with three robotic arms. Then, Katalyst's Link servicing spacecraft will boost Swift's orbit back to a safe operating altitude, allowing it to resume scientific observations. Easier said than done.
Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.
The Trump administration’s National Science Foundation (NSF) has begun dismantling the infrastructure of a $368 million deep-ocean observing program critical to monitoring marine ecosystems, global currents, marine heat waves, and more, according to a 21 May announcement.
The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), funded by the NSF, has been collecting long-term oceanographic data at multiple deep-ocean sites since 2016. The information about ocean temperature, chemistry, currents, biological conditions, and more is used by scientists to understand a multitude of marine research questions including the activity of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a critical ocean current.
“I worry that … we’ll be losing this enormously valuable site where we could really contextualize and detect these changes going forward.”
“There’s a real danger that we lose the ability to keep looking for long-term changes [in the ocean]” as climate change alters Earth systems, said Hilary Palevsky, a marine biogeochemist who has used OOI data for a decade to study how the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide. “I worry that … we’ll be losing this enormously valuable site where we could really contextualize and detect these changes going forward.”
The NSF plans to remove all in-water arrays and infrastructure—including hundreds of deep-sea instruments—from four of the five currently-operating sites within the project: the Global Station Papa Array (in the Gulf of Alaska), Coastal Endurance Array (off the coasts of Oregon and Washington), Global Irminger Sea Array (southeast of Greenland), and Coastal Pioneer Array (off the coast of North Carolina). The removal is expected to occur over the next 15 months, though the process has already begun at the Endurance Array.
The National Science Foundation’s planned descoping of the Ocean Observatories Initiative will include dismantling four of the five currently operating arrays of equipment. Credit: NSF/OOI
The Trump administration attempted previously to downscale OOI operations, proposing to cut its funding in 2025 and 2026, though Congress never approved the cuts.
The administration’s decision to dismantle the arrays “aligns with NSF’s wider strategy to have a nimbler approach to prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies as well as a deliberate approach to smart life cycle management within its portfolio of research infrastructure,” Michael England, an NSF spokesman, told the New York Times.
A Dearth of Data
As each array is dismantled, data streams will end, though all previously collected data from OOI networks will remain accessible, Jim Edson, principal investigator for the OOI, wrote in a letter to the oceanographic community.
Palevsky said there’s “a lot of real concern” among the oceanographic community that the Endurance Array is being dismantled just as an intense El Niño event—and associated marine heat wave—is expected this summer. “It would be especially important to be able to document the effect that [El Niño] is having on coastal physical circulation and ecosystems,” she said.
“We encourage the community to use the ten-plus years of OOI data by including it in proposals, publications, presentations, and conversations with colleagues. Continued engagement demonstrates the scientific impact and wide-ranging applications enabled by the OOI and its data, underscoring its importance as a resource for the oceanographic community,” the 21 May announcement stated.
There are other sources of data that researchers like Palevsky can use. But oceanographic research often requires stitching together different data sets, including OOI observations, satellite observations and observations from the U.S. research fleet. Many of these other sources of data are also facing uncertain futures.
Palevsky also worries about the loss of expertise that will occur as the program scales down. Installing these deep-sea observing networks was a huge achievement for U.S. science that will not be easy to replicate, she said. “If, in five years, we as a community decide we want to again be able to deploy this kind of complicated infrastructure in places that have really difficult oceanographic conditions … it’s going to be a lot of reinventing the wheel to figure out how to put things out again.”
“The complete cessation without community input or a community conversation about what’s going to happen to all this equipment and what’s going to happen with all of the expertise,” she said, “feels like a huge loss.”
These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org.
Trump's reign feels like it is in the rape and pillage phase, with a scorched earth policy to prevent anyone coming after him. Anyone like humanity, our children and grandchildren, any species that isn't Trump.
Last August, the Trump administration issued an executive order intended to fundamentally alter how grant funding is handled by the US government. Under the system that had made the US a scientific superpower, peer reviewers rated the scientific quality and feasibility of grant applications, and subject-matter experts within the funding agencies used these ratings to determine which grants got funded. Under the proposed rules, political appointees would have the final say, and they were specifically instructed not to "routinely defer" to peer reviewers.
In the interim, the administration has lost many court cases because it turns out that issuing executive orders doesn't circumvent legal requirements, and the orders can be vacated if they lack strong justification. To avoid that same fate, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has decided to merge the executive order with other administration priorities and send it through the formal federal rulemaking process.
The result is a horror show for US science research. Not only is peer review made a secondary consideration, but the new rules would allow any federal agency to cancel any grant at any time based on the vague assertion that it isn't in the "national interest." The document would also ban any grants on a number of culture war topics, limit international collaborations, and block spending on things like publishing papers and attending conferences.
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