PRESS

Our staff attorney Rachael Lyle says “a problem on the scale of climate change can never be solved without sustained public demand for forward-thinking policies – and that demand starts at the grassroots level.”

To diminish the EPA’s ability to restrict emissions from power plants at a time when the world is being battered by floods, fires, and droughts, is nothing short of reckless.

Drawing on more than four years of tracker data-from Trump's election to Biden's inauguration-we show that the Trump presidency fundamentally changed how federal government agencies perform, use, and communicate scientific research.

"While this report does a good job of setting the stage, there is also a lot more that needs to be done to actually guarantee protections for federal science,” says Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund.

We documented 328 anti-science actions taken by the Trump administration. Biden has only reversed or reconsidered nine of them.

Concerns about political interference have plagued many US administrations, says Lauren Kurtz, the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund’s executive director.

Lauren Kurtz thought the report downplayed some transgressions during the Trump years. She noted that EPA’s scientific integrity policy was used to defend unscientific claims like former Administrator Scott Pruitt’s statement that carbon dioxide was “not a primary contributor to global warming.”

“This is a situation where the devil is truly in the details, and the lack of specificity is frustrating,” says executive director Lauren Kurtz regarding the consequences for those who violate scientific integrity policies.

Our Silencing Science Tracker and staff attorney August Wilson quoted in this Nature article about getting the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to adopt much-needed, stronger protections for federal science.

In this opinion piece in Scientific American, CSLDF director Lauren Kurtz and Dana Gold discuss the extent of political interference in science -- not just under the Trump admin -- and what to do about it.

This podcast episode features our co-founder and chair Scott Mandia, who speaks about the nature of hurricanes, the role of climate change in relation to extreme weather events and why the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund was created to protect the science community.

Lauren Kurtz, CSLDF's director, was quoted in E&E News following an EPA meeting on agency scientific integrity issues under Trump, and how to improve future protections for science.