Prominent US climate scientists have told the Guardian that the Trump administration is holding up research funding as their projects undergo an unprecedented political review by the high-school football teammate of the US interior secretary.
The US interior department administers over $5.5bn in funding to external organizations, mostly for research, conservation and land acquisition. At the beginning of 2018, interior secretary Ryan Zinke instated a new requirement that scientific funding above $50,000 must undergo an additional review to ensure expenditures “better align with the administration’s priorities”.
Zinke has signaled that climate change is not one of those priorities: this week, he told Breitbart News that “environmental terrorist groups” were responsible for the ongoing wildfires in northern California and, ignoring scientific research on the issue, dismissed the role of climate change.
Steve Howke, one of Zinke’s high-school football teammates, oversees this review. Howke’s highest degree is a bachelor’s in business administration. Until Zinke appointed him as an interior department senior adviser to the acting assistant secretary of policy, management and budget, Howke had spent his entire career working in credit unions.
The department, which manages a significant portion of the US landmass, has attributed the slower pace of funding approval to efforts to reduce “waste, fraud and abuse”. Yet the policy, which has been in place for six months, is already hindering some research. One of the largest programs affected is the Climate Adaptation Science Centers, a network of eight regionally focused research centers located at “host” universities across the country.
“I think there is a real suspicion about what science is being done, and if you were going to design a way to bog things down so not much could happen, you might do it like this,” said a scientist affiliated with one of the centers who asked to remain anonymous owing to the perceived risks of speaking out. “We have voiced the challenges we have hiring staff, hiring students, with the science we can do, but I think that we’re not a priority audience.”
Initially authorized by Congress during the Bush administration, the centers have been widely viewed as a success and received strong bipartisan support.
“We really are just trying to do the best science that we can,” said Renee McPherson, a University of Oklahoma environmental researcher who is head of the center focusing on the…
