100,000 federal science agency jobs and funding for weather and ocean monitoring are falling victim to current US policy, with experts warning that the US is losing its global lead in climate research. But a group of intrepid former government employees have secured funding they say will help the country navigate the realities of a warming world.
Created by former employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate.gov, Climate.US aims to restore access to “accurate, accessible, and scientifically rigorous” climate information, raise awareness about heat waves, hurricanes, sea level rise and more.
Staff began accessing information from the old website after the project fell victim to project termination and funding cuts soon after President Donald Trump – who has called climate change a scam and hoax – takes office for a second term in early 2025.
Climate.gov, which had approximately 15 million page views in 2024 and growing annually, was redirected to a separate NOAA site controlled by political appointees from an administration hostile to climate action.
“Reliable climate information should not disappear when politics changes,” said Rebecca Lindsay, managing director of Climate.US. Lindsay told DW that the popularity of the old climate.gov site shows that “people in America want unbiased, trustworthy information about climate. They’re interested in it. They’re concerned about it.”
Climate.US goes online for the first time in 2025 to pull information from old government website but new iteration It will now begin to provide additional content including news, stories, expert blogs, data visualizations, reports on climate indicators and classroom resources. Scientists will volunteer to check the content for accuracy, and the site is being supported by thousands of small donations from across the US and around the world.
“It’s gratifying to have this reach from other countries because I know other countries have every right to think, OK, America, you shot yourself in the foot,” said Lindsey, who lost her job at Climate.gov in February 2025.
The relaunch is part of a broader fight to preserve access to scientific data and knowledge, as the Trump administration cuts funding for public science.
The cuts – which also include a proposed $1.6 billion (€1.464 billion) cut from NOAA in the next federal budget – risk the US losing “hundreds of years of collective expertise in different fields” and are “a threat to innovation”, warned Jules Barbati-Dages of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
What’s the big deal if funding and jobs in the federal workforce are cut?
The U.S. federal workforce has shrunk by about 12% under Trump, but about 40% of those losses came from science agencies, according to Partnership for Public Service. Federal science agencies cut about 118,000 employees in the 18 months between September 2024 and February 2026, with grant money for environmental research and innovation – which includes monitoring how chemicals and heat harm human health – a drop of 79%.
The impact is being felt in communities where contracts have been canceled and research sites have been abruptly closed, Lardy said, making those populations more vulnerable to polluted water and air, extreme weather and insect-borne infectious diseases, the range of which is increasing as temperatures rise.
“It clearly also has an impact on communities and their long-term health and well-being,” he said.
Nearly 10,000 of those leaving the government workforce in 2025 had PhDs in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) or health fields.
“When I think about sitting in the dentist’s chair or getting on a plane, I want a specialist to do their job and do it well, right?” “The same is true with the thousands of experts across the federal government who are experts in environmental toxics, epidemiology and meteorology. We need experts in these positions to help keep us safe,” Barbati-Dajes said.
Where are the federal employees and scientists going?
Rebecca Lindsay served as editor of Climate.gov for more than a decade before she was fired. The first thing he was worried about was losing his health insurance, which is tied to a person’s job in the US. Then the question came, what to do next, retire early or go to some other work.
“It was extremely stressful and scary and you can multiply that by thousands of stories from across the government,” he told DW. Ultimately, Lindsay and others decided to create Climate.US because the work felt like a “business.”
He said, “We felt it really mattered to the country and the public. And we felt proud to be involved.”
But he is “deeply concerned” about the impact on young scientists. “There is some science that only the government does – regulating the nuclear industry, protecting fisheries and human communities,” he said.
Lindsay said, “This is not the kind of thing the private sector would ever do, OK? They’re not going to make money from it.” “What happens when young people say, I can’t trust that if I study this thing, that I can work for the government and get a job in this field?”
The Partnership for Public Service has found that some former federal scientists are unemployed, while others have moved into local or state government or other organizations – and some are considering leaving the country altogether. The Nature poll found that 75% of 1,600 American scientists said they were considering moving abroad for work.
“Brain drain is a real concern,” said Lardy, whose parents were lifelong federal employees. “We’re particularly hearing reports of scientists moving to Canada or China or the EU and that’s clearly worrisome when it comes to America’s ability to be a leader in science.”
There has been some pushing and shoving. Federal lawmakers rejected deep cuts to funding to science agencies at the beginning of the year, and the administration was recently forced to reverse a decision to eliminate the deep-sea monitoring system. But even when the decisions are overturned, Lardy warned, “it will take generations to repair the damage that has been done” and “to convince young people that government is a viable and attractive option for building their careers.”
Edited by: Tamsin Walker