Trump officials shut off funding for climate adaptation centers

The potential shuttering of the South Central, Northeast and Pacific Islands centers, which collectively cover about one-third of the U.S. population and are funded under the Interior Department, would hamper projects aimed to help people, wildlife, land and water adapt to a changing climate locally. Their demise is unconnected to a possible federal shutdown: Instead, employees say, Interior Department officials have not approved paperwork that would help fund them for another five years.

“We’re not willing to just drop everything and walk away,” said Bethany Bradley, the co-director of the Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center and a University of Massachusetts professor. “But the reality is we can’t do this for free and pay our [research] students nothing.”

In recent weeks, federal workers across all adaptation centers have also been unable to spend money on traveling, publishing papers or funding new projects without approval.

The Washington Post spoke with 10 people who confirmed the funding issues and ongoing repercussions. Some USGS employees spoke on the condition of anonymity because they said they feared retaliation.

For more than a decade, researchers at the nine centers have studied how to protect the nation’s resources on a warming planet, receiving bipartisan support from many lawmakers and supporting hunting and fishing communities, water and transportation agency officials, and tribes.

The South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center confirmed last week that it and the two other centers were on the brink of losing federal backing. The center said in an announcement on its website Thursday that beginning Wednesday, it “will fully transition to minimal operations” until more federal funding is acquired.

“Without base funding, we will be unable to participate or lead any new projects, programs, or services,” the directors of the South Central center wrote in an email announcement. “Existing efforts also will be paused or reduced in scope until we receive our funding.”

The funding halt has surprised many federal and university employees who cited broad political support for their work. The affected centers serve a wide swath of states, including Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, New Mexico, Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts and Hawaii.

The centers’ data and tools, for instance, help assess fish and wildlife populations, which help state wildlife managers decide how many hunting or fishing permits to issue each season. Another project includes working on designing larger culverts on roadways, which will curb flooding but also protect fish swimming nearby.

In an email, Interior Department press secretary Charlotte Taylor declined to comment on the stalled funds, instead pointing to the looming government shutdown.

“Continued operation of these centers requires congressional action,” Taylor said. “Because Congress has failed to pass a continuing resolution, the current funding authority expires on October 1. That means these centers will close.”

But even if money is included in next year’s budget, the directors of the South Central center wrote in their announcement, the affected centers must still wait for the Interior Department and the Office of Management and Budget to approve key paperwork and release their funding.

The Climate Adaptation Science Centers may not be well known to the public, but their work often affects the communities where the hubs are based.

Each one is based at a university, which enters into a formal agreement with the USGS to host the work, provide facilities, and lead outreach and communication. USGS employees help oversee the scientific work, and every five to seven years, each host must submit and sign a new formal agreement to receive money for projects.

The Northeast, Pacific Islands and South Central centers all submitted competitive proposals to be signed off on by the Interior Department at the beginning of this year.

But forward movement on the agreements from Interior has stalled, and funding at the centers became hampered.

In August, the Office of Management and Budget sent a memo to USGS staff announcing that support had been scaled back for its Ecosystems Mission Area, which houses all the centers, according to three agency employees and records obtained by The Post. The memo stated that money could be spent only on federal salary and payroll, payment required by law and “minimum expenses to maintain safe operations.”

“No purchases can be made unless related to care and feeding of captive animals or to maintain safe operations,” the memo stated. “Current supplies can be utilized as needed with no additional costs until approved on a spend plan.”

The memo said that if staff wanted to spend money on anything outside of those three categories, they would have to submit “a spend plan” and then await approval from both Interior and OMB. As a result, federal employees have effectively been unable to join field research with the centers or even pay fees to publish research in journals.

The three centers may continue to exist in name for a few more months, but the money was only budgeted to last through September.

The ongoing uncertainty over funding has already affected staffing. Bradley said the Northeast center had to let go of graduate students and a communications manager and has only one university staff member on the payroll for the office, which covers an area from Maine to Virginia. Any work she and her university co-director do is voluntary and unpaid by federal grants.

At the Pacific Islands center, program director Ryan Longman — the only paid employee based at the University of Hawaii at Manoa still there — said his work is fully funded by the center, which means he’ll need to find a new job if funding is not renewed. His goal is to find other grants to support himself, but he doubts he’ll find millions of dollars to bring the center back.

“Overall, we have seen our operations [go] to a bare minimum,” Longman said. “Nobody knows what’s going to happen on October 1st.”

“I’m going to put together a couple of pieces here and a couple pieces there,” Longman said. “It’s not going to be easy.”

Renee McPherson, who is a university director of the South Central center and receives a salary from the University of Oklahoma, said she’ll do whatever she can to keep it operating. Right now she is helping the center’s graduate student researchers find new funding so they can complete their PhD programs and continue doing administrative work for the few remaining active grants.

Federal employees who work at the centers are unsure if they will still have jobs if the centers close.

The funding crunch comes as administration officials have made cuts to other Earth and climate science programs, and as President Donald Trump has questioned the impact of climate change. On Tuesday, speaking before the U.N. General Assembly, he called it a “con job.”

But the centers’ research covers an array of topics about “changing environmental conditions,” Longman said. Sometimes, that applies to natural year-to-year changes, such as El Niño and La Niña, weather patterns that can bring wetter or drier periods. Other times, it’s anticipating how coastlines and wildlife will change in a continuously warming world.

McPherson, with the South Central center, said the cuts surprised her because the centers’ work seems to align with a recent executive order that emphasized state and local preparedness, by translating “technical data and information to something that’s usable at the local level and that provides local people the ability to make their own decisions.”

For the upcoming fiscal year, the president’s budget eliminates the entire Ecosystems Mission Area, including the Climate Adaptation Science Centers. However, both the House and the Senate have proposed to continue funding for the ecosystems program and centers for the upcoming year.

“The support that we’ve gotten over the years is because the constituents who we serve continue to tell Congress about the importance of the work of the centers,” McPherson said. “We know droughts and floods and wildfires and tropical storms are not going to go away.”