Matthew Wielicki is now heading the reconstituted U.S. Global Change Research Program after the Trump administration gutted it last year, putting a former University of Alabama geochemist who calls himself a “professor in exile” in charge of the federal climate machine. The program’s primary product, the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment, is supposed to track how American infrastructure, lives and the economy are affected by climate change. Instead, the White House has handed the wheel to someone who frequently attacks climate science on social media and says he’d like to speak about his work only if the White House allows.
Who Gets to Control the Story
The White House didn’t make Wielicki available for an interview. It sent a statement instead, saying, “For too long, the USGCRP has been used as a vehicle for political agendas instead of sound science,” and, “We look forward to restoring the USGCRP and ensuring it fulfills its legal mandate.” That’s the language of control dressed up as cleanup. The same apparatus that gutted the program now claims it’s restoring it.
The U.S. Global Change Research Program coordinates federal climate research across more than a dozen agencies. It was created by a law signed under former President George H.W. Bush in 1990, and it helps shape environmental rules, legislation and infrastructure projects. The report it produces covers land productivity, flooding risks, water resources, fisheries, ecosystems and more. When a federal office like this gets captured, the consequences don’t stay in a conference room. They land on people’s homes, water, roads and livelihoods.
Previous versions of the assessment warned Americans about rising temperatures, increased flooding and deadly wildfires. Drawing on hundreds of peer-reviewed studies, they showed how warming temperatures are quickly changing some parts of the country. Shortly after the program was created in 1990, one of its early successes was revealing how a depleted ozone layer harmed Americans, which led to regulations that addressed the issue. That history matters because it shows what the program was built to do before the political knives came out.
What the Power Brokers Want
White House Budget Director Russ Vought has long viewed the program as a source of “climate alarmism” that the White House should have more control over, as he wrote in the Project 2025 conservative policy handbook organized by the Heritage Foundation. The phrase says plenty. The problem, in this telling, isn’t the warming planet. It’s the public hearing about it.
Wielicki has been more than willing to feed that line. He said he left higher education because of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. He has had multiple appearances in conservative media. He has said that a “significant portion of the climate science literature is nothing more than stamp collecting.” He has also suggested that climate scientists are faking data to make the world appear hotter. Then there’s his recent post on X: “Does anyone else find it odd that the region with the highest concentration of climate activists, climate policies, climate conferences, climate taxes, and climate emergency declarations is also the place allegedly warming the fastest?” He was referring to Europe, where deadly heat waves last month killed more than 2,000. Climate data shows that Europe is the fastest-warming continent.
The administration’s approach isn’t happening in a vacuum. The Trump administration has already published one climate report, organized by Energy Secretary Chris Wright last year, that offers clues to how a new assessment may be shaped. That report was written by a group of researchers who downplayed the effects of climate change and relied on work by dozens of scientists who criticized it as misleading and riddled with errors. Those researchers were invited to participate in the National Climate Assessment process and spent time criticizing previous versions of the report, POLITICO has previously reported.
Wright’s hand-picked researchers also proposed a new National Climate Assessment that would emphasize the positive aspects of climate change, according to a document obtained by POLITICO from court filings in a lawsuit over the report. They warned that the most recent version of the report “holds immense power” because it is “frequently cited in climate litigation” and used to justify regulations as well as lawsuits against fossil fuel companies. That’s the real target: not just the science, but the legal and regulatory consequences that follow when the science is taken seriously.
Who Pays for the Spin
Judith Curry, one of the scientists selected by Wright to author the DOE report, said the last version of the assessment “was all but useless” because it relied too heavily on extreme emissions scenarios. She said the forthcoming report would avoid that and expected that it would be an expansion of the work started by the DOE report. Curry said she would “provide high-level advice” to help craft the next version of the assessment. That’s the language of managed expertise, with the public left to absorb whatever the hand-picked panel decides to call reality.
Wright told POLITICO in May that he expected to release a broader climate science product in the spring or winter. “We want to have public engagement, debates on this,” he said. “Much more to come.” Public engagement, in this setup, means the powerful set the terms and everyone else gets to watch.
The National Climate Assessment was released in the first Trump administration. Trump later said he did not “believe” the report was accurate. That report, as well as all of the previous other versions, were deleted after Trump’s second term began. Michael Kuperberg, who was the executive director at the time, said political appointees in Trump’s first term told the program team that “they knew what our mission was, they knew our job was and they weren’t going to interfere with us.” He said it’s not hard to find a small group of people who will give an inaccurate assessment of research. The version now being assembled won’t represent the larger field of science, he said, and will degrade public trust in government research.
“The real risk here is the loss of integrity of the federal government,” he said. “If you cherry-pick a group of people that will say the sun’s not going to rise tomorrow, how do you believe the next group of people?” The question hangs there, ugly and plain, while the people at the top keep rearranging the machinery.