On the line was my boss at the time, Paul Leventhal, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, a tiny DC nonprofit focused on preventing nuclear and radiological terrorism. “Turn on the TV,” he said. Video of United Airlines Flight 175 crashing into the South Tower of the World Trade Center—the second tower to be attacked—filled the screen.  

The first crash could merely have been a terrible accident. But the second left little doubt. It was an act of terrorism that sent a chilling message: Anyone or anything could be a target. Without hesitation, Leventhal declared “It’s bin Laden.” Leventhal had long feared that nuclear power plants were vulnerable to terrorist sabotage that could cause a Chernobyl-like catastrophe on American soil, and he was an early (and lonely) advocate for strengthening NRC’s security requirements at a time when the nuclear industry and most security analysts dismissed the threat.  

Before 9/11, the biggest concerns for nuclear plant security were vehicle bombs, such as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the al Qaeda 1998 East African embassy attacks, or a paramilitary land assault by heavily armed groups. The 9/11 attacks, however, immediately made apparent a previously unforeseen threat scenario: hijacked jet aircraft turned into missiles—a terrifying possibility for which there are no practical protective measures.   

Leventhal—never one to hold back in a time of crisis—picked up the phone and cold-called Richard Meserve, the Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Remarkably, Chairman Meserve took his call. Leventhal urged him to impose emergency measures to bolster protection of the nation’s nuclear plants. Soon afterward, Leventhal and Dan Hirsch, the president of the California-based Committee to Bridge the Gap, wrote to Chairman Meserve to ask the Pentagon to deploy anti-aircraft weapons at nuclear plants, to improve vetting of nuclear workers, and to request that National Guard troops be dispatched to supplement inadequately staffed security forces. He responded with a non-answer, assuring that the NRC immediately “took a number of responsive actions” after the attacks, and was “evaluating current requirements and statutory authority related to acts or threats of terrorism, including but not limited to those that you presented in your letter.” 

And so began the long journey of the NRC coming to terms with the reality that the requirements it had in place for protecting US nuclear power plants from terrorists had not kept pace with the magnitude of the actual threat, leaving the fleet dangerously exposed. As we now know from the 9/11 Commission Report, al Qaeda operatives had considered targeting a nuclear plant near New York on 9/11 (presumably Indian Point), but fortunately, they decided against it in part because they thought that the airspace around it would be protected. Subsequent events quickly revealed that assumption was incorrect. 

In 9/11’s aftermath, the NRC ultimately did ratchet up its standards for protection of nuclear plants—for example, by increasing the assumed size of the attacking force that plant security would have to defend against—and for a few years, nuclear plants became somewhat better prepared to withstand terrorist ground assaults. (The agency never did require defenses against air attacks by jets or drones). But the nuclear industry, objecting to the cost of meeting stronger requirements, fought the NRC all the way. And over the last decade, the NRC has made a steady stream of changes, in response to industry pressure, that undid some of the post-9/11 improvements. 

After I joined UCS in 2003, my former colleague Dave Lochbaum and I continued to engage the NRC on this critical issue, pushing back against industry proposals to weaken reactor security. In 2016, the year of the fifteenth 9/11 anniversary, I chronicled our concerns about the changes that had been proposed up to that time. Today, unfortunately, the NRC’s undoing of its strengthened security framework is all but total, as the no-longer-independent agency caves in to Trump administration directives and slashes its security oversight to a level not seen since September 10, 2001.  

The checkered history of force-on-force evaluations 

When al Qaeda struck on 9/11, the only NRC program that directly tested the capabilities of nuclear power plant security forces to protect against terrorist attacks, the Operational Safeguards Response Evaluation (OSRE), had been in disarray for over three years. OSRE utilized live “force-on-force” exercises with mock adversary teams staging violent assaults at reactors—essentially a sophisticated version of laser tag. The goal of the protective force was to stop the adversary team from simulating the destruction of enough safety equipment to disrupt cooling of the reactor cores, which in a real attack would cause overheating and significant damage to the highly radioactive fuel. By 1998, 57 of the 68 nuclear plants then operating had been tested, and 27 had been unable to prevent the mock attackers from achieving their objective of causing a meltdown—a failure rate of 47 percent—even though the plant owners had beefed up their security measures in advance of the tests. The industry was embarrassed by the results and, instead of working to fix its security problems, it pushed the NRC to shut the program down—which it finally did in the summer of 1998.  

Captain David Orrik, a former Navy Seal and the OSRE team lead, objected to the program’s cancellation and filed an internal “Differing Professional View” in August 1998, which was endorsed by a number of other NRC staff. However, NRC senior managers refused to reverse the decision. The dissenters, alarmed by the state of security at the nation’s nuclear plants at a time when terrorist threats were increasing, leaked their concerns to the press. Once the conflict came into public view, the NRC was forced to reinstate the program, but also initiated a review of its implementation, and decided to promulgate new regulations for the future performance evaluation program.  

The nuclear reactor owners and their lobbying group, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), offered their own vision: a self-assessment in which nuclear plants would conduct their own force-on-force exercises, and the NRC would be relegated to a mere observer. This differed in important ways from OSRE, in which the NRC provided the mock adversary force, chose the attack scenarios (based on intelligence information), and was assisted by US Special Forces contractors with vast experience in paramilitary tactics. This approach maintained the independence of the evaluating agency from the plants being evaluated and avoided conflicts of interest. But the industry proposal offered too many opportunities to tilt the playing field so that the “good guys” would win, and Captain Orrik, in a second dissenting opinion, derided it as a “meaningless NRC rubber-stamping of whatever the industry decided it could afford.” (I got to know Captain Orrik at the time and greatly respected his expertise.) 

Dismissing Captain Orrik’s concerns, the NRC was on track to adopt the industry’s proposal— until 9/11 changed the playing field by making efforts to weaken security politically unpopular. Through the advocacy of then-Representative (and now-Senator) Edward Markey of Massachusetts, Congress enshrined NRC-run triennial force-on-force inspections in the law by enacting a provision in the 2005 Energy Policy Act that amended the Atomic Energy Act. Since then, there have been seven complete force-on-force inspection cycles (with some disruptions during COVID). The security performance of nuclear plants has improved significantly since the OSRE era, although about five to ten percent of plants still fail the test each year, showing the importance of maintaining vigilance through a robust testing and inspection regime.  

Throughout this entire period, the NEI never stopped pushing the NRC to weaken its force-on-force inspections—or even terminate them again, despite the 2005 Energy Policy Act provision. Although the NRC has arguably pursued a “death by a thousand cuts” approach to its force-on-force program, as recently as 2018 the commissioners instructed the staff not to get rid of it altogether. 

What’s Past is Prologue 

The NEI finally got the upper hand after the Trump administration’s takeover of the NRC in 2025. In April of 2026, the NRC commissioners reversed course and issued a decision to grant the NEI’s legally dubious request to replace NRC-run force-on-force inspections with observation of licensee-conducted exercises by 2028—even though the NRC staff did not even provide such an option to the Commission. 

The NRC has also made other major cuts to its security oversight, including slashing resources for routine physical and cyber security inspections by over fifty percent in some cases; transferring some inspection duties to already overwhelmed resident inspectors who do not have specialized security training; allowing new reactor owners to take credit for local law enforcement response in lieu of providing their own security forces; and even eliminating the Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response, established after 9/11 to elevate the agency’s security oversight mission.  

The agency also recently released a proposed rule that further weakens security requirements across the board, including redefining its standards so that even if a nuclear plant security force were helpless to prevent terrorists from deliberately causing a meltdown as severe as the 1979 Three Mile Island disaster, the agency would not consider it radiological sabotage because the projected radiation doses to the public would be within “acceptable” limits.  Nothing to see here! 

The cumulative effect of all these changes is hard to predict. But there is little doubt that the NRC is dangerously undermining nuclear plant security at a time when the convergence of rapidly emerging technologies—from drones with advanced military capabilities to artificial intelligence-boosted cyber attacks—are amplifying the threat landscape in even more profound ways than did the jet attacks of 9/11. 

In a 2014 interview, co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton warned about the dangers of complacency setting in as the horrific events of that day become a distant memory. The NRC should heed this warning. The nuclear industry, supported by the Trump administration, has ambitious plans to build scores of small modular reactors around the country, in more diverse locations and closer to populated areas. A “nuclear 9/11” would imperil the health and safety of millions of Americans and derail the industry’s hoped-for nuclear revival for generations to come.   

The study of these interactions, and how they can accumulate, is known as cumulative impacts analysis. And the US government only recently began working to update its guidance about exposure to pollution based on cumulative impacts.

In late 2024, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a document designed to help EPA incorporate a cumulative impacts approach into its science and policymaking. To give the public appropriate and meaningful input, EPA solicited public comments on this framework, getting opinions from experts and advocates on using cumulative impacts analysis to improve public health and the environment. Unfortunately, when President Trump appointed Lee Zeldin as the new administrator of EPA, this process came to a halt. EPA has not responded to any of the public comments nor made any moves to implement or even finalize this framework.

Since then, the Union of Concerned Scientists has worked with government, environmental justice, and public health experts to review and analyze public comments and get a better understanding of how cumulative impacts analysis can be put to work to improve people’s lives. Those findings were released in a new report, Unfinished Business.

Dr. Kristie Ellickson of the Center for Science and Democracy at UCS was the lead author on this new report. A longtime cumulative impacts researcher, she says that in the absence of federal action, states, community advocates, and scientists alike have an opportunity to put the lessons of cumulative impacts to work to improve people’s lives.

AAS: First things first: what is cumulative impacts analysis?

Kristie Ellickson: “Cumulative impacts” is both a concept and a tool—fundamentally, it means matching environmental protections with the way people actually experience pollution. Too often, the rules for different pollutants—or for different kinds of exposures, like in the workplace and the home—don’t “talk to” each other. You can’t look at a single pollutant in a vacuum. You need to bring in other factors, to look at people’s living conditions and what kinds of other pollution they’re exposed to. You need to understand things like access to health care, access to food, the effects of racial discrimination. To do that, you need to connect different kinds of information and the work of different agencies, so you can make more holistic decisions.

This could look like an environmental agency using data from a health agency to find out about hospitalization rates in a community. It could look like a permitting agency consulting a map to see what other facilities or pollution sources are located close to the facility applying for a permit. The overarching concept is that you need to look at multiple kinds of information to make good decisions.

AAS: What’s your background with this topic? How have you used cumulative impacts analysis in your work?

KE: I worked for 14 years as a staff scientist for the state of Minnesota. In 2008, Minnesota passed a law requiring a cumulative impacts approach for an environmental justice area in Minneapolis. For decisions about air permits, the state needed to examine not just the proposed facility’s pollution, but also existing pollution, health data like emergency room visits due to asthma attacks, as well as social conditions like poverty rates and historical racial discrimination. As a staff scientist, I was tasked with getting input from the affected communities and incorporating it into our analysis. And as a result of that new requirement, I saw real reductions in the amount of pollution that was allowed in these permits.

There’s a lot of really interesting science here. I love to work with maps and data sets, and I have seen the value of cumulative impacts analysis in action. This isn’t just research for research’s sake—these assessments should be connected to decisions, and the information used to make sure those decisions get us to a real-world outcome. The science is there to support this approach if decisionmakers choose or are required to use it.

For the last four years, I’ve worked at UCS, starting as a fellow with a two-year project to create a Community Guide to Cumulative Impacts. We’ve worked collaboratively with community partners and a range of experts to help people understand what cumulative impacts analysis is and how to use it. It’s so crucial that we match environmental protection efforts with how people actually experience pollution, and that those communities are a central part of the process of designing these assessments and making policies. The words and wisdom of people who live and breathe environmental justice issues were incorporated into the guide.

I also co-chaired a working group of the EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) to write up cumulative impact guidance for the federal government. A goal of the NEJAC was to bring a variety of perspectives to the table, including regionally. The United States is big and geographically diverse, with a wide range of ecosystems and climates, and you can’t design good policies based on a single set of assumptions. We also looked closely at racial disparities—the goal is to reduce pollution overall, but also to reduce how disproportionate pollution exposures are in our country.

One important part of this is pairing different kinds of expertise. There’s quantitative work—measuring the lead levels in soil, counting children with high lead levels in their blood—but you have to consider people’s lived experience as well. You can’t understand, or solve, environmental issues without that context, combining the stories and expertise from people who live in affected communities with more traditional quantitative data. As a UCS fellow, I co-authored a peer-reviewed study on these “mixed method” approaches for the journal Environmental Justice in 2024.

AAS: How did the EPA get involved with cumulative impacts analysis?

KE: Community groups have been advocating for a cumulative impacts approach for decades—and this call has also been put forth by major advisory groups, including NEJAC in 2003 and 2004, the National Research Council in 2009, and the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine last year. At the end of the Biden administration, EPA published this document, the Interim Framework, to lay out how the agency could understand cumulative impacts and put these tools to work, as a response to this long-running effort. Then, they opened a 90-day period for public comment. That period straddled two administrations, and when President Trump was inaugurated, the federal government took a hard turn away from this approach. The Trump administration (and the new EPA administrator Lee Zeldin) eliminated the two offices in EPA that did the most to produce the framework: the Office of Research and Development and the Office of Environmental Justice and Civil Rights. They also eliminated the NEJAC and other advisory boards. And they simply did not respond to any of the comments or even acknowledge them. So the framework and all the comments on it were sitting in the public register. That’s incredibly valuable data, and that motivated us to look at and preserve these comments, which the Trump administration was largely ignoring.

AAS: How did you approach the framework and the comments?

KE: UCS partnered with some independent researchers, including people who formerly worked for or advised the EPA. We did a rigorous analysis of these comments to find the common themes and input on how to make cumulative impact assessment effective. This, too, was a mixed-methods process, in which we looked at the comments themselves but also spoke with people who wrote comments, people who served on those disbanded advisory committees, and people who have been doing education and organizing around cumulative impacts. We held four different convenings to talk about the framework and the comments.

One thing that really came through was the importance of accountability. You can’t set up effective policies without measures for enforcement. The law tells you what you should do, the rules tell you how you do it, but you also need integrated accountability and enforcement so those rules actually work in practice to benefit people.

Another aspect is the value of a public health perspective that incorporates the experience of health practitioners, and a labor perspective that accounts for people’s experience in the workplace.

One thing that was very helpful to understand was: people are surprised that cumulative impact analysis isn’t already the default approach. It’s common sense to people, and they’re surprised to learn that policies and permitting decisions don’t take existing pollution and stressors into account.  

Another striking thing is how the people we invited to these convenings really showed up engaged and ready to work hard to keep making progress. While we do a lot of work at UCS on existing harms and impacts and the attacks on science that are happening right now, cumulative impacts is a way of looking forward to the future, to make environmental protections that are really protective in the long term.

AAS: What are the next steps for this work? What do you hope happens with this report and the conversations you’ve had around it?

KE: As a courtesy, we sent the report to everyone who included their contact information in their comment. We’ve also sent our report to the EPA, so that it’s on the record, and they know we’re watching. But the White House and their EPA appointees are so explicitly hostile to science, to environmental justice considerations, to environmental protection in general that we know there won’t be much progress on this at the federal level under this administration. But that doesn’t mean the effort is over.

At least seven states have cumulative impacts laws or regulations, and there are a number of city and local ordinances as well, mostly aimed at air pollution permitting. We can expand these policies, and more states and communities can adopt them, and we hope this report offers useful information about what people with both academic and lived expertise want to see. We could see cumulative impacts used as a lens for county-level zoning and planning processes, for example. This is a resource that people all around the country can use to find ways to implement a cumulative impacts approach. For UCS, the next step is to broaden our conversations to bring in different kinds of expertise and experience, and to convene people to create policy roadmaps that state or local governments can adopt going forward.

Instead, it often emerges through a series of actions that may seem disconnected on the surface: attacks on scientists who tell inconvenient truths, efforts to restrict voting access, attempts to punish nonprofit organizations, political interference in government decisionmaking, or rhetoric that encourages us to see fellow Americans as enemies rather than neighbors.

When viewed individually, these incidents can appear narrow, technical, or temporary. But when viewed together, they reveal something larger: a challenge to the democratic principles that allow people, communities, and science to thrive.

Authoritarian movements often rely on disinformation, historical revisionism, and attacks on independent sources of evidence because informed citizens are better equipped to recognize abuses of power and hold leaders accountable. When facts become negotiable and history is rewritten to serve political objectives, it becomes harder for communities to understand what is happening now, learn from the past, and make informed decisions about the future.

Over the last year, I’ve written about how authoritarian movements attack facts, suppress dissent, target vulnerable communities, and undermine democratic institutions. These developments show a pattern that threatens the foundations of an inclusive, participatory democracy. As I argued in What Authoritarian Regimes Do and later in Divide and Destroy, authoritarianism advances by weakening the institutions and democratic norms that allow people to participate fully in public life and hold leaders accountable for their actions.

At a moment when Americans are deeply divided on many public policy questions, we must recognize and champion the shared democratic principles that continue to inspire across the political spectrum, even when they feel less present—as they have at times throughout my career, and particularly in the past year, as I’ve worked on these issues, I have had the opportunity to connect with different constituencies, industries, faith traditions, communities, and political perspectives. And it is clear that while we disagree on many important issues – from different views on climate policy, taxation, healthcare, immigration, education, and more – we nevertheless agree that democracy itself is worth protecting. In a healthy democracy, that diversity of viewpoints is not a weakness, it is a strength.

It is also important to acknowledge that democracy in the United States has not always worked equally well for everyone. Throughout our history, many communities have been excluded from full participation, denied representation, or faced barriers to exercising their rights. Defending democracy should not mean preserving those inequities. It should mean strengthening democratic institutions so they become more inclusive, representative, and responsive to all people. A commitment to democracy requires both protecting what is valuable and recognizing and improving what has too often fallen short.

As concerns about the health of American democracy grow, now is the time for folks from different political traditions, industries, communities, and issue areas to come together around a minimum set of commitments essential to democratic self-government. These  are not a political platform, nor do they require us to agree on every issue facing the country. Instead, they establish a common foundation and minimum points of unity that allow democratic disagreement to continue.

Without the rule of law, free and fair elections, a free civil society, and a commitment to resolving conflict peacefully, our ability to address any issue becomes compromised. These four principles are foundational to a functional and healthy democracy. The loss of any one of these means the functional loss of our democracy as we know it.

Commitment to the Rule of Law

The rule of law is one of democracy’s most important protections because it ensures that power remains accountable. It means that no person, political party, or institution is above, or beneath, the law. Constitutional rights apply to everyone. People are entitled to due process, equal treatment, and protection from arbitrary government action. Public officials are accountable when they abuse their authority, and institutions such as courts, Congress, state governments, inspectors general, journalists, watchdog organizations, and the public can continue to serve as checks to prevent the abuse of power.

For those of us who care about science and evidence-based policymaking, the rule of law has practical consequences. Scientific integrity depends on institutions that operate according to established laws, standards, and procedures rather than political loyalty. Public health protections, environmental safeguards, and scientific research programs all rely on transparent processes that constrain politicized decisionmaking.

 When leaders attempt to weaken oversight, disregard legal limits, replace expertise with loyalty, or ignore evidence that conflicts with political objectives, they are not merely changing policy. They are weakening the systems that allow government to remain accountable to the people it serves. They are eroding trust that allows us to work together.

The rule of law is not a left, center or right principle. It is a democratic principle. Regardless of our political views, we all benefit from a system in which rights are protected, laws are applied fairly, and those entrusted with public authority remain accountable for how they use it.

Commitment  to Free, Safe, and Fair Elections

Democracy depends on the ability of voters to choose their leaders and hold them accountable. Every eligible voter should be able to participate freely, safely, and without intimidation. Elections should be administered fairly, and election results should be respected.

These commitments may sound basic, but they are foundational, and they must be fought for. Elections are one of the most direct means by which people exercise power in a democracy. They are how communities communicate priorities, evaluate leaders’ performance, and influence the direction of public policy.

The Center for Science and Democracy has long emphasized that a healthy democracy reflects the will of the people and creates opportunities for broad participation and fair representation. Our research in election science has helped identify evidence-based approaches to increasing voter access, improving election administration, strengthening public confidence, and ensuring that people have meaningful opportunities to participate in democratic life.

Yet many communities continue to face barriers to participation. Restrictive voting laws, threats to election workers, attacks on the legitimacy of election outcomes, and extreme partisan gerrymandering all undermine democratic accountability. These barriers often fall disproportionately on communities that have historically faced exclusion from political power.

At a time of heightened political polarization, it is especially important to reaffirm a simple principle: political power comes from the people. Protecting free, safe, and fair elections protects every other democratic right.

Commitment to a Free Civil Society

Democracy is sustained not only through elections and government institutions but through the countless organizations and communities that make up civil society. Scientists, journalists, faith communities, educators, businesses, labor organizations, artists, nonprofits, advocacy groups, and local civic organizations all help create a society in which people can participate, organize, solve problems collectively, and hold leaders accountable.

These institutions provide independent sources of information, expertise, and community leadership. They create opportunities for people to engage beyond the ballot box and help ensure that public decisions are informed by a broad range of experiences and perspectives.

Throughout history, authoritarian movements have sought to weaken civil society because independent organizations create alternative centers of power and accountability. Efforts to intimidate critics, suppress dissent, attack universities, politicize research, undermine journalism, or pressure organizations to conform to a government’s political ideology are often aimed at limiting the public’s ability to organize and challenge those in power. As I wrote earlier this year, democracy depends on people’s ability to access reliable information and make informed decisions about public affairs. A shared commitment to independent facts and knowledge is essential for democratic decisionmaking and public accountability.

This is one reason UCS has spent so much time documenting attacks on science. When scientists are silenced, data are removed from public access, research is politicized, or independent expertise is sidelined, the consequences extend beyond science itself. These actions weaken independent sources of facts and make it harder for the public to evaluate government decisions and hold leaders accountable.

A free civil society is not an obstacle to democracy. It is one of democracy’s greatest strengths.

Commitment to Resolving Conflict Peacefully

Democracy does not eliminate conflict. It provides a framework for managing conflict peacefully.

People will always disagree about political priorities, public policies, and the future of the country. Those disagreements are not evidence that democracy is failing. In many respects, they are evidence that democracy is working. Citizens have the right to advocate for their beliefs, challenge government actions, protest injustice, and organize for change.

What democracy cannot survive is the replacement of political competition with intimidation, coercion, or violence.

Free speech is essential to democratic life, but so is a commitment to rejecting political violence and rhetoric that encourages violence against perceived opponents. Democratic societies depend on our willingness to regard one another as fellow citizens even when we strongly disagree.

One of the recurring themes in my writing on authoritarianism has been the danger of efforts to divide society into “us” and “them”. Throughout history, authoritarian movements have used fear, scapegoating, dehumanization, and disinformation to isolate vulnerable communities and consolidate power. These tactics weaken public trust, fracture communities, and make accountability more difficult.

Political opponents are not enemies. They are fellow participants in a shared democratic project. Preserving that understanding is essential if democracy is to endure.

We Must Unite Around Democracy, Not Agreement on Policy

Democracy is not a spectator sport, nor is it an individual endeavor. It is a collective exercise in self-government that depends on people working together across differences to solve problems, hold leaders accountable, and shape the future of their communities. The ability to cooperate despite disagreements is one of democracy’s greatest strengths and one reason movements and coalitions remain so important during periods of democratic stress. The significance of pro-democracy movements is not that everybody agrees on everything. The significance is that we do not.

It’s important to recognize that we can embrace the foundational tenets of democracy even as we disagree about many public policy questions. Some of us will advocate different solutions to the same problems. Others will continue to compete vigorously in the marketplace of ideas or argue for different priorities. None of that changes when we all unite behind these core principles of a healthy democracy. These principles therefore represent a floor, not a ceiling. They are minimum commitments that allow all of us with different interests and perspectives to work together in defense of democracy without requiring anyone to abandon their values or priorities.

For UCS, these commitments reinforce something we have long understood: science and democracy rise and fall together. Democracy creates the conditions that allow evidence to be gathered, debated, challenged, and applied in service of the public good. Science helps people understand complex problems, evaluate competing claims, and hold decisionmakers accountable. Both depend on transparency, participation, and freedom from political coercion.

From Principles to Action

A commitment to principles matters only if people act on it and history demonstrates that democratic institutions are not protected by individuals acting alone. They are defended through collective action. Communities organizing together, people showing up for one another, coalitions working across differences, and movements demanding accountability have repeatedly helped democracies withstand authoritarian pressure. This illustrates a  simple lesson: concern is not enough. Defending democracy requires collective action.

We all have a role to play in protecting the democratic values that make science, accountability, and public participation possible. That work can take many forms, but some of the most important actions include:

• Defend facts, evidence, and independent science. Speak up when facts are distorted, research is politicized, or scientific expertise is sidelined. Reliable information is essential for both science and democracy.
• Protect free, safe, and fair elections. Support efforts that expand participation, protect voters from intimidation, and ensure that election results are respected. Democracy works only when everyone has a meaningful opportunity to participate.
• Stand with communities and institutions under attack. Civil society remains strongest when people support journalists, educators, scientists, nonprofit organizations, faith communities, and others who are speaking out in defense of democratic values.
• Reject efforts to divide us through fear and scapegoating. Authoritarian movements often seek to turn neighbors against one another. Building solidarity across communities is one of the most powerful ways to resist those tactics.
• Take action when opportunities arise. Whether that means contacting elected officials, participating in community meetings, joining a local organization, attending a public event, providing mutual aid for others, or supporting UCS campaigns, democracy depends on people who choose to engage rather than look away.

The future of our democracy will not be determined by a single election, a single court decision, or a single political figure. It will be shaped by whether people continue to defend the institutions, rights, freedoms, and democratic norms that make self-government possible. As I argued in Scientists Must Act, one of the greatest dangers in authoritarian moments is the belief that ordinary people have no power to influence events. History suggests otherwise. Democratic institutions are strongest when people show up to defend them. We are the ones we have been waiting for.

As of August 27, 2026, the US government banned export of black mass from the United States for one year to increase the recovery of critical minerals. Black mass is a powder substance from lithium-ion batteries that contains critical minerals such as cobalt, lithium, manganese, and nickel. While the ban can help build up the United States black mass recycling industry in the long term, our research demonstrates that there is currently an undercapacity. Without reconsidering this timeline and pairing it with complementary recycling requirements, this ban doesn’t do much to increase domestic recovery of minerals from our waste stream.  

Lithium-ion battery recycling capacity in North America 

Published in the Journal of Resource, Conservation, and Recycling, our research explores those questions. The research estimates lithium-ion battery recycling capacity in North America and whether this is enough to process batteries from our products in circulation, such as electronic devices, electric vehicles, and stationary storage, as well as from manufacturing losses. This is an important exploration when planning for the emission-reducing transition to electric vehicles and a renewable energy grid. Utilizing minerals from our recycling system has a much lower impact than newly mined ones but requires expansion.  

Recycling of the critical minerals in these batteries can be split into two steps, with capacity allocated between them: pre-processing and black mass refining.  

Pre-processing consists of breaking down the batteries. There are a wide variety of processing methods, but they can be categorized as shredding or smelting. Shredding is the preferred process due to smelting’s high energy consumption, increased emissions, and lithium loss. There is also variation in the shredding process used to separate the black mass. Some companies use pyrometallurgical processes, such as calcination or pyrolysis, to burn graphite and the binder, while others use chemical processes to separate the foils from the black mass. This pre-processing can be done in a separate facility from the black mass refining.  

Black mass refining is also carried out using various processes, yielding different products. All these processes involve dissolving black mass in a reductant (typically hydrogen peroxide), then combining it with an acid (typically sulfuric acid) to recover the constituent minerals or recovering them in a combined form that can be used in battery cathode (electrolyte) manufacturing.  

Our research demonstrates that North America’s current and planned capacity results in an overcapacity of pre-processing infrastructure but an undercapacity of black mass refining (see the figure below). The refining capacity isn’t large enough to handle the black mass inputs until 2030 and is estimated to be slightly over capacity until 2033. As of 2026, we estimate about 7,000 metric tons of black mass refining capacity, with 65,000 metric tons of black mass feedstock to be processed. The refining capacity is not public knowledge but was gathered from NaatBatt, Bloomberg, and other sources, with the remaining capacities estimated.  

This forecast demonstrates that the export ban that went into effect for one year is not a realistic timeline for the industry to meet. While this order signals the US government’s ambition to increase recovery of critical minerals from batteries retired from use, the short implementation timeline doesn’t take into account that the United States = doesn’t yet have adequate infrastructure for this recovery, and this may dissuade real mineral recovery, which is not yet a requirement for lithium-ion batteries.  

The companies that do have limited black mass refining capacity in the United States are likely to be in high demand and to charge a premium for black mass refining. While that may bring in additional funds to support current processing capacity, the ban is guaranteed for only one year and is therefore unlikely to spur increased outside investment and competition. The pre-processing companies that are unable to find a domestic processor for the black mass are left with the option of storing until the ban expires in a year (storage time limits vary based on whether it is a large or small processor), requesting an exception or adjustment from the Bureau of Industry and Security, or sending the materials to hazardous waste landfills.  

Policy to build a domestic recycling industry 

This type of export ban could be effective if set for several years in the future, allowing automakers and recyclers to plan and build US capacity for black mass processing. But this policy isn’t enough and 1) doesn’t consider that recycling of these batteries isn’t a requirement and 2) the black mass refined in the US doesn’t have to recover high rates of the critical minerals.  

To effectively create a domestic recycling industry that increases US production of lithium-ion battery minerals, these other areas need to be addressed. The following policies are necessary inclusions. 

Required recycling: Policy should require batteries to be recycled. Extended producer responsibility, such as the recently passed policy in Colorado or policy implemented in the European Union, requires the manufacturer of the product to ensure it is recycled and plan accordingly. In addition, for the export ban to be effective, the pre-processing must also be required to occur domestically.  

Recovery rates: Recycling is only effective at promoting the reuse of minerals if the minerals are recovered. Mineral recovery from black mass currently depends on market prices, therefore, it is not undertaken if there is no profit. For example, while graphite is technologically viable to recover, it isn’t due to low market value. Lithium prices are also variable and therefore aren’t always recovered. Setting high recovery rates, as the European Union does, will ensure that the specified minerals are actually recovered.  

Prioritizing domestic production: Domestic recovery can ensure that minerals aren’t processed and pollute in countries with lower environmental standards. As domestic recovery is prioritized, emissions from these facilities need to be monitored and reduced. The batteries contain PFAS, which can be released into the air, water, or product outputs. PFAS exposure is known to cause liver disease, kidney disease, reproductive issues, and cancer. PFAS is found throughout many products in our economy and, at this time, is not sufficiently controlled.  

A better path forward 

As we transition to an electric transportation system and a renewable energy grid, it is important to consider mineral sources and how we can reduce system-wide impacts. Recycling of lithium-ion batteries has the potential to create a domestic, lower-impact source of minerals. At this time, the US is attempting to build up this industry through grants, loans, and export bans. This is a partial solution that complements battery recycling requirements, mineral recovery requirements, and increased environmental controls. These solutions are modeled in the European Union and China. Further, states are taking on this issue with Colorado passing legislation earlier this year and efforts are ongoing in California. Without their implementation in the United States, we are likely to see minerals wasted and batteries improperly disposed of.   

Like so many others, I spent late July choking on smoke as wildfires, worsened by fossil-fueled climate change, raged across Canada and the United States, as well as France, Greece, Spain and Turkey. People, including firefighters, lost their lives.

Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee their homes, with many losing everything. And millions of people across the United States, many living hundreds of miles from the wildfires, experienced dangerous levels of pollution from wildfire smoke.

The undeniable fingerprints of climate change are all over recent extreme wildfire seasons. Across the world, unusually hot, dry weather, punctuated by extreme heatwaves, has dried out ecosystems, priming them for fire. In the United States, the burned area in 2026 is currently 168 percent of the 10-year average, while many fires continue to burn out of control.

Globally, burned area is decreasing, but not all fires are equal. Most of the reduction in global burned area comes from savannahs and grasslands, as changes in agricultural practice and land use reduce intentional fires and burned area.

In contrast, fire activity and burned area in North America’s forests continues to intensify, burning large areas with growing severity. These fires can burn so severely that they scorch the soil deeply, and some forests cannot regrow. In Canada’s boreal forests, wildfires also generate huge amounts of heat-trapping emissions, combusting soil that took decades or centuries to accumulate. In 2023, Canada’s record-smashing fire season emitted more carbon than every country in the world except China, India and the United States.

Wildfires in forests of the western United States are some of the most well-studied, and the effects of climate change are glaring across almost every metric scientists use to characterize wildfire. Relative to the mid-1980s, more wildfires are burning larger areas, at higher severity, growing faster, at higher elevations, over longer fire seasons, and under more extreme fire weather conditions. Wildfires also are burning later into the night and ramping up earlier in the morning, meaning less rest for the wildland firefighters who put their lives on the line to protect us.

Attribution science, which isolates and quantifies the contribution of climate change to observed trends, makes this point even more clearly, showing that climate-driven increases in dryness led to a near doubling of burned area in forests of western North America between 1984 and 2015.

Climate change also limits options to use existing, science-supported tools to reduce wildfire risks, like prescribed fire, by shortening the very narrow window in which these controlled burns can safely occur. While forest management can mitigate some effects, climate-driven extreme fire behavior can overwhelm these interventions.

Climate change further drives conditions conducive to wildfire beyond changes to forests, with reductions in snowpack and earlier melt providing more time for vegetation to dry out.

These climate-fueled changes have devastated communities, destroying homes, claiming lives and ending ways of life. The damage of these wildfires is escalating too — last year’s wildfires in Los Angeles killed at least 30 people and produced estimated losses of $140 billion, while property insurance skyrocketed, if it remained accessible at all. As global temperatures continue to rise, this destruction will keep mounting.

It didn’t have to be this way.

The dangers of burning fossil fuels, the primary driver of climate change, have been well known for decades, including by fossil fuel companies that publicly denied what their own research showed and deceived the public to protect their profits.

Research from the Union of Concerned Scientists has quantified how heat-trapping emissions traced to the largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers, including ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron and Shell, have worsened these hot, dry and fire-prone conditions. From 1986 to 2021, nearly 40 percent of the area burned in forests of western North America can be attributed to their emissions. Our newest study finds that across the western United States, emissions traced to these entities reduced annual snowpack and stream flow by 15 percent and 6 percent, respectively, equivalent to nearly six times the annual water use of all California’s cities.

Wildfires have many contributing factors. Dismissing the role of fossil-fueled climate change in driving extreme wildfires is at odds with the best available science and only serves the interests of the fossil fuel industry. Instead, communities, firefighters and first responders need policymakers to advance real solutions­ — including measures to stop corporate deception, advance a phaseout of fossil fuels, and make polluters pay their fair share — to address this wicked problem.

But this year, it would be disingenuous to celebrate without also acknowledging the uncertainty many early-career experts are facing. Over the past year and a half, thousands of federally funded research grants have been terminated or frozen, some universities have reduced or paused some Ph.D. admissions, some labs have undergone indefinite hiring freezes, and research in politically targeted areas has faced increased restriction and scrutiny. The National Science Foundation is on track to award its fewest research grants in over 40 years. This is limiting opportunities for early-career scientists especially.

This isn’t normal

The scientific enterprise once seemed unstoppable. The past several decades have shown consistent growth and discovery across medicine, technology, climate science, public health, space exploration, and countless other fields. We’ve been able to map the human genome, develop vaccines in record time, dramatically improve weather forecasting, and build technologies that once only belonged in science fiction. None of this progress happened overnight: it was made possible by generations of scientists and technical experts, sustained public investment, strong and well-resourced scientific institutions, and a scientific ecosystem that allowed new experts to learn, experiment, and eventually, lead.

For an expert who is already established in their field, these disruptions can be devastating. For an early-career expert trying to enter their field, these disruptions can change whether the opportunity exists at all. When we dismantle the systems that make scientific progress possible, we aren’t just cutting today’s research, we’re disrupting how tomorrow’s experts become experts.

Science can’t afford to lose its next generation

Unfortunately, we’re already seeing signs of what that disruption could mean. A study published over the summer examining how early-career researchers are responding to federal science funding disruptions found widespread concern about what comes next. Among the 30 researchers that were surveyed, 90% of them were concerned about long-term job prospects, more than 50% of them were considering leaving academic research, and about 60% were considering pursuing research opportunities outside of the United States. They described interrupted research, uncertainty about completing their work, and concerns about whether the careers they had spent so many years training for would still exist in the near future.

While this was a small study and isn’t representative of all early-career researchers, the experiences captured illustrate a bigger risk: a funding cut that happens today doesn’t just affect what research gets done today. It can shape who stays in science, who leaves, and who gets the chance to become one of the experts we depend on years from now.

Stay with me—this isn’t meant to be a grim piece. Science and scientists have faced political interference, funding threats, censorship, and efforts to sideline scientific evidence before. But scientists and technical experts haven’t simply stood by and watched it happen. They have organized with their colleagues, spoken publicly, worked alongside communities, engaged decisionmakers, defended threatened programs and institutions, and used their expertise to push for change.

These efforts don’t always produce immediate wins, and they haven’t made every threat disappear. But history gives us plenty of reminders that the trajectory of science isn’t always predetermined. Policies can change. Funding can be restored. And when scientists join their expertise with collective action, they can help shape what happens next.

We don’t have to look too far for examples

We’ve seen what progress we can make when scientists and experts act together. In 2025, more than 3,300 scientists and experts signed a UCS-organized letter calling for NOAA’s staffing, funding, and scientific independence to be protected. After sustained pressure from UCS and other groups, the Trump administration backed away from threats to close NOAA’s regional climate centers.

We have seen scientists turn communication into action, too. Last year, about 200 scientists (including grad students, senior professors, broadcast meteorologists, and UCS Climate Fellow Dr. Marc Alessi) participated in a 100-hour livestream explaining what weather and climate scientists do and why federal funding for their work matters. More than 180,000 people tuned into the livestream, generating more than 15,000 calls to Congress.

Direct pressure on decisionmakers can also be an effective strategy. In July 2025, as the administration slowed the disbursement of congressionally appropriated NIH funding, a group of 14 senators urged the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to release the funds. Days later, OMB directed NIH to pause the issuing of research grants, contracts, and training awards. After pushback from members of Congress and patient advocacy groups, the administration reversed the pause later that same day.

So, what does this moment call for?

Political priorities can change. Harmful policies can be challenged, delayed, reversed, or replaced. Funding can return. Institutions can recover. But waiting for better conditions isn’t the strategy to get us there. Some of the damage being done to science now can outlast the policies that caused it. What we do now matters more than ever.

The is no one right way to advocate, and different moments call for different tactics. Sometimes progress comes through relationships with decisionmakers, educating the public, community engagement, or organizing your fellow experts. Other moments may call for greater urgency and pressure from the public. Peaceful demonstrations, coordinated days of action, and other forms of non-violent direct action can draw attention to an issue, create pressure, and make it harder to ignore what’s at stake. If traditional approaches to advocacy aren’t moving those with the power to act, we shouldn’t be afraid to ask if other forms of collective pressure might.

Of course, not everyone can (or should) take on the same level of risk. For some early-career experts, speaking publicly could have real consequences. You may be trying to protect a new or precarious position, dependent on a particular institution or supervisor for funding, navigating an immigration process, or facing other circumstances that make visibility feel especially risky. Those realities matter. Understand the potential risks, and choose the forms of advocacy that feel right for you.

But that also means those who have more flexibility to speak and act can use it. If your position is relatively secure, you have institutional support, or you simply feel comfortable taking a more visible role, consider where you might stretch beyond what you’ve done before. That could mean speaking publicly, organizing colleagues, attending a demonstration, or participating in peaceful actions when it is strategic and safe to do so.

Find your lane

If you’re early in your career, you may not feel like the most powerful person in your institution or your field. You might not have tenure, a large professional network, or a title that gets you invited into every room where decisions are made. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have power. You have expertise. You have a story about what this moment is doing to the future of your field. You have colleagues, communities, professional networks, and people who care about the same things you do.

The researchers in the 2026 study mentioned above were already finding their own ways to respond. Some contacted their elected representatives. Some participated in protests or organized events. Others focused on educating the public, talking with their professional networks, or simply learning how to become better advocates. The important thing is finding your lane—and knowing you don’t have to stand in it alone.

Early career scientists and experts have a major stake in what that future becomes. You shouldn’t have to spend the beginning of your career fighting to preserve the opportunities that allowed generations before you to build theirs. But you also don’t have to simply watch those opportunities disappear.

Whatever your lane looks like, there is a place for you in shaping what comes next.

The Union of Concerned Scientists recently released Unfinished Business, a report analyzing public comments submitted to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on its 2024 “Interim Framework for Advancing Consideration of Cumulative Impacts.” I participated in this work and co-authored the report.

One lesson from that process stands out: the conversation about cumulative impacts needs to reach beyond the communities and the professionals who have traditionally been part of it.

Two constituencies, in particular, deserve much more attention: labor and public health practitioners. Workers—including unionized and blue-collar workers—experience cumulative exposures in their workplaces, homes, and communities. Public health practitioners, from policy implementers to doulas, see how those exposures translate into health consequences across a person’s life.

Bringing these perspectives into the conversation is not simply about expanding the list of stakeholders. It is about expanding what we are able to see—and, ultimately, what we are able to do.

Cumulative impacts helps us see the whole picture

Cumulative impacts assessment is a way to understand what is happening to people in a particular place over time by looking at multiple sources of burden and harm. After all, people do not experience environmental, health, economic, and social conditions one at a time.

Members of a community may be dealing with air pollution, flooding, heavy truck traffic, inadequate green space, housing instability, displacement, and human health concerns all at the same time . A worker may encounter exposures on the job that are compounded by conditions at home and in the neighborhood where they live.

Through a cumulative impacts approach, we can see these conditions together, and how they influence and compound each other.

That fuller picture helps us answer an important set of questions:

What needs to be done differently? Who needs to act? And how can their actions reinforce one another?

Changing conditions rarely depends on a single agency, program, or decision. It requires a constellation of partners—regulators, community organizations, elected and Tribal officials, public health practitioners, scientists, planners, environmental and justice organizations, labor, industry, philanthropy, academics, and others—to act within their respective authorities while working toward shared outcomes.

In this sense, cumulative impacts is not simply an assessment tool.

It can be a roadmap for coordinated action.

From a government-centered model to a constellation of partners

Much of our policy infrastructure remains government-centered. Agencies identify problems, develop programs, issue permits, enforce requirements, and allocate resources. Those functions remain essential. But many of the conditions that shape people’s lives cannot be changed by government alone. Effective implementation requires a broader constellation of actors, each bringing different knowledge, authority, resources, and experience.

The challenge, therefore, is not simply to explain cumulative impacts to these constituencies. It is to frame this approach in language that connects with what each constituency is trying to accomplish.

• For regulators, the entry point may be better decisions and better implementation of existing legal and policy mandates: Cumulative impacts gives agencies a practical way to translate existing mandates into better-informed decisions.
• For community organizers, the entry point is power, lived experience, and accountability: Cumulative impacts makes visible what communities already know—harms rarely occur one at a time.
• For community members, CI can give them a way to intervene in more specific ways. It says: Your community’s experience is evidence, and it matters.
• For elected officials, CI can help connect seemingly separate issues and make public investments and rules more strategic.
• For Tribal governments, cumulative impacts assessment can support the protection of people, places, resources, and ways of life—but the framework must be grounded in Tribal authority, knowledge, and priorities, rather than treating Tribes simply as another stakeholder.
• For scientists and technical experts, CI provides a framework for integrating quantitative, qualitative, spatial, temporal, and community-generated evidence.
• For public health practitioners, the entry point is prevention and population health: Health is shaped by exposures that accumulate across places and over time.
• For planners and local governments, CI can illuminate how land-use and infrastructure decisions interact—and help avoid adding new burdens to places already carrying disproportionate ones.
• And for industry and regulated entities, understanding cumulative conditions early can improve project planning, reduce conflict, and create a clearer basis for identifying feasible mitigation and community benefits.

Different entry points. Different language.

But one shared objective: better decisions that lead to better outcomes.

Without workers, nothing works

One constituency deserves particular attention: workers and organized labor.

Workers see conditions in ways that may escape the notice of other decision makers. They experience exposures at work, but those exposures do not stop at the workplace gate. Working conditions interact with housing, transportation, environmental exposures, wages, scheduling, job security, and conditions in the communities where workers live.

Cumulative impacts provide a framework for seeing those connections.

That means asking questions such as:

• How do specific workplace exposures interact with broader environmental exposures?
• How do job quality and working conditions affect overall health and resilience?
• How will changes in energy, transportation, climate, and industrial systems affect workers as well as communities?
• Do workers have a meaningful voice in decisions about new technologies, facilities, closures, redevelopment, and environmental protections?
• When an industry changes, what happens to the workers and communities that depend on it?

This is where cumulative impacts connects directly to the idea of a just transition.

We should not ask only whether an industry or facility is environmentally harmful. We should also ask: What happens to workers and communities when we change it—and who participates in designing what comes next?

Workers experience cumulative impacts, too.

Protecting the environment and protecting workers are not competing goals. They are both part of building healthy communities and good jobs.

Public health puts people in the picture

Public health offers another essential entry point. Environmental conditions become health conditions. Exposures accumulate across places and over time, and the consequences may appear differently across populations and across a person’s life course. A cumulative impacts approach can help public health practitioners connect those dots and identify opportunities for prevention.

This matters because public policy is one of the few mechanisms we have for changing the underlying conditions that shape health at a population level. People with greater resources may be better positioned to protect themselves from some risks—to move, purchase cleaner technologies, access better housing, or obtain specialized services. But individual strategies cannot substitute for effective public policy.

Changing the conditions that produce harm requires collective action and implemented policy. And while those harms may fall most quickly and most severely on some communities, the underlying conditions ultimately affect all of us.

From assessment to an integrated package of action

This is why I believe we need to shift the conversation about cumulative impacts from “What is CI?” to “How do we use CI?”

CI should not end with an assessment, a map, a report, or another layer of analysis.

The real test is what happens next.

Suppose an assessment identifies a community experiencing a high and disproportionate burden. The response might include:

• restrictions on new industrial sources;
• zero-emission truck corridors;
• lead abatement and asthma prevention programs;
• expansion of urban tree canopy;
• preservation of affordable housing;
• local hiring and green workforce development; and
• a community oversight board.

These actions may sit in different policy domains and may require different decision makers and sources of funding. But the cumulative impacts assessment can help show why they must be part of the same strategy.

That is the opportunity. Cumulative impacts can become a bridge among environmental protection, public health, housing, infrastructure, economic development, workforce policy, and community power. It can help us move from isolated interventions to integrated strategies. And it can help us move from identifying burdens to actually changing the conditions that produce them.

The next step is implementation

The future of cumulative impacts work should not be defined solely by how sophisticated our assessments become.

It should be defined by whether those assessments help communities, governments, workers, Tribes, public health practitioners, and other partners make different decisions—and whether those decisions produce measurable improvements in people’s lives.

That requires a broader conversation, a broader set of partners, and language that speaks to what each partner can contribute.

Cumulative impacts gives us a way to see the whole picture. The challenge now is to use that picture to act.

America’s global leadership in science has been built over decades through bipartisan investments in research, universities, and a federal workforce of scientists, physicians, and public health experts whose work has led to major medical advances and protection against disease.

This foundation is now being weakened, with thousands of federal scientists and public health professionals having been jettisoned by the Trump administration during the past year and a half, along with reductions in funding and the elimination of vital programs, research grants and clinical trials.

The costs of cutting American science are significant and will result in fewer life-saving treatments, diminished disease surveillance, slower responses to public health emergencies, reduced food and drug safety, and a declining ability to protect Americans from threats we cannot yet foresee.

One of the most alarming consequences that cannot easily be repaired is the loss of scientific talent and expertise that has taken decades to build up—a major brain drain of accumulated experience and leadership that has disappeared.

Between September 2024 and May 2026, the arbitrary workforce cutbacks totaled 21.6% at the National Institutes of Health, 22.2% at the Food and Drug Administration, 28.1% at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 35.3% at the National Science Foundation, and 72.1% at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, according to analysis of data from the Office of Personnel Management. This loss of staffing includes senior leadership positions at many of these agencies, including the CDC and the NIH, where a majority of the top jobs have no permanent officials.

At the same time, morale at public health agencies has plummeted, with the Partnership’s Public Employee Viewpoint Survey showing that Department of Health and Human Services, where most of the public health agencies are located, registered an employee engagement score of just 20.4 out of 100 last year, placing it among the lowest-scoring large agencies.

This is because the day-to-day of the HHS employee has shifted from working to improve the health of Americans to censoring ideas, excluding already marginalized groups from the benefits of NIH programs, and endangering the American public. For many, whether to stay at the agency has become an impossible choice: abandon their mission and careers or risk degrading their integrity.

In addition, the Partnership analysis of USA spending data shows that project grant funding from public health and disease prevention agencies fell by 11.1% during fiscal year 2025. Even more striking, research and development contract funding from these agencies dropped by 49.4%. And at NIH, accounting changes—a shift to multiyear or forward funding, which puts the full grant amount on the government’s books in year one, instead of year-by-year as in the past—has resulted in NIH funding 24% fewer new research studies in 2025, with fewer scientists receiving project grants compared to 2024. All these NIH cuts also disproportionately affected women and racial, ethnic, and gender minority scientists who were already underrepresented in research.

When federal agencies lose scientists, physicians, epidemiologists, statisticians, and laboratory experts—and when medical research and public health funding is cut—the effects ripple throughout the entire scientific ecosystem.

The loss of this expertise has been accompanied by fewer research projects, fewer partnerships with universities and medical centers, fewer clinical studies, and fewer opportunities for scientific innovation, all of which will take many years and enormous resources to recover from, if recovery is even possible. It also has meant fewer experts monitoring emerging health threats before they become national crises. Another pandemic isn’t a matter of politics, it is just a matter of time.

Science often succeeds quietly. Vaccines prevent illnesses that never occur, food inspections stop outbreaks before families become sick, researchers identify dangerous pathogens before they spread widely, and drug reviewers ensure medicines reaching patients are both safe and effective. When prevention is weakened, the consequences eventually become painfully visible.

The recent outbreaks of cyclosporiasis, the resurgence of measles, the outbreak of hantavirus aboard a cruise ship, as well as the spread of Ebola in Africa remind us of the dangers we face as well as the importance of both having the ability to prevent, identify, and halt infectious disease outbreaks—responsibilities that have become more challenging with reduced staffing and fewer experts.

In the long term, the significant loss of scientific expertise and federal support will be measured in discoveries and medical advances never made, lives that might have been saved, and a nation less prepared for whatever public health challenge comes next.

The declining federal investment in science also will have a major impact on American economic competitiveness and our national security. Discoveries originating in federally supported laboratories have fueled biotechnology, pharmaceutical innovation, and countless medical advances that have improved lives, strengthened the economy and made America the world’s leading destination for scientific talent.

This American leadership is now being undermined, and rebuilding a lost generation of scientific expertise and investment will be far more difficult than dismantling it.

We should be unimpressed. Acting on this promise is overdue. Opportunities have risen, and they have deferred or demurred. The time has come to call their bluffs.    

For starters, these claims to care are just that: words, not promises. No single politician or regulatory agency, neither federal nor state, has the authority to keep all the costs from data centers out of consumers’ electric bills. However, the utilities and the data centers could address this head-on through their actions and protect consumers.  I assure you plenty of opportunities have sailed past without that happening. (It’s been nearly a year since I wrote about this “consensus” of concern, and little has been changed.) But now a case out of Maryland could finally shake the table.  

Pledges on pollution 

Before we get into the dark and murky world of how utility costs work their way into consumer rates and bills, it’s important to consider Big Tech’s push for  dirty energy choices and the obstacles deliberately enacted by data center companies to block informed decision-making. These controversies are capturing public attention, though the near-zero transparency from data centers themselves feels ironic given their branding as “information technologies.”  

Before these promises of consumer protection, companies set carbon goals. Amazon was a founder of the Climate Pledge, but now the headlines are “The Single Largest Pollution Source In The USA Going To Be An Amazon AI Data Center.”  “Net zero” now seems to describe the amount of information, not the carbon, emitted by data centers’ energy plans. 

In 2023, voluntary clean energy pledges were led by Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft. But now we see Microsoft’s Chief Sustainability Officer explaining that “In 2020, Microsoft leaders referred to our [net-zero carbon] sustainability goals as a moonshot, and nearly five years later, we have had to acknowledge that the moon has gotten further away.” 

Running from climate responsibility makes no sense, given the enormous costs from continued burning of fossil fuels, projections from UCS on long-term cost savings from clean energy, strategies for adding renewables to power data centers, and the actual way Texas has handled rising demand from data centers with wind, solar plus storage.  

Our fights in the state regulatory reviews focus on:  

• Requiring data centers to disclose clean energy plans. 
• Prioritizing data centers with the most robust clean energy plans. 
• Keeping data centers accountable for their commitments. 

Pledges on costs 

While the data center companies and utilities seem to abandon climate goals, they have rolled out a variety of promises under the cover of a “Ratepayer Protection Pledge.” UCS experts dig through regulatory filings, transmission plans, and the arguments written by utilities, data center companies, and power plant owners every day. What are we finding? There are undisclosed deals for data centers and there are half-measures for consumers. We need the regulatory agencies that referee the arguments about who actually pays to call these bluffs. 

We have found, over and over, utilities and data companies arguing that the state regulators should not adjust who pays the costs brought by data center connections and increased need for power plants. For example, Microsoft argued in Illinois they should not be required to sign binding commitments to pay for the costs they cause.  This was after utility ComEd expressed concern about the huge demands from data centers.  

So, ComEd proposed requiring a security deposit from new data centers to ensure they get paid. Since the utility is always going to be paid, this helps recoup the costs caused by data centers that would be passed other ratepayers if the data center business fails. However, this didn’t change the practice of spreading to all customers the costs caused by the new data centers. Thus this is a half-measure, only addressing the risk that new these customers like Microsoft actually pay their bills.  

This safety-net for the utility is a repeating practice, with no actual cost-saving impact for ratepayers. ComEd’s parent company, Exelon, made related requests at the federal level. And yet, in those filings, nothing has changed to the existing practice of putting the transmission costs caused by new data centers into everyone else’s rates. In fact, Exelon says in its agreement with Amazon and other data centers that it will keep pursuing this spreading of costs.  

My work digging through just the grid upgrades to connect data centers in eight states found $4.6 billion in 2024 and $3.1 billion in 2025 committed by utilities, in full knowledge these costs will be paid by all their customers. More transmission costs caused by the same data centers, described below, are being challenged by the Maryland Office of People’s Counsel, the state consumer advocate. 

State regulatory efforts may exacerbate these harms 

The “move fast, break things” culture of Silicon Valley isn’t the approach utilities—or their regulators—take.   The unwillingness of regulators to push back and do more than the utilities’ proposals is extending the problem of costs falling on consumers rather than ending it.  

Perhaps the most egregious utility response is Entergy building 10 new, full-size gas-burning power plants for the data center Meta is building in Louisiana. Entergy relies on overly optimistic assumptions to justify claims that the costs put on consumers will be eventually offset by benefits. When UCS and allies sought relevant information regarding the data center’s energy demand and permanent job creation in Entergy’s proposal, Entergy and Meta refused to answer and fought a subpoena.   

UCS has also tried to get the Wisconsin Public Service Commission to wrangle data center recklessness better. The rules there don’t require real planning to lower costs to supply data centers. The Wisconsin utility We Energies announced delays in the retirement of the Oak Creek coal plant units multiple times.  

The Trump administration is undermining cost-saving measures 

The Trump Administration has been seeking a lot of attention for its data center policies and promises. When it comes to keeping costs lower, some of these are only rhetorical, and some are harmful.  

Three times (so far) this year, the White House has organized large, public events about consumer protections from data center costs. First, there was a statement of principles from the National Energy Dominance Council and 13 state governors in January 2026; the second, an original presidential proclamation of a Ratepayer Protection Pledge in March 2026; and then in July 2026 a new release of “Rate Payer Protection Pledge” with more signatures by company leaders.  

And yet, over the same period, the administration has made it harder to meet these goals by blocking renewable energy projects, reversing offshore wind leases, and cancelling clean energy grants—all of which would contribute more energy supply and help keep costs to consumers stable.  

How this falls on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission 

There is no mistaking that the federal government’s tools for utility consumer protection are found at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). In a dramatic rollout of supports for data centers, FERC explained: “To fulfill its responsibility, the Commission must act to address the risk of cost shifting among transmission customers for the service to…[data centers].”  

Note that FERC has not taken any of the opportunities previously available to them to stop utilities from raising customers’ rates to pay the costs caused by data centers. FERC agreed to utilities’ requests that there be protections for the utilities, like the one described above for ComEd that requires a data center pays the bills that the utility sends them. That is, for all their bluster about transparency and cost shifting, billions of costs will still go into the rates, and ratepayers will still have rate increases. 

So, after letting the opportunity pass, FERC is changing their tune. They have taken up the battle flag, calling for this exact reform in a series of “Show Cause” orders directed at utilities in the regional power grids from the Great Plains to the Northeast, plus California. However, without explanation, FERC omitted any mention or attention to protecting consumers in the Southeast and most of the West. Also, I see no guidance in the “Show Cause Orders” for what levels of protections FERC expects utilities to enact, and no discussions about upending the old practices.   

In fact, every indication so far from the federal government is that consumer protection is not happening. Fortunately, we have an opportunity to call the bluff. The Maryland Office of People’s Counsel filed a complaint at FERC, calling for them to separate the costs from Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania data centers that have been falling on Maryland’s and other states’ consumers. 

The case Maryland brings 

The Maryland Office of People’s Counsel is the consumer protection agency in Maryland and is active in utility rate-setting cases. This case stems from the costs caused by utilities in neighboring states that committed to data centers in 2022, 2024, and 2025. These utilities’ actions caused commitments totaling “more than $22 billion in transmission capital expenditures for baseline projects, overwhelmingly driven by projected data center load growth.”  Their filing also cites UCS reporting on additional  transmission costs from data centers from 2024 and 2025 that added $7.7 billion more onto customer bills from another utility process. 

This is a pivotal opportunity to assign the costs back to the sources that caused them: data centers. The existing rules would spread the costs across the region make sense where the growth in demand is more evenly spread. That is the assumption that has supported the existing rules, and that assumption needs to be examined.  

This is the same as what FERC said June 18 in the “Show Cause Orders:” “In particular, we are concerned about: (1) transparency regarding the assignment of Network Upgrades, and their associated costs; and 2) [data center] customers are ultimately responsible for costs incurred to provide transmission service, including the cost of Network Upgrades.”  

This is such a rare case and a real chance for change: the murky, hard to find details are actually known, and the needed reforms align perfectly with  the goals the government has announced. 

This should be such an easy decision for the regulatory body to put the costs on the parties that cause them. If FERC took this step, then the state regulators could put these costs on the data centers—and then data centers would actually have to pay for what they need. In fact, state regulators don’t need to wait- each rate case is a fresh opportunity to sort and assign costs previously lumped together. Even quicker, the utilities and data companies could adhere to their pledges, and stop the cost-shifting before it starts. 

The standards it cannot set, the deadlines it cannot hold, the public it cannot consult, the experts it cannot employ, the grants it cannot fund, the enforcement it cannot conduct: for EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, it has been a relentless pursuit of cannot. Or rather, cannot for the people, in service of can for a select polluting few.  

Nowhere is this clearer than in all the ways EPA is suddenly arguing that it cannot protect the public from a surge in pollution due to the rapid build-out of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven data centers and the increasing amounts of coal, gas, and diesel resources now being relied on to power them. So much so, in fact, that Administrator Zeldin has made slashing safeguards for AI-enabling infrastructure one of the five core pillars of his agency’s entire agenda for President Trump’s second term. 

This ethos of “cannot” is a staggering perversion of EPA’s mission. It is also incredibly consequential. 

Exactly as EPA is attempting to remove itself from the business of protecting the public, the public is being confronted by a massive onslaught of new fossil fuel-fired power plants, alongside an increasing reliance on existing gas and coal plants.  

The consequences for people’s health and the environment are severe: these are heavily polluting sources, yet the administration is frantically working to free them from basic pollution control requirements and shield them from public view. And because of the long lifetime of this infrastructure, if the Trump EPA gets its way, the result will be vastly more pollution today and for decades to come.  

Power sector scene-setting 

Right now, all across the country, tech companies are on the hunt for power. They are seeking enormous amounts of electricity to run energy-intensive new data centers, each equivalent in electricity use to the needs of entire cities. As these data centers rapidly hoover up any remaining surpluses of electricity supply, attention has turned to building out new sources of generation.  

Renewable resources, especially wind and solar generation alongside energy storage, are overwhelmingly the fastest and cheapest resources to deploy. Or at least, they should be.  

However, the Trump administration is actively, often illegally, holding back their deployment and antagonistically increasing their costs, while at the same time heavily pressuring companies to embrace the use of fossil fuels. As a result, while there are still large amounts of renewables and storage being added to the system, there is nowhere near as much as there could or should be—and there is a lot more new gas, both on the grid and, increasingly, off. Moreover, demand for gas plants is now so high, and regulatory accountability around resulting pollution is now so low, that it’s not “just” typical gas plants being built, either: it’s also far less efficient, far heavier polluting jet engines, reciprocating internal combustion engines, and what-should-be-back-up generators running full-out, full-time.  

And here’s what makes this bad situation even worse: the slashing of pollution standards is an entirely worthless dealing away of the public interest.  

Beyond the wrongness in principle, there’s also the wrongness in underlying fact. The thing that energy-seeking Big Tech is constrained by is rapid access to power, not cost of power. Their willingness to pay is incredibly high. If fossil-based power plants were rightly held accountable for their pollution harms, the tech companies would pay for plants employing pollution controls. They’d also, of course, be likelier to avoid more gas to start. And for the Trump administration, that’s the catch. 

It’s not about AI. It’s not about Big Tech. It’s about fossil fuels. More specifically, it’s about making fossil fuels win and renewable resources lose, as much for the benefit of special-interest polluters as for the chance to advance a grievance-born, anti-renewables agenda.  

How the Trump EPA is making it easier for data center-related power plants to pollute 

Here are just a few of the ways that EPA is wielding “cannot” to withdraw from the business of holding tech companies to account for the surging pollution generated by their energy-intensive, increasingly fossil-powered data centers. Staggeringly, these lists are not exhaustive. 

Rolling back regulations. Key regulatory rollbacks include:  

• Attempting to strip EPA’s basic ability to regulate power plant carbon dioxide emissions, not just repeal the standards set to limit those emissions (though the agency also proposed to cut those, too). 
• Dramatically weakening standards limiting emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) from new gas turbines. 
• Fully striking down rules that strengthened the regulation of mercury and other hazardous air pollutants from coal plants. 
• Proposing to significantly weaken regulations covering toxic wastewater discharged from coal plants and required handling of coal ash. 

Introducing new loopholes, delays, and exemptions. Where EPA has not been able to fully strike or weaken regulations—or to do so on as fast a timeline as it would like—it has adopted other approaches to achieve a similar effect, including: 

• Incorporating new loopholes to enable entire tranches of polluters to slip through; in the recent NOx rule, this included certain exemptions such as for temporary turbines and low-use turbines, as well as hard-coding a conditional exemption for an entire class of turbines if the agency lands a triple-bank-shot of a polluter handout.  
• Delaying implementation timelines until the agency can more fully dismantle the underlying regulations, such as for methane standards covering oil and gas operations (meaning the upstream supply of gas for power plants) as well as coal-related regulations.  
• Setting up a plug-and-play process for coal-fired power plants and other toxic polluters to receive a two-year exemption from complying with certain Clean Air Act requirements.  
• Easing restrictions around how and when emergency backup generators can be operated outside of emergency events.  
• Explicitly and proactively declaring that power plants operating in off-grid configurations fall outside of Acid Rain Program coverage.  
• Adopting a position of non-enforcement for regulations that it does not “prioritize,” in alignment with the broader Trump administration’s guidance to this effect. 

Cutting out the public. At the same time as EPA is rolling back regulations and polluter coverage, it is also attempting to make it harder for the public to be in the know and able to participate. This includes by: 

• Proposing to shield polluters from public awareness by removing a federal public notice-and-comment requirement for “minor” New Source Review-related pollution permits—which is frequently how data center-related fossil generation projects are classified, despite there being nothing minor about their overall pollution footprints.  
• Proposing to make it easier for large sources of pollution, including data center-related projects, to be built before the public has a say, by allowing significant facility construction to occur before actually obtaining a permit.  
• Repeatedly working to hide data around the magnitude, and impacts, of health- and climate-harming pollution, including by proposing to repeal requirements for polluters to measure and report carbon emissions; stopping the use of the social cost of carbon, which translates carbon emissions into economic impacts; and stopping the quantification of public health impacts from changing levels of key pollutants of concern, including particulate matter and ozone. 

This is a staggering array of actions—and it’s only a subset of what EPA is doing to further clear the path for polluting data center infrastructure, alongside so many other polluting industries. Furthermore, EPA’s work is only a subset of the broader administration’s pro-polluter, anti-accountability agenda.  

The consequences of these rollbacks will reverberate for decades 

In the absolute best of cases, the data center buildout would be shaped by an unequivocal prioritization of the public interest, intentional and long-range planning, rigorous standards, meaningful transparency, and a wholesale commitment to accountability—and even then, it would pose a massive challenge to navigate responsibly and effectively.  

Suffice it to say: now is not the best of cases. Indeed, across every one of these issues, the Trump administration is instead careening toward the very worst of cases.  

As a result, communities across the country are being asked to bear entirely avoidable harms and costs, in the here and now and for decades to come. This unchecked, fossil-heavy data center bender is on track to leave the country with a staggering hangover, full stop.  

What shameful, profligate waste.  

Yet there’s another implication, too. Even in the best-case scenario, not one of those interventions would begin to contend with addressing the societal risks and harms, nor capturing the potential opportunities, arising from the deployment of AI as enabled by these data centers. Addressing that gap should be one of the nation’s, and the world’s, foremost issues of the day. But because of the actions of the Trump administration, attention and expertise are being diverted to contend with this entirely preventable, entirely self-inflicted catastrophe instead. 

The necessary recourse, the only recourse, is for people to keep pushing back. To push back against disastrously consequential and inequitable regulatory proposals, to push back against lawmakers enabling this pro-polluter agenda, to push back against reckless and unaccountable projects.  

To push back against an EPA that repeatedly asserts it cannot for the American people, and instead demand an EPA that can.  

This scheme keeps huge chunks of clean energy offline, with real consequences. Here’s where things stand, by the numbers: 

• 5 = number of offshore wind developers involved in the “settlements” 
• 12 = number of leases involved 
• $3.9 billion = amount of US taxpayer money being used for the buyouts 
• 21,000 = megawatts (MW) of potential offshore wind capacity lost without the lease areas 
• 6–8 million = approximate number of households the lost offshore wind capacity could have served, at a minimum 

Add to those figures the number of jobs that aren’t being created as a result of the buyouts, and the economic development that evaporates: a single 1000 MW project could generate more than 3,000 jobs and some $9 billion in US economic output. Also lost in these transactions is the potential for offshore wind to help homes and businesses manage or even cut their energy costs with stably priced power for the long term, while displacing dirty fossil fuel generation and improving the resilience of regional power grids in the face of extreme weather. 

Broken leases, broken laws? 

There’s another important figure that should be on the list in considering this woefully misguided push to take offshore wind off the table: the number of laws that the administration has broken in these deals.  

That last number is still to be determined, but some of those potential laws are the basis of suits against the administration that have been, or are about to be, filed by states that are counting on offshore wind to meet their energy and climate needs. One such case is New York et al., filed in June by New York Attorney General (AG) Letitia James and the attorneys general of six other Northeast states in response to the first of these buyouts. That “deal” involved two leases held by TotalEnergies, one off New York and the other off North Carolina. In July, based on two subsequent buyouts, eight states in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, led by Massachusetts AG Andrea Campbell, filed “Notices of Intent to Sue”. California AG Rob Bonta similarly announced the state’s intent to sue over two of the deals involving leases off its shores. 

The illegality of the buyouts is also the subject of various oversight pushes by members of Congress. Those include communications from the Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and multiple communications from the Ranking Members of the Natural Resources and Judiciary Committees of the House of Representatives, Jared Huffman (D-CA) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD), respectively. Other members of Congress followed on with additional questions about some of the deals. 

Here is a taste of some of these laws—and how they may have been broken.  

Administrative Procedure Act – “Arbitrary and capricious” actions don’t fly 

Congress passed the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) in the mid-20^th century “to improve the administration of justice by prescribing fair administrative procedure.” These buyout deals have failed that test in many ways, according to the AGs and members of Congress. 

In their complaint in New York et al., for example, the attorneys general contend that the TotalEnergies New York lease cancellation “is arbitrary and capricious, is not in accordance with law, and occurred without observance of procedure as required by law.” 

If that “arbitrary and capricious” phrase seems familiar, it’s because it is one that has shown up often in court decisions that have struck down other illegal Trump administration actions. Those include the cases involving the “stop work” orders that the administration issued in December 2025 against the five offshore wind projects under construction at the time. The judges for each of the five cases allowed the projects to get back to work after ruling that the administration had shown no good cause for the stoppages. 

In the New York et al. case, plaintiffs similarly argue that “Defendants failed to (1) provide a reasoned explanation for cancelling the Lease; (2) explain their change in position or account for New York’s reliance interests; (3) address alternative means of achieving their objectives; or (4) provide a genuine justification for their actions.” The filing explains in detail each piece of the administration’s actions that appear arbitrary and capricious, and each piece of the other alleged violations of the APA. 

The letter from Reps. Huffman and Raskin, too, points to the APA, noting that the timing of some of the lease buyout processes suggest that the Department of the Interior (DOI) may have illegally relied on a rationale that they didn’t actually have at the time they made their decision: “DOI’s excuse of national security to cancel offshore wind leases may have been fabricated to justify the deal after it was already sealed,” whereas under the APA, “an agency cannot rely on a justification it did not actually have when it made its decision.” 

National Environmental Policy Act – Impacts and alternatives have to be considered  

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires that “all federal agencies … prepare detailed statements assessing the environmental impact of and alternatives to major federal actions significantly affecting the environment.” The statements can be either environmental assessments (EAs) or, for larger projects, environmental impact statements (EISs). These reviews have to provide the opportunity for public comment and consider alternatives.  

Aas the New York et al. plaintiffs point out, the DOI did not prepare an EA or EIS, did not include opportunities for the public to comment, nor did they give consideration of alternatives to proposed actions. Given that the deal in question involves getting rid of a large quantity of offshore wind energy, with all of the implications for the environment that would entail, plaintiffs suggest it is clearly “a major federal action requiring Interior Defendants to consider the impacts of and alternatives to their action.”  

Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act – Laws don’t stop at the water’s edge  

The Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA), which governs how the federal government manages the seabed off our coasts, features prominently in each of these legal and oversight efforts. The plaintiffs in Massachusetts et al., for example, point out that to cancel a lease under OCSLA, the DOI would be required “to hold a hearing and specifically find that continuing the lease would likely cause serious harm to life, property, national security, or the environment, and further determine that the benefits of cancellation outweigh the benefits of allowing the lease to continue.”  

That didn’t happen. 

As the Mass. et al., New York et al., and California AGs each point out, the law also requires coordination with the governor of any state on any action that “has a direct and significant effect on the outer Continental Shelf or its development.”  

That likewise didn’t happen.  

California underscored the importance of OCSLA for ensuring that the state “gets a say in the offshore wind leasing program and prevent corrupt backroom deals.” 

Judgment Fund Act – The settlement fund isn’t a slush fund 

One of the biggest apparent legal deficiencies of the buyout deals is the source of the funds. The Judgment Fund Act provides resources for settlements coming out of lawsuits or likely lawsuits against the United States. 

The New York et al. plaintiffs note that the settlement fund is for use for compromise settlements between “adverse parties”—and that in this case, there hadn’t been any lawsuit against the administration by the offshore wind leaseholder. As Sen. Whitehouse notes, there was “no evidence that Total had filed any claim in any forum against DOI or any other agency of the US government,” and no evidence of any imminent litigation.  

Sen. Whitehouse and others also point out that the judgment fund is usable only in situations where there aren’t options—which appears not to be the case here, given that OCSLA includes provisions for canceling leases and potentially providing compensation. Reps. Huffman and Raskin state that the Total deal “violates federal law because it does not adhere to the congressionally determined formula for calculating compensation for cancelled leases,” and that “OCSLA is the governing statute in this case.” 

Another challenge to the legality of the deals based on the Judgment Fund is the apparent lack of serious Department of Justice (DOJ) involvement, which would be a prerequisite for tapping the Judgment Fund. Per Reps. Huffman and Raskin, the “only public role” in the Total case for DOJ was a quote from then-US Attorney General Pam Bondi in the press release announcing the deal. 

Antideficiency Act – Agencies can’t spend money that’s not theirs  

The money piece of the buyouts also brings in another important law. The Antideficiency Act “prohibits federal agencies from obligating or expending federal funds in advance or in excess of an appropriation.”—ssentially, agencies can’t spend more than they’ve been given. Sen. Whitehouse points out that “no relevant bureau or office within DOI has sufficient funds to pay Total the nearly $1 billion it has been promised.” 

The New York et al. plaintiffs similarly claim that the NY lease buyout is “in excess of statutory authority” because there’s no law that would authorize them to enter into such a “sham settlement agreement to unlawfully cancel an offshore wind lease and redirect the money paid for the lease to a separate, unauthorized use favored by the President”—in these cases, investment in fossil fuel projects. 

On the broader issue of the “settlement” in the absence of a judicial proceeding, and the source and use of the funds, the letter from Reps. Huffman and Raskin further spell out all kinds of ways this approach, if legal, could be used—including supplanting oil leases with renewable energy investments, for example. “The only requirements would be a hypothetical thread, a side agreement, and a check drawn from a permanent, uncapped federal account that Congress never authorized for this purpose.”  

Under those circumstances, they say, the Judgment Fund could become “the ultimate political slush fund.” The Antideficiency Act “exists to prevent exactly this kind of executive waste, fraud, and abuse.” 

And more 

If this recitation of legal impediments makes the likely illegality of the Trump administration’s actions seem readily apparent, that notion may not be lost on the administration either. These agreements include explicit clauses that claim courts can’t review these agreements in most cases.  

Reps. Huffman and Raskin say in their letter to Total’s CEO that including that language is “not only legally ineffective but almost certainly unconstitutional,” and that its inclusion “suggests that DOI and you both knew this deal was indefensible” and “is itself evidence of consciousness of wrongdoing.”  

What’s next 

Despite the apparent illegality of each of the deals, the most recent “settlement” may not be the last of them, given how enamored the administration seems to be with this approach. That makes legal and oversight efforts like these all the more important.  

On the judicial front, New York et al. is likely to be followed by lawsuits from the group led by Massachusetts and from California based on the Intent to Sue notices, once each has passed the 60-day waiting period required by OCSLA. Other suits may follow. Congressional investigations in parallel with those efforts can help draw more attention to everything lost if the Trump transactions stick. Recently introduced legislation could also get those offshore wind leases back into circulation. 

All of the filings and documents point to one thing: a strong suspicion, based in law, that this scheme is yet another example of the Trump administration using a wrecking ball without regard to process or to legality. Or to the workers, households, businesses, and communities hurt by these reckless decisions. And, again: all with US taxpayer money.

President Trump’s strong authoritarian tendencies have hit the US energy sector, as they have other areas of the economy. For offshore wind, establishing which or how many of these various laws his administration is actually breaking in these buyout deals is key to stopping this brazen attempt to cut the legs out from under a key source of clean renewable energy. 

Offshore wind is too powerful a source—of jobs, energy savings and resilience, community development, and clean renewable energy—for it not to be allowed to live up to its potential.  

Thanks to UCS Schneider Clean Energy Fellow Riya Bhatia for the research help for this post.

There is also a general lack of transparency by the industry as a whole; Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other tech companies often work through subsidiaries to build data centers, “masking their presence and revealing little about the resources that the facilities consume.” There is no central database providing information for the numbers of data centers currently in operation, under construction, or in the planning stages. And there is no accountability for data center developers and utilities who may see the current landscape as an opportunity for profit.  

For our own data center analysis, UCS used electricity demand projections developed by Evolved Energy Research (which itself draws from a database of existing data centers from Baxtel), and we supplemented this data with news reports about announced projects and utility filings from both public sources and private databases. Private (read, costly) databases such as S&P Global and BloombergNEF have information about individual projects, but these databases are not complete.

We additionally made assumptions about which proposals might be built using data from an Independent System Operator (ISO) and from data purchased from S&P Global. This was not a straightforward process and was in the end both time consuming and costly. Ultimately the electricity demand projections were in the range of other bottom-up projections from national labs and industry studies. And after all of this effort, our projections quickly became outdated as the data center market is rapidly evolving, underscoring the need for both dedicated and transparent reporting by data center developers.  

Without access to precise information on where data centers may be built and how they are operated, utility planners, grid operators, federal, regional, state and local agencies and researchers end up using their best guess at approximations and projections of how much electricity is required at specific places and times, which could lead to inaccurate conclusions, and risks saddling ratepayers and utilities with unneeded costly fossil fuel plants – not what you want when you are making investment decisions that could last for 30 years or more.  

Inaccurate data about electricity demand leads to poor planning of infrastructure expansion. Over-building leads to higher short-term costs and heat-trapping emissions, while under-building leads to reliability issues. Long-term, both lead to even more costs when the problems must inevitably be fixed. 

Developers are rushing to build data centers and are asking utilities to keep up with their proposed increased power requirements. This is a particular problem in many parts of the country;  in states that UCS studied like Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Louisiana, and California, state planning for utilities can have additional challenges (such as having no state Integrated Resource Planning (IRP) process, interstate electricity trading that could lead to even more fossil electricity generation, or states that fast tracked electricity infrastructure for data centers with minimal planning).

The lack of transparency and accountability around data centers in these states and others compounds potential problems with poor planning: utilities can over-build infrastructure, delay coal plant retirements, and can unnecessarily invest in fossil gas capacity. This is costly to consumers, increases pollution, and negatively impacts the health of communities. Communities are often either not provided with information on data center energy use, water consumption, and pollution produced or are straight up given misinformation about data center impacts. Some data centers are proposed in communities that already experience high levels of pollution from energy generation, potentially exacerbating already existing problems. But the possibility of billion dollar investments by data center operators in communities and the lack of planning can cause local decisionmakers to overlook very real risks.  

These policies across many states and at the federal level risk setting us up for a future dependent on fossil fuels. Often, states see data centers as a way to promote local economic growth, spur job creation and increase local tax revenues. State and local governments have been offering data center developers tax discounts and other incentives. These tax breaks have led to massive data center growth in states with larger incentives.

But some states are now beginning to pause (or having the appearance of pausing) and rethink data center-related policies. Texas is seeing a huge loss in state revenue: the Texas governor announced a pause on new data centers for the state Public Utility Commission (PUC) and ERCOT to conduct an audit of projects to be approved, but has allowed the giant Meta $10 billion 1 GW, enough to power 750,000 average US households, data center project to move forward. Minnesota rolled back its data center tax incentives, removing the data center electricity exemption from the state sales tax. Wisconsin removed some data center financing incentives from two municipalities. And New York is the first state to impose a temporary moratorium (through July 2027) on building new data centers of 50 MW or larger until the state has had a chance to evaluate the potential impacts.   

It’s encouraging that these states are slowing down data center development to listen to the concerns of communities, but we also need to do more to ensure a clean, affordable, and healthy electricity system for the electricity load that is imminent. Our recent analysis has shown that the US can meet increased demand from data centers primarily with clean energy while simultaneously phasing down fossil fuels. But we need strong policies to support and accelerate a clean energy transition. And we also need best practices and policy and regulatory changes at the federal, state and regional levels to ensure accountability and smart planning around data centers.  

Increase data center transparency and accountability 

State and federal policymakers need to require that data center developers and utilities be transparent in their contract negotiations and eliminate non-disclosure agreements. There should be public proceedings (with enough notice for communities to make informed decisions) for power purchase agreements and grid interconnections between data centers and utilities. Data centers need to publicly report and be held accountable for their electricity needs, water use, land use, onsite and induced emissions, and other data. Data centers need to be held accountable for any hazardous reliability, environmental, or public health impacts. 

There are some moves at the national level to try to improve data center reporting. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) is moving to require that data centers become registered entities and is currently drafting reliability standards for data centers.  

The NERC draft standards are to establish modeling data requirements, verification, and reporting procedures by data center owners, to ensure that grid operators and utility planners have the site data and information they need from data center owners to “plan, monitor, and assess the reliable operation” of the power system, and to have “adequate data available” from data center owners to ensure reliability and resource adequacy. These NERC standards are a good first step, but the information the data center owners are providing to meet these standards are confidential to NERC and are only focused on grid reliability. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) is also working to collect energy usage data from data centers. At the state and local level, there are efforts to prohibit lawmakers from signing NDAs and some state public utility commissions/public service commissions are working to not allow (as happened in Michigan) utilities to connect data centers through ex parte processes. These efforts should be widely adopted and become standard practice for all data center proposals. 

Require utilities to conduct transparent long-term planning to include data centers 

States need to require utilities to create long-term integrated resource plans (IRPs) that include transparent reporting of electricity demand from data centers, including any projected demand increases (this should cover any projected increases in load including data centers, population changes, changes due to electrification, etc.). Currently only 27 states are considering legislation to regulate data centers. It is important to conduct detailed modeling and analysis to make investment decisions for electricity generation to meet both electricity demand and any state climate and clean energy policies.

These plans, and the assumptions that went into the analysis for the IRPs, need to be made public. State regulators need to demonstrate to their communities that investments made in electricity generation are well planned, to minimize the risk of over- or underbuilding the electricity system. Data center developers need to be held accountable for the additional costs to the electricity system due to their increased load. There should be requirements around new data center loads to eliminate speculation so that rate payers are not stuck with the costs of over-building.  

There is a lot of uncertainty if the increase in electricity demand due to data centers is going to continue, or if the AI bubble is going to “pop”. Investments in data centers and AI infrastructure has greatly exceeded data center revenue, which is worrying investors. When the AI bubble bursts we will be stuck with way more electricity generating capacity and other data center infrastructure than we need: investments that are “stranded” and beg the question of who pays the bill. As these IRPs are being developed, utilities should be cautious and need to place more emphasis on near-term projects that have already made significant financial commitments.  

The data center boom is currently outpacing our electricity system’s ability to respond, already driving up electricity rates. Our federal, state and local governments need time to evaluate our complex electricity system, with its aging and polluting infrastructure and increasing electricity demand. We need accurate data enforced through standardized reporting requirements to make informed investment decisions for the size and type of new electricity generating capacity to build, where and when to meet this new demand, to keep electricity costs affordable and to limit the impacts of climate change.

This degree of data transparency must also be extended to water use and other environmental impact reporting. We need good data to develop policies to encourage investments in renewable energy and keep electricity costs affordable. Accurate data is essential for developing smart plans and making informed decisions to provide all consumers with clean affordable power. The first step to ensuring clean and affordable energy for consumers is an informed group of decision-makers that keep AI and utilities accountable for their impacts and investments to our grid.   

New study links emissions from fossil fuel producers to western water crisis 

Water in the western US is defined by widespread scarcity, in part due to a timing mismatch. Most water falls as snow in the winter, is stored as snowpack, and then melts during the warm season, when it can be used, primarily for agriculture. Major feats of engineering like canals, aqueducts, and reservoirs have buffered against this mismatch, enabling industrial agriculture and rapid population growth despite dwindling and overallocated rivers.  

Climate change is adding pressure to an already precarious situation, threatening the livelihoods, ecosystems, and economy of the region. The events of 2026 show the harms that climate change is already inflicting and the threat that unchecked emissions pose to our future.  

First, an extreme March heatwave decimated snowpack, meaning that a huge amount of water melted earlier than usual, and now is not available for the growing season. Of the five major basins in the region, three saw the lowest April 1st snowpack ever recorded , the time of year when snow accumulation historically peaks.  

A recently published paper dubbed these heat events ‘snow-eaters’ because of how they decimate snowpack The study also showed that these heatwaves have increased in frequency and intensity since the mid-1880s. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global authority on consensus climate science, concluded with virtual certainty that extreme heat events are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change, suggesting that heat events which pose major threats to water availability will continue to occur into the future. 

Next, the region’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead—which supplies water to more than 25 million people throughout the western United States—has also hit a new low, falling several inches below the previous record set in 2022.  

While water has always been limited in the western US, these examples highlight the ways fossil-fueled climate change is pushing the system to the brink.   

Our new peer-reviewed research, Wringing the West Dry, highlights how for snowpack, streamflow, and irrigation demand in the Western US, nearly half of the impacts due to climate change between 2014 and 2024 can be traced to emissions from the 122 largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers. This research adds to a growing body of evidence linking major fossil fuel companies—including ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell—to the harms of climate change being experienced by communities around the world, and highlights the important role that scientists can play in informing accountability. 

1. Advance Legally-Relevant Research  

Scientific engagement is a key component of both litigation and legislation that seeks to hold major polluters accountable.  

Attribution science identifies and quantifies the contribution of climate change to global trends, extreme events, and their impacts, allowing scientists to quantify how climate change is directly shaping the lived experience of communities across the world. Source attribution, a subdiscipline and growing field that includes our newly published study, quantifies how specific sources of emissions, sectors, actors, or nations have contributed to climate change and its impacts. Research in this field has traced emissions from the Carbon Majors, the largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers, to their consequences, including global temperature increase, ocean acidification, sea level rise, area burned in forests of the western US, and extreme heatwaves and their impacts.  

In pursuing accountability, attribution evidence goes hand-in-hand with social science and archival research that outlines how major fossil fuel companies deceived the public about climate change, even when their own internal research clearly showed the risks that continued use of their products posed.   

Our recent report, Research Priorities for Climate Litigation, identifies ten other types of research that lawyers need to advance litigation,  extending far beyond climate science. From public health experts to economists to stewards of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, well-communicated scientific information and insights are a critical component of ongoing and future accountability efforts.  

To learn more about how to use your expertise, sign up for the Science Hub for Climate Litigation newsletter and explore our Research on the Record toolkit. 

2. Stand up for science and democracy  

Scientists can be important advocates for evidence-based decision making, especially when it comes to accountability. Scientific research and scientists themselves have come under attack during the second Trump administration, threatening not only the advancement of critical research in the US, but also our ability to hold big polluters accountable. UCS has tracked the explosion of attacks on science, illustrating how sidelining scientists, rolling back regulations on forever chemicals, and degrading infrastructure to monitor and predict extreme weather can harm communities across the country.  

When it comes to climate accountability, the fossil fuel industry and its politically appointed allies are pulling out all the stops to intimidate scientists, manufacture controversy about widely accepted research, and block judges from accessing factual, reliable scientific information about climate change. These attacks follow the same playbook used by powerful industries for decades to distract, discredit, and deny research that threatens their bottom lines.   

In the face of this assault, scientists have stood up to these attacks and made a meaningful difference in resisting and reversing many of the anti-science actions of this administration. UCS has used the legal system to hold this administration accountable, including by securing the dissolution of the sham Climate Working Group led by well-known climate contrarians, and fighting against the administration’s goal of removing factual information from our National Parks.  

Join the movement of scientists pushing back on this administration’s anti-science agenda.  

3. Tell your Congressperson: No immunity for Big Oil  

Amidst these attacks on scientific evidence that can inform climate lawsuits, Big Oil is pursuing an even more brazen strategy to evade accountability: lobbying our elected representatives in Congress to pass immunity legislation, much like the liability waiver Congress passed to protect the gun industry in 2005. This would prevent science from being heard in court and impose barriers to justice for those harmed by the industry’s products and practices.  

Several state legislatures, including Utah, Tennessee, and Oklahoma, have already passed their own versions of liability waivers, and Representative Harriet Hageman and Senator Ted Cruz have introduced legislation on the federal level that, if passed, would eliminate pathways to accountability for the communities most harmed by the consequences of climate change.  

Scientists can reach out to their members of Congress to ensure that communities across the country have access to justice through the courts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for their deception and the harms caused by their products.  

This evocative metaphor is a key part of the oil industry’s narrative about why the state’s gas prices are so volatile. Chevron and its astroturf proxies have spent millions on ads, billboards and direct mail to make sure you hear that the state’s regulatory environment is making it impossible for oil companies to supply fuel at fair prices.  

But what if I told you these companies were disingenuous?  

Well, that is true: the oil industry has spent staggering amounts to proliferate the energy island narrative while simultaneously advocating against bridges to connect the island to the mainland. And the brazenness with which they are wielding their ability to control the supply and, thus, the price of gasoline over consumers would raise the eyebrows of even the most seasoned, jaded Sacramento observer. 

Big oil’s favorite cost-driver  

California has a unique gasoline blend. It is called CARBOB for short (which stands for California Reformulated Gasoline for Oxygenate Blending) and is a much-maligned, oft-cited reason for California’s expensive gasoline. And for good reason.  

Not only is it slightly more expensive to produce, but it also makes the state’s fuel market fragile. Only a small number of mostly in-state refineries make this gasoline on a regular basis. The market power created by the combination of limited CARBOB producers and an inflexible market is a big contributor to the state’s “Mystery Gasoline Surcharge.”  

Other factors are also important, including the control of in-state refining by an ever-shrinking number of companies, control by these same companies over pricing at branded gas stations through restrictive contracts, and other physical and market barriers to competition. According to the latest analysis of the California Division of Petroleum Market Oversight, the resulting Mystery Gas Surcharge is an extra 41 cents per gallon Californians pay at the pump, after adjusting for differences in taxes, fees and other state-specific costs. At major brand stations the surcharge is even higher, 75 cents a gallon, and the cumulative impact of the cost California consumers over $59 billion in extra payments for gasoline between 2015 and 2024.  

In other parts of the country, when a refinery has an unplanned outage or there are global supply constraints, gasoline-sellers can simply bring in fuel from a nearby refinery or ship, and consumers barely notice. 

In California, we pay a serious price at the pump when there’s a supply disruption because our unique gasoline blend is not readily available. It can take weeks after a disruptive event to get California gasoline produced (often in South Korea or India), loaded on to ships, and delivered to the state. Meanwhile, consumers are paying a premium at the pump. 

If gasoline sellers in California had access to an abundant, affordable supply, the state would be more resilient, and consumers would pay less. 

But alas, oil majors want the state to keep clutching California gasoline standards to limit supply and reap in windfall profits. This is a great deal for big oil, but consumers are paying the price at the pump. 

Marginal emission reductions at maximal cost

California’s leadership on gasoline requirements was a crucial part of air quality improvements over the last few decades, as we’ve seen with how much Los Angeles smog has decreased.  

The federal government saw California’s success at reducing toxic air pollution and updated their gasoline regulations three times in the past few decades. Now, California’s gasoline is only marginally cleaner than gas sold in other states.  

Another thing has changed in the decades since California updated its gasoline regulations: the vehicle fleet. Vehicles regulations in California and federally have significantly improved the emissions controls in gas-powered cars.  

So, California’s gasoline is not much cleaner than other abundant, cheaper gasolines and cleaner gasoline only really matters for the emissions of cars made before 2004 when vehicle regulations started being the key driver of emission reductions. 

The state’s unique gasoline blend is more problematic than ever because market consolidation in refining and retail means that problems that harm consumers benefit refiners, and there is not enough competition for the market to fix the problem without making changes that facilitate competition.   

A better way for consumers and the climate

The California Energy Commission (CEC) included a clunkily named, elegantly conceived idea in their 2024 Transportation Fuels Assessment: A Non CARBOB Fee Based Variance. 

The idea is that the state could allow for the sale of the gasoline most other states use with a 25 cent per gallon fee to help with supply constraints. This would stabilize gasoline supply and could put a cap on the premium California drivers pay for their gasoline.  

When the CEC proposed this idea, they were uncertain how it would impact air quality. UCS stepped in with analysis showing that if the fee revenue is directed to replacing old, dirty cars, the emissions increase from dirtier gasoline would be effectively offset.  

“Fee” is often seen as a dirty word, but this fee is important for two reasons: 

1. It would pay for the marginal emissions impact of using dirtier gasoline. UCS analysis shows that if this fee was directed towards the replacement of pre 2004 vehicles, it would effectively mitigate emissions in the first year of replacement and pay long-term climate and pollution dividends. 
   
2. Dropping California’s regulation entirely could destabilize the market, potentially accelerating additional refinery closures. The fee works to protect jobs and in state supply because when there is no California supply problem, it would not make sense to pay a fee to sell non-California gasoline.   
   
3. The fee is voluntary and would only ever reduce gasoline prices because gasoline sellers would only pay a fee to sell alternative gasoline when California gasoline is more expensive than the fee due to supply constraints. 

Our analysis showed the CEC idea was a win for consumers, a win for air quality and big win for drivers of old, inefficient and polluting cars that get help upgrading to a new or used EV and don’t have to buy gasoline at all. 

Brilliant, right? 

So, what’s big oil’s deal?

UCS sponsored a bill by Assemblymember Hart, AB 2672, which would have made this idea a reality. The Western State’s Petroleum Association (a trade group of major oil companies) opposed it and the bill was stalled after overwhelming passing its first committee.  

Then, we tried again with SB 1245 by Senator Stern which would have simply required the state to implement a strategy to allow for the sale of non-California gasolines if state agencies found that doing so would benefit consumers without undermining fuels supply. Again, Big Oil opposed it and stopped it.   

Even with a fee to protect their in-state refineries, Big Oil is unwilling to limit their ability to profiteer and make consumers pay outrageous prices when there’s a supply constraint.  

Fighting this proposal while constantly bemoaning California’s burdensome regulations displays an absurd level of hypocrisy. It shows the lengths the industry is willing to go to maintain their immense leverage over working Californians who have no choice but to pay the ungodly prices imposed by these companies. 

A path forward

Policymakers in Sacramento should take a sober look at whether keeping an outdated regulation solely to make sure oil companies can extract maximum profits from their constituents is a good idea. 

Updating California’s gasoline regulations to be more fungible while maintaining emission benefits is achievable and essential. It may take some time and must involve conversations with industry and labor to make sure it does not have unintended consequences.  

In the meantime, allowing the sale of non California gasoline with a fee will help stabilize supply, mitigate emissions and protect in-state refiners and jobs.   

Elected leaders should reject the oil lobby’s argument that price spikes caused by a disconnected market are simply a price California consumers must keep paying to keep big oil happy and, instead, get us all off this fuel island.  

Water defines so much of our lives: what we plant, where we build, how we spend our leisure time. Here in the Western US, water is precious, as its supply has always been limited. Because of this, huge amounts of time, money, and labor have been poured into increasing water availability, resulting in aqueducts and canals that bring water from mountainous regions to otherwise dry regions for agriculture or cities, and massive dams that store water for the hot and dry months.

The often dramatic history of water management in the Western US has been a central part of our story, inspiring stories like the film Chinatown. But just like the movie, our waterways have aged, and perhaps not aged well. They were designed in an era of more plentiful water. Today, we face a very different reality. In recent decades, due to increasingly warmer temperatures leading to drier years, fossil-fueled climate change has brought in an era of even greater limitations to our water.

Our biggest reservoir: the mountain snowpack

While we do get water from some local sources in the western US (e.g. local groundwater or reservoirs), around half of runoff comes from winter snowpack. In mountainous regions like the Sierra Nevada or Cascades, it can be up to 75%. Except for the US Southwest—which gets summer rains carried in by the North American Monsoon—most of our precipitation comes in the cold, winter months. In California, most of our precipitation has historically come in just a handful of winter storms, some of which carry so much water that they can act as ‘drought busters.’

This fact is crucial to understanding our water supply: when that precipitation falls in our high mountain regions, it’s cold enough that it falls as snow. As such, our winter snowpack functions as our largest reservoir. Whereas rain requires an actual reservoir to hold that water for summer months, snowpack holds onto its water content until it gets warm enough to melt. That water content, or Snow Water Equivalent (SWE), generally peaks around April 1, after which, as winter gives way to spring, snow begins to melt, running off into our rivers and streams, meaning snowpack acts as a bridge between when the moisture comes in (winter), holding onto water until it’s needed (spring-summer).

We get in trouble when our snowpack fails, as we saw this year. Across much of the western US, our snowpack was abysmal—from California to the Colorado Basin to the Pacific Northwest, we experienced our lowest to second-lowest April 1 snowpack on record. This record-low snow drought was made 4 times more likely by climate change. Our warm winter meant that precipitation came in heavy and warm, at times falling as rain on top of the snowpack. This was followed by a warmer-than-average spring, including a record-breaking heatwave, leading to the rapid melt of the already small snowpack. While this year was remarkable, spring temperatures have been warming significantly over the past two decades, with an increase in these types of ‘snow eater’ heatwaves.

Dramatic reductions in snowpack mean we have a longer window of dry conditions, with huge implications for the health and wellbeing of our ecosystems, human health, and infrastructure. We’ve seen what this means when it comes to fire. Our forests are historically adapted to plentiful water supplied by a late-melting snowpack. When the snowpack fails to accumulate, or melts early, forests can become bone-dry, ready to burn on a hot windy day. Moreover, when wet winters are followed by hot summers, dry grasses become tinder. We saw how this can play out in Spokane, Washington, earlier this month.

And a low snowpack, crucially, spells trouble for water resources. Lake Mead just broke records by reaching its lowest level ever recorded. And the hot, dry season is when agriculture, which sucks up the most water, comes online.

Our biggest water user: agriculture

I learned from a young age to conserve water by taking shorter showers and turning off the tap while brushing my teeth. While these things matter, they are such a small slice of the (water) pie: Western US water is mostly used for industrialized, irrigated agriculture, ranging from 74% of developed water in the Colorado Basin to 80% in Washington to more than 90% in California’s San Joaquin Valley. This multi-billion-dollar agricultural industry produces crops consumed from the East Coast to China to Saudi Arabia.

In fact, much of the water infrastructure across the Western US was designed to bring agriculture to regions that were historically water-poor but have plenty of sun and fertile soils. Today, however, many basins in the western US are already overallocated, operating at the tail end of what they were designed for. And when those surface water supplies fail to materialize or when local demand surges, groundwater has been used to fill the gap.

In the agricultural-intensive San Joaquin Valley, so much groundwater has been used for the past century that groundwater declined by ~12mm/year during 1962-2021, leading to dramatic land subsidence (or sinking) of up to 30 feet in some regions.

Since the onset of the megadrought in the 2000s, groundwater decline in California has accelerated. This has been in part due to lower snowpack, and in part due to greater water demand from irrigation due to warmer temperatures from climate change.

Irrigation comes online in spring with the start of the growing season, and extends into summer until harvest time. As you may remember from biology class, plants need water to photosynthesize. They ‘breathe’ in carbon dioxide, then store that carbon and emit oxygen. As part of this process, plants move water up from the soil then out through their leaves through tiny pores called stomata. On a hot, dry day (i.e. low humidity), more water evaporates into the air due to a strong difference, or gradient, between the water content on the leaf and the water content in the air. This process—evapotranspiration—is strongly related to the temperature and water content of the atmosphere. The problem is that this demand for water or ‘thirstiness’ of the atmosphere rises exponentially with temperature, in fact by 7% per degree Celsius.

To visualize this process, think of the air as a giant sponge. When the sponge is dry (i.e. the humidity is low), it sucks up water from the ground below. Warmer air can hold more water, so as temperatures increase due to climate change, that sponge gets bigger and can draw even more water out of the land surface—including plants.

Therefore, as climate change increases temperatures—especially in the warmer spring and summer months—it also increases that thirstiness, which translates to greater demand for crop irrigation. That water has to come from somewhere, and if there isn’t enough surface water being delivered from snowmelt, farmers turn to groundwater.

Climate change is largely due to the combustion of fossil fuels, including coal, oil, and gas. Ironically, in places like the San Joaquin Valley, there are oil wells peppered throughout agricultural fields. In these places, the two industries compete for water: agriculture pumps water for irrigation while oil pumps use water to extract even more oil. Rural communities bear the brunt of these impacts since residential wells are shallower than industry’s wells and hence dry up first, and these communities then breathe in and drink up polluted air and water.

The full picture

This all adds up to a water system pushed to the brink. Declining snowpack means less water is available while a thirstier atmosphere means water demand will only increase. So what do we do? This is a problem with no easy fixes.

California Governor Newsom’s proposed to expand the state’s reservoirs, but reservoirs can increase downstream flood risk during wet years, which we expect to see more of with climate change, and even dispossess tribes of culturally important lands.

Other proposals tackle multiple issues at once, such as placing solar panels over canals or in agricultural fields (“agrivoltaics”), which both reduce evaporation of water by shading the area as well as help move us away from greenhouse-gas emitting energy sources.

Efforts to pursue climate accountability from major emitters, through litigation or climate superfund laws, also play an important role in ensuring that companies that have contributed the most to climate change pay their fair share.

Any effective measures to protect our water will require systemic changes and cooperation that aim much higher than our individual efforts to take shorter showers. However, water conservation on its own isn’t going to cut it if we don’t address climate change. It’s past time for our decisionmakers to be realistic about what our changing climate means for equitable management of and access to water.

This past July, Blake and computer scientists across the US were granted temporary relief when a federal court blocked the Trump administration from enforcing its unconstitutional policy of censorship at the border. The court’s decision in response to a legal case by the Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR) also came shortly after two international scholarly associations in computing stood up publicly for scientists like Blake.

In June, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, stated that “scientific progress depends on freedom of inquiry, communication, global mobility, and international collaboration… without undue political or institutional pressure.” The Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR) affirmed similar values the same month and expressed support for the legal case.

The lawsuit and public statements respond to the federal government’s attempts to control science by controlling the flow of researchers. In May 2025, the State Department announced a policy of excluding noncitizens who study misinformation, fact-checking, content moderation, and regulatory compliance in the technology industry. The policies were later expanded to include deportation. Such restrictions are similar in spirit to policies in China and other countries that selectively vet scholars for overseas travel based on the content of their research.

This censorship-by-visa scheme also affects the technology industry by preventing safety teams from international travel. Trust and safety workers at tech firms maintain a 24-hour watch over child sexual abuse, harmful scams, and human trafficking. According to industry leaders Charlotte Willner and David Sullivan, the State Department policy is “undermining the urgent fight against criminals who abuse online services to exploit everyone from children to the elderly.”

Why would the US threaten scientists who study the safety of AI and social media at a time when their expertise is in high demand worldwide? According to the State Department, these policies protect Americans from “encroachments” that “undermine the… right to free speech.”

Writing in Science this January, former White House official Alondra Nelson offered a different explanation: US promises of protection from burdensome rules are a cover for maximizing discretion in who the government punishes, rewards, and controls through ownership. By threatening officials and researchers, those in power can tip the digital scale in favor of firms and political actors who are closest to them in a hierarchy of patronage. In this system of punishment by discretion, people are incentivized to keep their heads down or say what they think the government wants to hear.

Censorship at the border rewires science

In an era where people can easily publish ideas and find an audience online, how much damage can a travel and immigration policy actually do to the integrity of science and industry? This kind of censorship achieves tectonic changes through three mechanisms: intimidation, peer influence, and the most consequential and invisible impact: fair selection.

Censorship most directly works through intimidation when people worry that constitutionally-protected ideas might expose them to retaliation from the government. For example, an expert on social media and child safety might reasonably wonder if they or their family will be targeted if they speak at a professional conference. Faced with vague language from authorities and silence from their own institutions, they face tremendous pressure to self-censor—keeping quiet or changing their work entirely. A representative survey of scientists in the US in January found that 47% of researchers have reframed their work and 36% have abandoned plans for at least one project due to concerns about negative consequences.

Academic self-censorship rates are so high because intimidation also sends shock waves throughout a community through peer effects. When people see others hiding and changing their work, they update what psychologists call social norms—expectations about what others consider expected behavior. When each person backs down and there are no counter-examples, dozens of others see it and adjust accordingly. The chilling effect spreads further.

The most pervasive effects of censorship hijack fair institutional rules to enlist organizations as unwitting accomplices. Both academia and industry are hierarchies of scarcity that frequently review people’s records when deciding who to hire, promote, and recognize. When one person looks less productive on paper, they are sometimes passed over in favor of someone who has more grants, publications, or other accomplishments. Under systems of intimidation and fear, seemingly impartial processes will tend to reward whoever is least targeted by censorship. When cohorts of leaders are filled with people who were lucky, clueless, or compliers, the fruit of intimidation can last a generation.

I imagine Blake wonders if intimidation or selection explains why they have been passed up for opportunities since the US censorship policy started, despite being a widely recognized leader in their field. In computing, the effects of censorship are most likely to impede women and underrepresented minorities, who systematically take on the most challenging social issues in our fields and already face reduced status as a result. If we’re not careful, the tech sector will face a cumulative, generational setback from government intimidation, undoing even the paltry gains that computing has made to engage more inclusively with society.

Since censorship exerts control through selection, individual efforts to keep a low profile also make us into unwitting accomplices by increasing the risk for others. That’s why the best response is to stand together—something that the ACM, AOIR, and CITR have chosen to do in powerful ways.

Making science resilient to intimidation

What can individuals and institutions do in the face of government attempts to shape science and industry through intimidation?

Institutions can protect our people and our fields by standing up to intimidation. Direct, public support can take several forms. When successful, legal challenges from organizations like CITR can protect basic rights while shielding individuals from retaliation. Public statements from professional organizations like the AOIR and ACM can dampen the damage of censorship’s peer effects. Statements also provide a powerful signal to admissions, hiring, and promotion deciders to resist the censorship of selection by acknowledging the courage of people who take on important, risky topics.

This leadership will come from small and medium-sized organizations that have less to lose. But even large organizations can help by offsetting the costs of censorship on targeted researchers and by supporting the organizations that fight to protect our rights.

Leaders can use our voices, our networks, resources, and power to redirect the inertia that turns us into unwitting accomplices. Often simple acts like speaking up in a hiring or promotion meeting can reorient key decisions away from the gravity of censorship into a better orbit. We can also organize our fields to enable people to contribute equitably even when they face government restrictions. When we design our teams and conferences for remote, secure participation at the core, our fields will also protect the environment and become more inclusive of people with disabilities.

Individuals can build resilience among our peers by educating ourselves and by championing the careers of people affected by government threats. Because censorship works through peer effects and field level selection, we are most effective when we work together. That’s why it’s especially important to support organizations like CITR that use collective power to stand up for our rights.

For Blake, the court decision and public statements from ACM and AOIR are a welcome, if temporary, change. With governments around the world rushing to regulate AI and social media, their research has never been more in demand. As Blake goes on the job market, it’s fair to ask: will the tech industry and scientific establishment account for these threats or let government intimidation succeed? The answer is up to us.

While the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has been documenting and publicizing such attacks for more than 20 years, the pace, scale, and scope of attacks since January 2025 has been dizzying, and incredibly damaging to our safety, health, and environment. (For context, UCS recorded 207 attacks during the entire first Trump administration, 96 during the two terms of George W. Bush, and 21 during the Obama and Biden administrations combined.)

With the Trump administration unleashing an average of more than 30 attacks each month, UCS needed a more robust and effective system for keeping track of them. Dr. Jules Barbati-Dajches, an analyst with the Center for Science and Democracy at UCS, took the lead on a new multipurpose tool that not only tracks attacks on science, but offers anyone who wants to use it the data they need to fight back.

What is the new Attacks on Science Tracker? How can people use it?

Jules Barbati-Dajches: The Attacks on Science Tracker is an interactive analytical platform that presents data on such attacks, along with potential scientific integrity violations, all in one place. It has a lot of different uses and interactive features that allows users from any area, any expertise, any interest level—basically, any person who cares about science—to narrow in on the data that they are interested in, with visualizations.

What’s really cool about it is that users can look at attacks in isolation, or explore patterns, or how different variables intersect with one another, just in the tool alone. People can use this data and connect it to other sources for any type of purpose that they would want—I think of it as a “choose your own adventure” kind of resource. For scientists and researchers, there are endless possibilities for creating custom research products. And it can also be used just for curiosity’s sake, or if someone’s interested in becoming more involved in science advocacy.

For example, if someone wants to write a letter to the editor, or author an op-ed on a topic that they’re particularly passionate about, then the Tracker can be used to help inform the content. In a UCS webinar last month, I walked audience members through an example of how they can use the Tracker to help develop talking points for in-district meetings with their members of Congress. Our team wanted to create something that can be used for many different purposes, by people with different levels of expertise and familiarity with scientific policies.

What rises to the level of an attack on science to be included in the tool?

Jules Barbati-Dajches: Attacks on science, in general terms, are instances of political interference in the federal government. Our Attacks on Science Tracker categorizes 11 different types of attacks and seven attack topics—e.g., climate science—to contextualize how this is happening and why it matters. Anyone who’s curious about how we arrived at these classifications can review our methodology.

How does the Attacks on Science Tracker differ from previous UCS efforts to record and monitor attacks on science under different presidential administrations?

Jules Barbati-Dajches: The Tracker is the front-facing product component of it that everyone sees. But the methodology behind that—how the data is collected, screened, analyzed, organized to feed into it—has been updated. The new methodology is based on over two decades of UCS research and advocacy documenting attacks on science. Now, scripts automate the collection and organization of news coverage of attacks on science, and our team analyzes the data to identify and categorize attacks. This will allow us to document and record these attacks much more efficiently and consistently, and in perpetuity.   

Why is it so important to document these attacks on science?

Jules Barbati-Dajches: Documenting is just one part of this work, and it’s important for folks who are interested in pursuing litigation, or in helping to connect the dots between different attacks on science and impacts that we see down the line. There’s a whole host of uses for people who want that record.

But the Tracker also presents an opportunity to think forward: to have a clear sense of what has been attacked and dismantled, and what can be reimagined or rebuilt, to be able to better serve the public and keep people safe.

In my view, it also highlights the need to protect the role of scientific integrity in government decisionmaking. The Tracker suggests how potential scientific integrity violations could be prevented by implementing protections like those in the Scientific Integrity Act. This bill, which has some bipartisan support, is currently being debated in the House and Senate. It would reinforce federal science against political interference in all scientific agencies. It would be more consistent than agency-specific policies, and would also be more resistant to changes coming from executive orders.

Our team has presented the Tracker to members of Congress who have signed on to the Scientific Integrity Act, and members who are interested in signing on. It’s pretty stark evidence to support these protections.

The Tracker has been live for about two months! How has it been received by the people now using it?

Jules Barbati-Dajches: Overall, there’s been a very positive reception. Our team has been getting good feedback on how useful it’s been for different purposes—from supporters, from our colleagues at UCS, and from partner organizations. I’ve been presenting the Tracker to different partners to learn how they’re interested in using the tool and how they can plug it into their own work, and they’ve been sharing different use cases of the tracker in response.

Did anything surprise you or stand out to you as you worked on the Tracker? What are you hoping people will take away from it?

Jules Barbati-Dajches: For me, what stood out the most about what we’ve recorded in the Tracker is the frequency of attacks on health and safety. That means the physical, mental, emotional, or social health and safety of people, groups, and communities. So many of these attacks are negatively impacting our safety and well-being.

And as a takeaway: People should know that we created this tool for anyone who cares about science. I hope that people feel like they can use it for whatever purpose will serve them best, and whatever will help them advocate for scientific protections and evidence-informed policy.

Now, as the next phase of tailpipe regulations of truck engines is set to go into effect, the technology enabling these emissions reductions is being attacked by both the Trump EPA and Congress. These proposals attack the ability to set regulations and enforce them to ensure emissions reductions in the lab result in emissions reductions in the real world. And it comes as the result of heavy lobbying by special interest groups including Big Ag, drivers through organizations like the Owner-Operator and Independent Driver Association (OOIDA) and the American Bus Association, trucking fleets, and truck manufacturers.

Diesel emissions control systems are incredibly efficient, cutting emissions by 90 percent or more, so anything that undermines that technology can result in emissions increases of 10X or more. Below I walk through how these controls have been so successful and the attacks that could completely obliterate any reductions in emissions made to date by the trucking sector.

How cleaner trucks cut soot pollution

In response to EPA regulations, new trucks deployed aftertreatment systems to significantly reduce the pollution resulting from diesel combustion. These systems are called “aftertreatment” because rather than reducing emissions within the engine (say, through more efficient combustion), they are deployed downstream of the engine and work to reduce the component materials of the exhaust itself.

Beginning with the 2007 model year, new diesel trucks meeting strong particulate matter (PM) standards began to deploy diesel particulate filters (DPFs), which do exactly what is said: filter particulate matter from diesel exhaust. DPFs cut particulate matter from diesel trucks by over 90 percent, critical emissions reductions given the negative impacts of soot on health and the carcinogenic nature of diesel particulate.

How cleaner trucks cut smog-forming NO_x pollution

In addition to cutting particulate matter, since 2010 EPA standards have resulted in trucks deploying selective catalytic reduction (SCR) systems to cut smog-forming NO_x pollution. SCR systems inject diesel exhaust fluid (DEF) into the diesel engine exhaust. Under high heat the urea-based DEF turns into ammonia vapor that reacts within the SCR system to neutralize the NO_x pollution from the engine, forming nitrogen gas and water.

Because the SCR system is an aftertreatment system, the efficiency of the catalyst is critical to cutting NO_x pollution. Modern diesel engines typically emit between 3 and 4 grams of NO_x per brake-horsepower-hour (bhp-hr is a measure of work); with aftertreatment, trucks already on the road today can cut that to below 0.2 g NO_x/bhp-hr, and engine manufacturers are responding to next year’s standards to drop that even further to 0.035 g/bhp-hr.

However, anything that impairs the efficiency of the SCR system has a dramatic impact on the total emissions from the truck. For example, real world measurements of pollution from 2010-compliant trucks turned out to be much higher than anticipated under the types of low-speed operation near ports and warehouses because those older SCR systems were running too cold to be maximally effective.

A number of actions the Trump administration and Congress are seeking to make SCR systems even less effective, or even non-existent, increasing NO_x emissions nationwide and threatening public health.

How regulators incentivize compliance with emissions regulations

The trucking industry has a long history of opposing attempts to clean up the sector. In fact, in response to EPA’s regulation, a cottage industry developed around Class 8 trucks to sell new truck bodies with old truck engines, a pollution loophole resulting from a number of truckers wanting to avoid emissions control systems. There’s also been widespread tampering with diesel engines, illegal activity which the Trump administration and Congress are now trying to absolve.

Since the pollution from a truck is dependent upon those emissions controls acting properly, it is critical that any failure in the emissions control system is dealt with ASAP. Emissions from a post-2010 truck with a faulty SCR system has about 10 times the pollution impact of a truck with a working SCR system—a small number of faulty trucks and/or a small number of miles driven under sub-optimal conditions can add up to big harms quickly.

In order to ensure that truckers handle any failures to the emissions control systems quickly, EPA uses so-called “inducements” that affect the truck’s operation to encourage drivers to fix the issue immediately. Upon detection of a fault, the truck will notify the driver, typically with both a “check engine” light on the dash and an accompanying auditory notification. After this condition exists for a certain period of time/distance traveled, if the issue has not yet been dealt with the next step is what is called a derate—the engine’s power/torque will be throttled, e.g., to 50 percent of maximum power. After this phase is triggered, the inducement cycle will then look for a safe harbor to institute a final limitation—upon parking, for example, the vehicle will be limited to low-speed operation only, e.g., 5 mph.

The goal of the inducement is to be severe enough to push the driver to proceed to the nearest service center to handle any fault while providing enough latitude to do so, with the vehicle typically capable of traveling a couple hundred miles before the final level of inducement. These inducements were set by EPA via industry guidance after both an industry workshop and notice-and-comment process where the trucking industry and manufacturers all weighed in.

Trump EPA attacks emissions controls through guidances and rulemaking

Truckers do not like the fact that inducements affect operability of the vehicle, a major reason for the existence of the highly polluting glider trucks noted earlier. As a result, they’ve lobbied both Congress and EPA to eliminate any inducements. And, unfortunately, some policymakers have followed through on that request.

While issues with premature failure of Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF) sensors have led to some disruptive derates, this is a problem solved with the redundancy of the emissions control systems as well as stronger warranty provisions set to go into effect next year. Yet industry has instead shown its true colors by pushing for total elimination of ties between vehicle performance and the emissions controls limiting pollution from those vehicles.

First, EPA blew wide open the window for the inducements—rather than a couple hundred miles, trucks could now travel thousands of highly polluting miles with little repercussion, a loophole some in Congress have sought to enshrine in law through the  “Diesel Engine Flexibility Act” or the “DEF Act”, along with a 10-year freeze even as new standards go into effect next year. Under this guidance, a single emissions control failure could emit as much pollution as the truck would emit over the course of an entire year before the final “limp mode” derate took effect.

But even worse, now EPA is threatening to do away with inducements altogether in a newly proposed rule, replacing them with a mere “check engine” light and auditory warning, something which is already required and has repeatedly been ignored by truckers (or they would not experience deratement). Surveys of car drivers show that up to half drive with a “check engine” light for up to 18 months to delay repair costs—given that we know truckers routinely ignore emissions-related notifications until deratement and have even more pointed concerns around cost, there is no reason to expect the share of truckers responding to these notifications to be any higher. And yet the costs of such failure would be devastating.

If just 1 percent of trucks operate without a fully functioning SCR system, they could generate roughly as much emissions as the remaining 99 percent.

As noted earlier, the NO_x emissions of a Class 8 engine are around 3 or 4 g/bhp-hr, about 100 times the required average certification level for 2027 and newer engines. If just 1 percent of trucks operate without a fully functioning SCR system, they could generate roughly as much emissions as the remaining 99 percent. If just 6 percent of truckers ignore the proposed “check engine” light, the rule could be no more effective than the current 2010-era standards. And yet the survey data suggests 6 percent may be a gross underestimate of the size of this problem.

Of course, the only thing worse than not having inducements to keep emissions controls operating properly is to not have strong emissions controls in the first place. But EPA is proposing to allow manufacturers to buy their way out of compliance with the standards through “non-compliance penalties”—and manufacturers are jumping at the chance. Major engine manufacturers like Cummins and PACCAR have already said that they’re going to pay up to continue selling older, more polluting engines even though they already have engines that meet the next set of standards.

Emissions controls are necessary to reduce public harm from trucking

A new tractor-trailer engine will be on the road for about 1 million miles. EPA is proposing to cut the warranty requirements of the engine (and therefore the warranty requirements of the emissions controls) down to just 100,000 miles. That means for roughly 90 percent of the time that engine is on the road, truckers will bear the cost of the emissions control system’s upkeep rather than truck manufacturers. And the public will bear the cost of any failure for truckers to do so.

Diesel engines are the largest manmade source of NO_x emissions in the United States, and diesel trucks represent about half of those emissions. According to EPA’s COBRA model, from this NO_x pollution alone, trucks are estimated to cause between 3,600 and 4,700 premature deaths every year, along with 21,000 new cases of asthma and 1.8 million lost days of work or school. This amounts to between $58 and $75 billion in health-related costs to the country.

The trucking industry is built on externalizing these costs, subsidized by the health impacts borne disproportionately by the low-income communities and communities of color who see greater levels of truck traffic. EPA regulations are meant to shift those costs, reducing health burdens through emissions controls that reduce pollution, paid for by the emitting industry. And history has shown that these and other Clean Air Act regulations are not just effective but a tremendous bargain! If you want to take a stand for clean air, join the effort to tell Congress that transporting goods shouldn’t pollute the air.

EPA and Congress are now seeking to break that social contract, putting public health in the hands of an industry that has shown repeatedly it doesn’t care about its impacts. Not only must EPA set the strongest possible emissions standards, but it must also ensure that any emissions controls are operating as intended for the entire lifetime of the vehicles in which they are deployed. And that means we need strong inducements to hold industry accountable for its harms. After all, their strong lobbying effort to pollute more freely has shown they’re not going to do it of their own free will.

After catastrophic floods about one century ago, the river started to be lined with concrete for most of its 51 miles. The river became a single-purpose concrete channel to flush stormwater from the mountains to the sea as fast as possible.

But in three stretches, the river couldn’t be lined with concrete. And in those stretches, something happened that no one had planned. Cottonwoods and willows came back. Herons, egrets, and the Santa Ana sucker (an endangered fish species) came back. And people came back too to enjoy the river that had become their neighborhood park, to ride their bikes or to use their kayaks.

Same river, two realities. Gray concrete infrastructure does one job at a very steep price. The soft-bottom stretches do multiple things at once: flood protection, habitat, public health, recreation, urban cooling, water quality… And the river runs through neighborhoods where nearly a million Angelenos live within a single mile. Luckily for our L.A. friends, the L.A. River is undergoing a restoration that will bring back many of the multiple benefits of the river such as habitat, cleaner air, and green areas in the city while improving water quality, reducing erosion, and of course, maintaining (or even improving) the much-needed flood risk control.

This restoration project in the L.A. River is an example of a nature-based solution. Nature-based solutions are approaches to adapt to challenging environmental conditions in ways that work with nature, not against it. Traditional infrastructure is often more expensive and provides fewer benefits with more negative impacts. Nature-based solutions are often cheaper and always more natural than concrete infrastructure to tackle the same problems but with many more benefits and positive side effects.

This is the first post in a series about what using nature-based solutions looks like in California. You can read our guide Working with Nature to Protect California’s Agricultural Regions: How Nature-Based Solutions Can Build Resilience, and you can also see our related first Instagram video below.

A whiplash climate

Many public health and environmental problems we experience in California and in other parts of the world come from a legacy of unsustainable land management exacerbated by climate change. Extreme events that swing from one end to the other like a whiplash are now the new normal.

Gray infrastructure was originally designed to control nature instead of working sustainably with the environment, as most Indigenous communities do. Climate change is making destruction more frequent and more expensive, and gray infrastructure cannot adapt to the new conditions in many cases. And our traditional response has been to react rather than prevent. California spends billions on fires, floods, and droughts after they happen, which is far more expensive than preventing them in the first place. Every dollar we do not invest in resilience today, we end up paying many times over in the near future.

And those costs are not paid equally. All Californians pay them through taxpayers’ money in disaster relief and emergency response. But frontline communities with limited infrastructure pay also with their health, their wellbeing, and the quality of their daily lives.

We need to prepare California for what is coming, but the answer is not just more gray infrastructure. Concrete dams, levees, and storm drains are expensive, brittle, and built to fight nature instead of working with it.

Nature-based solutions are a better (and cheaper) way.

Nature-based solutions and cropland repurposing in agricultural regions

Here where I live in Merced, in the middle of California’s San Joaquin Valley, agriculture is one of the main economic engines and represents the identity of a lot of people. But agriculture in California hasn’t been sustainable for more than a century, especially because of an inadequate water management and inadequate agricultural practices (like dry tillage of idle land, excessive pesticide use, monoculture, or irrigation of marginal lands), problems aggravated by climate change. Part of my work is to understand this system and find solutions that don’t create new problems. And since I love agriculture and the environment, and I have many friends who live in farmworker communities, I have been thinking of nature-based solutions for agricultural regions since years ago.

My work orbits around cropland repurposing to achieve a just land transition. Current water law in California requires local agencies to sustainably manage groundwater and avoid what the law defines as “undesirable results,” such as dry wells, soil sinking, and seawater intrusion. This legal framework has the potential to become a transformative power to change a system that wasn’t working. And to achieve water sustainability, California may need to repurpose about one million acres of irrigated agriculture to decrease our water footprint.

While this is a huge task, it is also a huge opportunity to correct a legacy of problems that started more than a century ago while adapting to climate change, adopting sustainable agricultural practices, and managing public resources sustainably. Nature-based solutions can tackle water sustainability in multiple ways, including aquifer recharge, floodplain restoration, and sustainable agricultural practices. And they can also take care of public health issues, such as flood prevention, erosion, dust prevention, pollution reduction, lack of green areas, and extreme heat. Nature-based solutions can also create local employment during the construction, for maintenance, or even tourism and other new, out-of-the-box ideas. However, Nature-based solutions are not a solution for everything, and we will need to create pathways to foster local, non-extractive economies to bring complete sustainability to agricultural regions. We call this a Just Land Transition, and along with on-the-ground grassroots partners like Allensworth Progressive Association, with nonprofits like Community Water Center and Environmental Defense Fund, and with agencies like the California Department of Conservation, we are supporting science-based policy and science-driven actions to bring sustainability to agricultural regions in California.

In this blog series, we will show the potential of nature-based solutions to become the best to-go tools to address cropland repurposing and to tackle climate justice in agricultural areas.

If you want to know more, you can read our guide: Working with Nature to Protect California’s Agricultural Regions: How Nature-Based Solutions Can Build Resilience. And if you want to know more about best practices in land repurposing for a just land transition beyond nature-based solutions, you can check UCS’s webpage Guiding California’s Land Transitions Toward Justice and Equity.

California has the tools, intellectual knowledge, and the funding to make this better choice happen. Proposition 4, the Climate Bond, has provided billions of dollars to use in climate resilience and land repurposing, and nature-based solutions can be one of the best ways to invest our taxpayer’s money to create sustainability and transform the system to work for everyone.

Después de inundaciones catastróficas hace casi un siglo, el río comenzó a ser revestido con concreto en la mayor parte de sus 51 millas (82 kilómetros). El río se convirtió en un canal gris con un solo propósito: desalojar el agua de lluvia desde las montañas hasta el mar lo más rápido posible.

Pero en tres tramos, el río no pudo ser revestido con concreto. Y en esos tramos, ocurrió algo que nadie había planeado. Los álamos y los sauces regresaron. Las garzas, las garcetas y el matalote de Santa Ana (una especie de pez en peligro de extinción) también volvieron. Y la gente regresó también, para disfrutar del río que se había convertido en el parque de su vecindario, para andar en bicicleta o para usar sus kayaks.

El mismo río, dos realidades. El concreto cumple una sola función a un precio muy alto. Los tramos naturales cumplen múltiples funciones a la vez: protegen contra inundaciones, mejoran el hábitat, la salud pública, la recreación, la calidad del agua, bajan las temperaturas locales … Y el río atraviesa vecindarios donde casi un millón de personas viven a menos de una milla (1,6 kilómetros) de distancia. Por suerte para nuestras amistades de Los Ángeles, el Río de Los Ángeles está en proceso de restauración que traerá de vuelta muchos de los múltiples beneficios del río, como hábitat, aire más limpio y áreas verdes en la ciudad, además de mejorar la calidad del agua, reducir la erosión y, por supuesto, mantener (o incluso mejorar) el tan necesario control del riesgo de inundaciones.

Este proyecto de restauración en el Río de Los Ángeles es un ejemplo de una solución basada en la naturaleza. Las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza ayudan a adaptarnos a condiciones ambientales difíciles trabajando con la naturaleza, no en contra de ella. La infraestructura gris (de concreto) suele ser más costosa y ofrece menos beneficios con más impactos negativos. Las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza suelen ser más económicas y pueden abordar los mismos problemas de manera más natural que la infraestructura de concreto y con muchos más beneficios y efectos secundarios positivos.

Esta es la primera publicación de una serie sobre cómo las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza pueden ayudar a California. Puedes leer nuestra Guía sobre soluciones-basadas en la naturaleza aquí. También puedes ver nuestro primer video en Instagram:

Latigazos climáticos

Muchos de los problemas de salud pública y ambientales que experimentamos en California y en otras partes del mundo provienen de un legado de manejo insostenible de los recursos naturales, agravado por el cambio climático. Los eventos extremos que oscilan de un extremo a otro como un latigazo son ahora la nueva normalidad.

La infraestructura gris fue originalmente diseñada para controlar la naturaleza en lugar de entender cómo trabajar sosteniblemente con el medio ambiente, como hacen muchas comunidades Indígenas alrededor del mundo. Y ahora que el clima y las condiciones están cambiando, la infraestructura rígida de concreto no consigue adaptarse en muchos casos. Su baja capacidad de adaptación y el cambio climático están haciendo que la destrucción sea más frecuente y más costosa, y nuestra respuesta tradicional ha sido reaccionar en lugar de prevenir. California gasta miles de millones de dólares en impactos de incendios, inundaciones y sequías después de que ocurren, lo cual es mucho más costoso que prevenirlos desde un principio. Cada dólar que no invertimos hoy en resiliencia termina costándonos unas seis veces más en el futuro cercano.

Y esos costos no se pagan de manera equitativa. Todas las personas pagamos con nuestros impuestos la ayuda para desastres y emergencias. Pero las comunidades en primera línea con infraestructura limitada además pagan con su salud, su bienestar y su calidad de vida.

Necesitamos preparar a California para lo que viene, pero la respuesta no es simplemente más infraestructura gris. Las presas, los diques y los drenajes pluviales de concreto son costosos, frágiles y están construidos para luchar contra la naturaleza en lugar de trabajar con ella.

Las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza son una manera mejor (y más económica) de enfrentarnos a estos desafíos.

Soluciones basadas en la naturaleza y el reúso de tierras de cultivo en regiones agrícolas

Aquí donde vivo, en Merced, California, en medio del Valle de San Joaquín, la agricultura es uno de los principales motores económicos y representa la identidad de mucha gente. Pero la agricultura en California no ha sido sostenible durante más de un siglo, sobre todo por un manejo inadecuado del agua y por prácticas agrícolas inadecuadas (como arar tierra seca, el uso excesivo de pesticidas, el monocultivo o el riego de tierras marginales), problemas que son agravados por el cambio climático. Parte de mi trabajo consiste en entender este sistema y encontrar soluciones que no generen nuevos problemas. Y como me encanta la agricultura y el medio ambiente, y tengo muchos amigos que viven en comunidades de campesinos, llevo pensando en soluciones basadas en la naturaleza para regiones agrícolas desde hace años.

Mi trabajo gira en torno al reúso de tierras de cultivo para lograr una transición justa de la tierra. La ley de agua vigente en California exige que las agencias locales gestionen el agua subterránea de manera sostenible y eviten lo que la ley llama “resultados no deseados”, tales como pozos secos, subsidencia del terreno e intrusión de agua de mar. Este marco legal tiene el potencial de convertirse en un poder transformador capaz de cambiar un sistema que no funciona para todos. Y para lograr la sostenibilidad del agua, California podría necesitar reusar cerca de un millón de acres (unas 400.000 hectáreas) de agricultura irrigada para reducir nuestra huella hídrica.

Aunque esta es una tarea enorme, también es una gran oportunidad para corregir un legado de problemas que comenzó hace más de un siglo, y a la vez adaptarnos al cambio climático, adoptar prácticas agrícolas sostenibles y gestionar los recursos públicos de manera sostenible. Las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza pueden abordar la sostenibilidad del agua de múltiples maneras, incluyendo la recarga de acuíferos, la restauración de llanuras de inundación y las prácticas agrícolas sostenibles. Y también pueden atender problemas de salud pública, como la prevención de inundaciones, la erosión, la prevención de polvo, la reducción de la contaminación, la falta de áreas verdes y el calor extremo. Las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza también pueden generar empleo local durante su construcción, mantenimiento, o incluso para el turismo y otras ideas nuevas. Sin embargo, las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza no son una solución para todo, y necesitaremos crear caminos para fomentar economías locales no extractivas que traigan sostenibilidad completa a las regiones agrícolas. A esto le llamamos una Transición Justa de la Tierra, y junto con aliados como Allensworth Progressive Association, Community Water Center y Environmental Defense Fund, y con agencias como el Departamento de Conservación de California, estamos apoyando políticas y acciones basadas en ciencia para traer sostenibilidad a las regiones agrícolas de California.

En esta serie mostraremos el potencial de las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza para convertirse en las mejores herramientas para abordar el reúso de tierras de cultivo y para enfrentar la justicia climática en las áreas agrícolas.

Si quieres saber más, puedes leer nuestra guía: Soluciones basadas en la naturaleza para crear resiliencia en regiones agrícolas de California. Y si quieres saber más sobre las buenas prácticas en el reúso de tierras para una transición justa de la tierra más allá de las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza, puedes visitar la página web de UCS (en inglés pero con multiples recursos en español) Guiando las transiciones de tierras de California hacia la justicia y la equidad.

California tiene las herramientas, el conocimiento intelectual y el financiamiento para hacer realidad esta mejor decisión. La Proposición 4, el Bono Climático, va a dedicar miles de millones de dólares a la resiliencia climática y al reúso de tierras, y las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza pueden ser una de las mejores formas de invertir el dinero de quienes pagamos impuestos para crear sostenibilidad y transformar el sistema para que funcione para todas las personas.

Some quick context

In April 2026, Louisiana’s largest utility company, Entergy Louisiana, filed an application with state regulators to build seven additional gas-fired power plants to serve an expansion of the AI data center being built by Meta in Richland Parish, Louisiana. These new plants, along with new transmission and other proposed infrastructure, would be in addition to three gas plants approved by regulators last year for Meta’s data center. Entergy and Meta are claiming that a single data center needs a total of 10 new gas plants, each of them rated at 754 megawatts (MW) of power. For perspective, 7,540 MW is enough to power the entire city of New Orleans’ annual peak demand — six times over.

Now, the regulatory proceeding at the Louisiana Public Service Commission (LPSC) is well underway, where stakeholders are weighing in on Entergy’s proposal to build the seven additional plants and other associated infrastructure. Because Entergy must make its case to the LPSC that this new proposal is in “the public interest” in order to get approval, the company is claiming that the data center will actually benefit its existing customers instead of triggering rate hikes, which has already happened in other parts of the country and is set to take place in Louisiana as well.

This claim of ratepayer “benefit” does not stand up to scrutiny when you actually dig into the details of the proposal. It shouldn’t come as a total shock that Meta is opposing efforts for improved transparency into the data center project.

Meta is fighting transparency, but Louisianans can make their voices heard

On August 4^th, 2026, an administrative law judge at the LPSC rejected Meta’s motion to cancel a subpoena that was requested by Earthjustice on behalf of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and the Alliance for Affordable Energy (AAE), a Louisiana-based consumer advocacy group. The subpoena ordered Meta to substantiate:

1. Meta’s level of investment and permanent job creation; and
2. The amount of electricity the data center will demand.

Because Meta isn’t a party to this proceeding, UCS, AAE, and other stakeholders in the proceeding haven’t been able to ask the tech company these types of questions in any formal, legal manner. Stakeholders can ask Entergy these questions formally, because that’s the company that filed the application for all the power infrastructure. But when asked to back up the claim that the data center will create new permanent jobs and will require seven additional gas plants, the utility company points only to Meta’s claims, without any other data.

So, the judge ruled last week that Meta must back up these claims in a formal and rigorous manner, but has also granted the tech company’s request to have the full Commission review the issue.

The bottom line: Louisiana’s five elected Commissioners are set to take a vote to ultimately decide whether Meta has to answer these key questions at the Commission’s Wednesday, August 12^th public meeting, starting at 9 AM at 602 North 5th Street, Baton Rouge, LA in the 1^st Floor Natchez Room.

If you live in Louisiana outside of New Orleans (where the city council regulates utility rates), you can make your voice heard either by contacting your Commissioner or showing up physically to the meeting in Baton Rouge. If you show up, you’ll have an opportunity to make a public comment to the Commissioners, and this blog may give you some ideas if you’re unsure where to start with your remarks But even if you don’t want to speak, your presence in the room makes clear to the Commissioners that people are paying attention to the decisions they’re making.

Now, let’s get into more of the substance of this proposal and why it’s such a risky proposition for Louisiana ratepayers.

Ratepayers still on the hook

Starting with the basics: Meta has not agreed to cover all of the costs of powering this data center project. That means Louisianians could get stuck footing the bill for their ten new polluting, expensive gas plants, including the seven at issue in this proceeding.

This is partially because Meta and Entergy structured their deal with flexibility to allow Meta to walk away from the data center before all the infrastructure is paid for, leaving ratepayers to pay for remaining costs. But even if Meta is truly in it for the long haul, ratepayers are still set to subsidize the operating costs at the new plants.

Expert testimony filed by Current Energy Group (CEG) on behalf of UCS and AAE shows that Entergy’s claimed “benefits” are premised on an unreasonably optimistic set of assumptions and quickly turn into higher ratepayer costs—potentially billions of dollars—once key uncertainties, such as data center demand and fuel costs, are examined. Further, Entergy’s analysis of power grid reliability was wholly inadequate for a project of this scale, failing to consider solutions that could have reduced both costs and emissions.

To be specific about the scale, Meta wants the data center’s peak computing electricity demand to grow to about 5,000 MW, roughly the average  load of New York City. Yet, just like last year’s case, the tech company is refusing to come to the table and answer any questions that would shed some much-needed light on this proposal.  Let’s recap what’s actually being proposed.

Large construction costs go untested

Investor-owned utilities like Entergy profit off construction projects, generally referred to as “capital costs.” The more they build, the more they profit. Entergy is currently seeking to build more than $15 billion in new capital infrastructure, summarized by the table below:

Entergy is proposing four gas plants in Richland Parish, and three gas plants in Point Coupee Parish, totaling 5,278 MW. The company is also proposing some additional battery storage capacity, plus transmission infrastructure.

If the construction projects were approved as proposed, Entergy’s shareholders would stand to make an estimated $8 billion in additional profits over a 20-year period.

Also, because Entergy is proposing this project be rushed through the regulatory process under the LPSC’s new “Lightning Amendment”, the utility company won’t be required to prove that its proposal is the least-cost option for meeting Meta’s needs – a process typically required before new infrastructure projects are approved by the LPSC. With that process being pushed aside, the project costs could very well likely be inflated.

20-year contract, but…

Under the proposal, Meta would get electricity service from Entergy through a 20-year contract that includes “minimum charges” the tech company must pay in order to offset the costs to other ratepayers. Included in these minimum charges is the annual capital cost, the rate of return to Entergy’s shareholders and debtholders, fixed operating and maintenance costs, as well as taxes and insurance. However, while Meta will be paying its own share of Entergy’s “fuel adjustment clause” (FAC) charge, that charge isn’t included in Meta’s minimum charge; these are operating costs that will be spread to all customers. More on that a little further down.

It’s important to keep in mind that even if Meta sticks around for the entirety of its 20-year contract, ratepayers aren’t in the clear on the capital costs. Three out of the seven gas plants being proposed, which would be in Point Coupee parish, would not be fully depreciated (in other words, paid off) until 32 years after being in service, so ratepayers would be on the hook for more than a decade’s worth of capital costs if Meta doesn’t renew its contract. The other four proposed plants, which would be in Richland Parish near the data center, would depreciate over just 20 years, but will still only be about 90% paid down by the end of the contract term, due to the contract coming into effect in 2028 before all the plants are finished being constructed.

Entergy estimates that the gas plants, and the much smaller battery storage projects, will be about 75% depreciated by the end of the 20-year contract term. The utility company’s method of allocating these costs over time isn’t clear from its public filings, which include many redactions, but 25% of those total costs is $3.4 billion. The receipt ratepayers are left holding after the contract expires could be in that ballpark, and that wouldn’t include other costs, such as the operating costs I’ve alluded to, as well as the ~9.7% profit margin Entergy’s shareholders are authorized to make on their construction projects.

But Meta could terminate this contract much earlier than 20 years. If Meta decides to do this, there is a loophole that allows Entergy to seek so-called “retained generator” status, which would allow the utility to charge ratepayers for any remaining costs. This caveat is particularly concerning because Entergy has a financial incentive to retain the plants in order to continue earning its 9.7% profit margin on those billions of dollars in capital infrastructure. Plus, with overall future demand for AI services remaining uncertain, Meta backing out is a possibility that regulators must rigorously take into account.

CEG’s testimony finds that ratepayers seem to bear 100% of the financial risk of these Meta-triggered plants if Entergy retains them. Ratepayers didn’t prompt these huge expenses, so at a bare minimum, Entergy’s shareholders should have to share this risk, and the LPSC should make that expectation clear at the outset (especially given the $8 billion  in profits shareholders are estimated to make). This would incentivize the utility to instead pursue any unrecovered funds from Meta, which is the company causing the additional costs. If Entergy is making a huge bet that all these costs will be worth it, the company should be betting with its own money, not ratepayer money.

“Benefits” quickly turn into costs

Even assuming Meta stays at the data center for 20 years, Entergy’s claims that this proposal will benefit other ratepayers doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The utility calculates $28.5 billion in total costs over the next 20 years, compared with $30.4 billion in total revenue. That’s how the company derives a “benefit” of about $1.9 billion (roughly 6.5% – shown in the table below), in the event that Meta renews its contract. If Meta walks away after 20 years, that decreases to $991 million, or about 3.5%. This means that just a 3.5% increase in costs or decrease in revenues could wipe out any benefit and result in a ratepayer subsidy for Meta. To compare this to a recent example, the projected capital costs of Entergy’s already-approved project to power the first phase of Meta’s data center increased in May from $3.9 billion to $4.4 billion, or about 11.7%.

There are several key uncertainties with this massive new proposal that could result in higher costs or lower revenues, but Entergy didn’t adjust any of those variables to see how they’d change the results compared to their overly optimistic assumptions. One of those uncertainties is: how much energy will Meta’s data center actually demand? We are trying to get an answer to this question via the subpoena mentioned above, but Entergy just used the Meta-provided number and didn’t test any other possibilities.

The expected “load factor” of the data center—which is the average percentage of time it will run at its own peak load—is kept confidential. But the CEG testimony notes that the assumed load factor is “very high for any load, leaving no room for upside in the analysis but resulting in significant downside exposure if actual operations fall short of that level.”

We are not the first to point out utilities using very high data center load factors in their projections. With all the uncertainty around the future AI landscape, and with Meta clearly still hedging its bets on what to actually use its data centers for, Entergy should be testing for lower levels of demand to see how it affects its cost-benefit analysis. In fact, Entergy does seem to be expecting possibly lower demand as outside of that analysis; the companies’ contract allows Meta to reduce its average contracted demand in order to avoid a “windfall” benefit to other ratepayers at Meta’s expense.

However, windfalls appear to be going the other direction under this current proposal. The testimony points out that another key variable that Entergy failed to thoroughly examine is fuel and other operating costs at the plants. The utility’s fuel adjustment clause (FAC) charge includes not just fuel costs for the gas plants, but also major maintenance costs—about $10.3 million per year at each of the seven plants—as well as gas transportation costs. The utility company would spread the FAC costs to all customers right away, and most of the estimates for these costs are redacted from public view.

The proposed gas plants would have “firm”, or uninterruptible, gas transportation service via pipeline, which means Entergy would pay a gas pipeline operator to reserve capacity on the line. That is a fixed cost Entergy will recover through the FAC, but again, Meta could use less electricity than expected and then the tech company’s revenue contributions to the FAC therefore wouldn’t be commensurate with the costs. Ratepayers could therefore subsidize Meta’s fuel costs.

Entergy also acknowledged that three of the plants in Point Coupee parish will likely need new pipeline infrastructure. Those additional costs will be caused by this Meta-driven project, but Entergy will spread the costs to all of its customers through the FAC. This is yet another subsidy of Meta’s fuel needs by ratepayers.

Power-grid reliability solutions go unexplored

The second piece of testimony, submitted by engineering consultancy HickoryLedge on behalf of AAE and UCS, highlights a number of grid solutions that Entergy ignored or only studied at a very surface level. These solutions could have the potential to reduce the number of gas plants and project costs, and improve the reliability of the grid. But the company instead is primarily seeking to throw more fossil fuels at the problem.

For example, for the proposed transmission aspects of this project, Entergy is seeking to use transmission line designs that are 20 years old. Newer, more advanced lines would be able to carry up to about 30% more power and could potentially allow better access to renewables at a minimal impact on capital cost.

Another solution is data center load flexibility: essentially, reducing demand during peak hours a handful of hours per year so that the overall infrastructure buildout can be reduced. This strategy has potential to reduce overall costs, mitigate the risk that these assets become stranded (essentially worthless), and improve grid reliability. But Entergy wrote off data center load flexibility because Meta said it wasn’t interested in it. The companies seem to have given up quickly for such a massive project.

LPSC must prioritize ratepayers in this risky proposal

The LPSC has a long way to go to adequately protect ratepayers. With such a massive contemplated scale, the risks are enormous, and many of them are being kept out of public view.

The Commission should require Entergy to further study the above-mentioned grid-reliability issues, among others detailed in the testimony, and come up with a plan for monitoring the data center’s grid impact if it were to come online. The seven gas plants should also not be considered all at the same time; a more staggered review schedule is more appropriate for a more-than $15 billion project that has so much ratepayer money at stake. This would also allow more time for the Commission’s normal request for proposal process, which would allow third-party power providers to offer potentially cleaner, cheaper options to meet demand. There are more detailed recommendations outlined in the testimony that readers should check out if they’re interested—and highlight to the LPSC as well.

I’ll reiterate that if you’re in Louisiana, outside of New Orleans, you can contact your Commissioner and urge them to protect ratepayers instead of the shareholders of Entergy and Meta. You can even show up to the Commission vote this Wednesday, August 12^th, which starts at 9 AM at 602 North 5th Street, Baton Rouge, LA in the 1^st Floor Natchez Room.

Showing up lets the elected Commissioners know that folks are paying attention to their decisions, and you can even give a public comment urging basic transparency from Meta. It’s far past due for the LPSC to hold these billion- and trillion-dollar companies accountable.

Editor’s Note: Since the time of publication, state regulators nixed a subpoena that would’ve required Meta to be more transparent about its plans for this data center. The move was made in spite of multiple decisions from a judge who ruled that more information from Meta was necessary, as well as the wishes of community members who showed up to voice a wide array of concerns.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is the biggest package of housing legislation passed since the Cranston-Gonzalez Affordable Housing Act became law in 1990. It sets the stage for more housing to be built by working across a suite of federal agencies: to change federal housing programs to enhance financing for housing production; support state and local governments’ initiatives to plan for more housing; and encourage states to re-think their approach to land use. Although resilience to climate impacts was not the primary focus of this legislative package, some important progress was made on improving the resilience of manufactured housing, expanding repair programs for homeowners and landlords of existing housing, and speeding up funding for disaster recovery efforts in low-income communities for the next three years.    

A package combining 60 bills, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing now requires dozens of next steps for the implementation of its provisions, which you can find in a section-by-section summary. In this post, I’ll unpack two federal processes—appropriations and rulemaking—which, together with actions taken at the state and local level, will shape the outcomes of this legislation for communities across the nation in the years to come.  

Appropriations shape impact

As passed, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing funded a few pilot programs but was budget-deficit neutral. Instead, this legislation overwhelmingly focused on policies that encouraged the private market to put more homes on the ground. This will certainly have an impact on the number of homes in a nationwide housing shortage, but the resilience of those homes and the impact on overall affordability for lower and fixed income households is still unknown.   

For this legislation to have maximum impact, federal lawmakers must demonstrate continued bipartisan commitment to addressing the housing crisis through the annual appropriations process. Subcommittees in the House and Senate authorize federal funding through the appropriations process each year by setting funding levels, rescinding previous appropriations or transferring unspent balances. Unless a meaningful level of funding is provided during the appropriations process, programs authorized by the legislation—such expanded home repairs, studying the impact of deadly residential extreme heat in public and subsidized housing, and planning grants to state and local governments to support housing development—will lack the resources needed to preserve and expand our housing supply.

Rulemaking amidst rollbacks  

The 21^st Century ROAD to Housing Act will kick off several rule-making processes managed by different federal agencies, including several branches of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Rulemaking involves substantive public engagement and can have an important impact on policy implementation, grounding government action in the public interest, fairness, and the best available science. Rules that guide where and how housing is built will last far beyond any presidential administration or Congress, and this process will be an opportunity to enshrine climate resilience policies and standards for the long term—instead of rushing to build without accounting for the risks of mounting climate extremes. Any new rules also need to rely on the best available climate science, and account for the myriad ways fossil fuel-driven climate change will re-shape our natural resources and built environment in the years to come. 

A few of the rule-making processes detailed below will be particularly important in shaping the climate resilience and energy efficiency of the new housing that this legislation will spur. One of the rules that will be developed pursuant to the new law will identify circumstances under which federally-funded housing projects will be excluded from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Changes to NEPA have long been suggested to speed up the construction of housing. The final rule must ensure that these exceptions, known as categorical exclusions, made today don’t exacerbate the harms of the past—a concern made all the more urgent given the attacks of the second Trump administration on federal environmental justice commitments. 

Another new rulemaking requires new energy efficiency standards for manufactured housing to be developed by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Unlike other types of housing for which building standards are set by state and local governments, the code for manufactured homes is set by the federal government.  This process could shape the long-term affordability of manufactured housing amidst volatile energy prices and worsening heatwaves. For this sector of the housing market to be deployed at scale to fulfill its potential to provide safe and affordable housing, HUD must develop a rigorous standard that reflects the long-term benefits of energy efficiency for residents of manufactured housing.

The three-year authorization of HUD’s Community Development Block Grant for Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) program, intended to speed up and reform long-term funding to low- and moderate-income communities, after disasters occur, will also require a rule-making process by next summer. It’s an important step forward, and Congress should go further and permanently authorize this crucial program. As disasters grow in frequency and complexity, rules developed by the federal government must also require programs to address the long-term harms of disasters and use rigorous data to incorporate future conditions into their recovery programs.  

These and other rulemaking processes kickstarted by 21^st Century ROAD to Housing are occurring at the same time as the federal government pursues repeal of the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard (FFRMS) across agencies. As my colleague Shana Udvardy has previously detailed, the HUD version of these standards ensured that HUD’s federally funded projects would be built to withstand current and future flood risks. The repeal of HUD’s FFRMS rule will mean that new buildings, facilities and homes could be at an increased risk of flooding from hurricanes and sea level rise: increasingly severe weather that is supercharged by climate change.  

Much of the rulemaking required by 21^st Century ROAD to Housing will be spearheaded by HUD, an agency besieged by staffing cuts and struggling with capacity as it operates billions of dollars of critical programs.  The rulemaking process requires a well-resourced  and accountable federal agency to ensure that programs serve the public interest. HUD and other agencies must be funded not only to support their core mission and programs, but to shape much-needed new policy and programs such as those in the 21^st Century ROAD to Housing Act.

Congressional leaders must act to ensure this legislation benefits us

After decades of neglecting our housing crisis and ignoring clear warnings from climate science, no single legislative package from one level of government could have addressed our many needs.  As communities, policymakers, and advocates begin to make the most of this historic legislation, we must also fundamentally shift how we approach housing policy. We can’t afford to wait decades for the next major housing legislation and public investment. The climate crisis will increasingly require leaders to fund transformations in the built environment and social safety net to keep communities safe and manage the growing economic risk of climate change on our housing market.

We should consider the implementation of the ROAD to 21^st Century Housing an essential and welcome opportunity for laying the groundwork for further progress. That this legislation was passed in the current political environment—despite the many threats to climate science,  resilience programs,  and a growing effort by the fossil fuel industry to avoid any accountability for its role in a climate crisis that destroys homes, contributes to homelessness, and decimates communities—demonstrates the necessity of climate resilient housing for all.

The nation has also gone the entire 18 months of the second Trump administration without a permanent administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and with major chaos plaguing the agency thanks to President Trump. The president failed to appoint an administrator, instead leaning on four plainly unqualified “senior officials performing the duties of the administrator” (SOPDA), one of whom was Cameron Hamilton, until he was fired on May 8, 2025. In the chaotic fashion typical of this administration, he was renominated to lead the agency a year after being fired. This week, the Senate voted to confirm him as the first permanent FEMA administrator under this administration.

Hamilton’s rocky road to permanently leading FEMA

Hamilton worked as FEMA’s SOPDA for roughly 3.5 months at the start of the second Trump administration until he was fired for supporting the existence of the agency during a congressional hearing a year ago (instead of calling for its elimination, which was the Trump administration’s preferred stance at the time).

While his tenure was brief, Hamilton implemented several controversial policies at FEMA including:

• Increasing the threshold by which the federal government would declare a disaster, meaning a reduction in critical federal assistance that states rely on for disaster response
• Halting the automatic approval of funds under the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, limiting crucial funding that would help communities prepare for extreme events
• Canceling funding for the incredibly popular Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program. A FEMA statement called the program “another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program. It was more concerned with climate change than helping Americans effected [sic] by natural disasters.” After multiple court orders, FEMA reversed this decision and BRIC was reinstated on March 25. However, the program hasn’t been fully reinstated; grant awards that had funds already allocated to them can expend those funds, but grants that were selected but did not have funds allocated prior to the cancelation of the program have not seen those funds restored.

Since his nomination in May, Hamilton has been working at FEMA as a senior adviser. This allows the Trump administration to sidestep the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, which in most cases prohibits a nominee from serving in an acting role for the same position for which they’ve been nominated. This law is why the Trump administration created the SOPDA role.

Hamilton’s Senate testimony was short on substance

We’re dealing with a low bar when it comes to President Trump’s agency nominees. Even though it could be worse when it comes to Hamilton as FEMA administrator (think back to missing-in-action David Richardson and “the enforcer” Karen Evans), he will be the first FEMA administrator who lacks the qualifications and the five years of experience required by the Post Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006. Since that law was enacted, all five former FEMA administrators, including David Paulison, Craig Fugate, Brock Long, Peter Gaynor, and Deanne Criswell, had years or even decades of emergency management experience.

During the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs hearing on June 17, Democrats grilled Hamilton on multiple issues and Hamilton promised to conduct a review within the first 30 days on “areas where FEMA can reform.” Unsurprisingly, the committee voted largely along party lines to advance his nomination to the full Senate, with the exception of Senator John Fetterman (D-PA), who joined the Republicans.

Hamilton was well coached by two former FEMA administrators, Brock Long and Peter Gaynor, in preparation for his nomination hearing. His responses to senators’ questions, while respectful, were vague and noncommittal. Although Hamilton expressed his commitment to FEMA’s mission, it’s unlikely he’ll defy the vision of his bosses, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and President Trump.

There are several points to highlight from the nomination hearing, including the objections raised on process, Hamilton’s brief and inadequate written testimony, and his noncommittal answers to the senators’ questions.

Hamilton’s written testimony is brief—a total of two pages. The first page expresses his gratitude for his family, President Trump, and the two former FEMA administrators who provided him with support and counsel. On page two, Hamilton outlines what he’ll accomplish in his role as FEMA administrator. He echoes the tired mantra of the Trump administration: “We must return to our roots where disaster response is locally executed, state led and federally supported.” As has been pointed out by emergency managers, this is what FEMA already does.

He also promises to “deliver assistance to survivors rapidly” with the caveat “when Federal assistance is warranted.” These two statements conveniently balanced Hamilton’s need to appease senators on the committee but also show allegiance to President Trump’s politicization of disaster aid and his campaign to push more of the disaster response and recovery burden onto local, state, Tribal, and territorial governments.

Democrats highlight broken process leading to a “rubber-stamped” nominee

In the first opening remarks of the nomination hearing that included 11 nominees, Committee Ranking Member Gary Peters (D-MI) spoke powerfully on the many problems with the hearing, including a rushed process, overcrowded panel, and harmful lack of transparency. Senator Peters pointed out that the chairman did not allow each nominee to make a public statement, and that the ranking member had not received the nominees’ written testimonies prior to the hearing.

Senator Peters also noted that Hamilton had not completed his FBI background investigation, calling it “unprecedented” that nominees were advancing without meeting the minimum requirements of a typical vetting process. Chairman Rand Paul (R-KY) promised that the committee would vote on the nominees only after the ethics and FBI review were complete, but it is not clear if that promise has been kept.

During the hearing, Democrats focused on several important concerns with the administration’s handling of FEMA and Hamilton’s past decisions.

• The politicization of disaster assistance. Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH), among other Democratic senators, asked whether disaster survivors from blue states should be treated differently and receive less help than red-state survivors. She called the politicization of disaster assistance “shameful and unamerican.” Senator Hassan pressed Hamilton on what he would do if the president ordered him to withhold assistance to blue states. Hamilton replied that he would be sure that FEMA is “objective,” “fair and reasonable,” that he would “follow the law,” and would be “consistent in how [FEMA] adjudicates claims.” Senator Hassan closed her questioning by challenging Hamilton, noting that he was going “to have to think about what you are going to do when he (President Trump) reverses your recommendations.” Hamilton, however, did promise to speed up answers to disaster declaration decisions and reimbursements with the caveat of keeping a “close eye” on how states spend the assistance. The Trump administration has brazenly denied FEMA assistance to blue states and is continuing to do so.
• Hamilton’s April memo. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) addressed an April memo in which Hamilton recommended raising the threshold for disaster assistance. Senator Blumenthal spoke to how this change would disqualify a lot of families in Connecticut and asked him whether he still supported this policy. Hamilton responded that the memo reflected a “pre-deliberative” and “pre-decisional” process for areas where disaster assistance could be reformed and that it was not ready for adoption. Hamilton’s evasive answer ignores the fact that the Trump administration has been advancing both unwritten and written policies that reduce disaster assistance to communities, including Trump’s preparedness executive order and the final report by Trump’s FEMA Review Council.
• FEMA staffing cuts. Senators also asked Hamilton about staffing cuts at FEMA and FEMA’s readiness. Hamilton’s response was noncommittal, stating he had “full faith and confidence in the FEMA workforce” but that “we can do better.” Missing from the answer was a commitment to fully staff up the agency in a timely manner.

Unfortunately, additional important issues, such as Hamilton’s position on climate change (which is directly contributing to worsening disasters), and his lack of qualifications for the job were not adequately explored by the committee.

Actions Administrator Hamilton must take in his first month in office

In January 2025 I wrote about the five things the nation needs from the next FEMA administrator, and these remain true today. While Hamilton’s pledge to update FEMA’s antiquated IT system is important, this will take time and there are other pressing needs. In the immediate future, here are the top five actions he must take in his first month in office:

1. Advance a robust hiring process to shore up the agency’s ability to deliver for the public and disaster survivors. Unfortunately, during the nomination hearing Hamilton praised the opening of 350 FEMA positions but did not commit to a more robust hiring effort as was outlined in a recent Government Accountability Office report. The GAO found that FEMA reduced more than 4,300 employees in fiscal year 2025, causing a loss in institutional knowledge and experienced personnel, and was told by FEMA officials that “they have been operating in uncertainty and confusion while still trying to meet the mission with the staff they have.” The GAO raises serious concerns about FEMA’s ability to meet its mission in the case of a catastrophe such as the back-to-back hurricanes in 2024, Helene and Milton.
2. Stop President Trump’s politicization of disaster assistance and ensure disaster relief is equitable and nonpartisan.
3. Ignore the Trump administration’s biased FEMA Review Council report recommendations and instead develop a strategic plan based on the latest science and staffing analysis, and work with members of Congress on bipartisan policies that can actually improve FEMA.
4. Reinstate FEMA advisory committees, including its National Advisory Council, Technical Mapping Advisory Council, and National Dam Safety Review Board, so the agency’s work will be informed by the best available science and expertise.
5. Defend against mis- and disinformation about disasters and advocate for robust funding for FEMA, the Disaster Relief Fund, and preparedness programs that will help communities get back on their feet in more resilient ways.

Cameron Hamilton is expected to bring stability to FEMA. But the nation deserves and needs more than just the bare minimum of bringing stability to a broken agency. We’re witnessing back-to-back fossil-fueled disasters on top of the affordability crisis. Communities that are still recovering from last year’s disasters—like the tragic Texas Hill Country floods—are being hit again this Danger Season.

Congress must continue its oversight of FEMA and press Administrator Hamilton to implement immediate actions that ensure FEMA is ready to serve people across the nation this Danger Season, and in the months and years ahead.

Two weeks ago, over three gigawatts (GW) of data centers disconnected themselves from the grid in response to a minor transmission fault in Virginia and switched to their own polluting backup power. This sudden drop in load—equivalent to millions of homes—caused fluctuations in the grid’s voltage and frequency that could be detected as far away as Illinois and took nearly 10 minutes to resolve. While grid fluctuations are common, most are resolved automatically in seconds. Such massive, extended fluctuations create a risk of cascading disturbances which can eventually lead to blackouts—and since data centers are connected to the transmission system, the impact can be felt states away.

If this feels like déjà vu, you might be remembering a very similar incident which occurred in July 2024, when 1.5 GW of data centers disconnected from the grid in response to a transmission fault. (And that’s not to mention the 26 documented loss of load events in Texas over the last two years.) In between these two events, regulators have been busily drafting standards and making recommendations—but because this keeps happening, it’s clear that not enough is being done. To address the growing risk, immediate action is needed from state regulators and utilities to transparently apply robust requirements, and make plans to implement upcoming standards.

The rapid growth of data centers causes reliability risks

The technical name for the two events in Virginia is “customer initiated load reduction,” or CILR. In both cases, major damage to the grid was avoided, although utilities did field complaints about flickering lights and strange noises coming from refrigerators and air conditioners, caused by the grid’s voltage and frequency going outside of normal ranges.

Shortly after the 2024 event, the president of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) described it as a “five-alarm fire when it comes to reliability.” NERC is responsible for developing and enforcing grid reliability standards. NERC’s authority, and approval of its standards, comes from FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which governs the bulk power system—the large wires which move power between states and which most hyperscale data centers are seeking to connect to.

Despite NERC’s best efforts, data centers continue causing problems on the grid. I’m going to provide an overview of what FERC and NERC have been doing, but the truth is that their efforts alone are not enough— state regulators will need to step up to the plate, too.

What have NERC and FERC been up to?

Here’s a brief timeline of key actions by NERC and FERC, bookended by these two events:

• January 2025: NERC published an incident review covering the 1.5 GW CILR event in 2024, recommending actions that transmission planners and operators “should start taking to avoid significant issues in the future.”
• September 2025: NERC issued a level two alert with specific recommendations to address reliability risks caused by data centers. NERC’s later summary of responses to the alert found that very few utilities are following the recommendations or developing plans to implement them.
• October 2025: The Secretary of Energy issued an “advanced notice of proposed rulemaking”, directing FERC to develop rules to “ensure the timely and orderly interconnection of large loads to the transmission system.”
• May 2026: NERC published reliability guidelines, a precursor to enforceable standards, and issued a level three alert (NERC’s highest), including seven “essential actions” which utilities must take “to address the risks posed by existing and new computational loads interacting with the bulk power system.”
• June 2026: In response to the October directive, FERC issued “show cause” orders to each of the regional grid operators, finding that none of them were doing enough to address the reliability concerns of data centers.

Finally, in July FERC ordered NERC to issue reliability requirements by the end of the year (a timeline NERC had proposed earlier). This answered one of the key questions that had been swirling around all of NERC’s activity: whether the organization actually had the authority to require data centers to register (and thus be subject to reliability standards). NERC’s CEO had raised this concern earlier in a letter to members, noting that “registering load-side assets is unprecedented.”

Data centers are coming online even as standards evolve

While this may seem like a lot of movement, key gaps remain. NERC noted as much in a March 2026 whitepaper, finding that the lack of coordination between regulators, utilities, and data centers “can result in inefficiencies, misalignment, and increased risk to system reliability.”

A critical challenge is that data centers are already online, with even more being built now, while enforceable standards won’t be published for several more months. A recent report from Berkeley Lab estimates that from 2024, when NERC documented the first data center CILR, to 2027—the earliest that data center reliability standards will be enforceable—total load from data centers is expected to nearly double.

This growth wouldn’t be quite so challenging for grid reliability if utilities were taking it more seriously by implementing sufficient requirements on their own in the meantime, or if regulators were planning to make any future standards retroactive. However, neither of these are happening.

This is especially egregious given that a constant excuse from utilities about why they aren’t moving faster to connect clean energy is a lack of confidence in existing standards for things like rooftop solar. But now, utilities are rushing to interconnect data centers without any applicable standards.

The Midwest grid operator takes a step backward on enforcing reliability standards

MISO, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, is one of the grid operators under FERC jurisdiction which is responsible for building NERC standards into its interconnection policies and practices. In a June presentation, MISO shared a plan to phase in any NERC requirements by late 2027, with standards retroactive to data centers built after October 2026, or existing data centers which expand by over 25 MW.

But just a month later, MISO changed course, saying that existing data centers will be “managed,” with the full standards only applying to new data centers. In sharing the update, MISO mentioned feedback from un-named stakeholders. On a call announcing this change, MISO estimated that there are up to 30 GW of data centers in its territory that would thus be exempt from these standards. While the individual utilities that serve them may have their own standards, there is no transparency into these standards to understand whether they are sufficient or how they will be enforced.

Just 1.5 GW of data center load in Virginia triggered an event that NERC referred to as a “five alarm fire.” The risk in MISO’s territory is potentially 20 times greater.

State regulators must fill this gap

While FERC and NERC are active at the federal level, progress is slow. At the regional level, FERC’s show cause orders spared no one, finding that none of the six grid operators are doing enough,  allowing for a massive lapse in regulation. This makes it imperative that state regulators—public service commissions and public utility commissions—step in.

Across our state-level advocacy, UCS has been pushing for such efforts.

When Michigan utility I&M submitted a large load tariff for approval, I recommended that the state create a working group to address the data center reliability risks even as NERC and regional requirements are pending. The administrative law judge supported this recommendation; a decision by the commission may come later this month.

I built on this testimony when Michigan utility DTE filed for approval to interconnect a 1 GW Google data center. Our brief argued that because standards are still under development, greater scrutiny of DTE’s confidential requirements is needed.

This week, I filed additional testimony in Michigan calling on the Commission to ensure that any NERC and MISO standards are applied retroactively.

In a Louisiana docket to develop large load guidelines, UCS submitted extensive comments documenting the reliability risks from data centers and recommending formation of a workgroup similar to what we recommended in Michigan.

UCS also submitted excerpts from these comments in a Maine docket to investigate the impacts of data centers.

Next steps

This is a crowded landscape, and I haven’t even touched on the work of industry-expert groups, developments from other regional grid operators, or what’s happening in Europe. However, the rapid pace of development in this area underscores the point: regulators must require more transparency from data centers and utilities, and as standards are developed, lay plans to apply them retroactively.

The 3 GW loss of load incident that I opened with demonstrates exactly why: data centers are impacting the grid’s reliability even as experts scramble to develop standards and requirements. We can’t simply wait until those standards are ready. Doing so allows the stress from data centers to build up on the grid, inevitably leading to wide-scale grid damage and blackouts.