Mark Rowe examines the range of impacts caused by the current American administration – from moratoriums on wind and solar to cuts to wildlife services
What a difference 12 months makes. Many of those who didn’t vote for Donald Trump to be US president in November 2024 pointed to his first term in office and a perceived legacy that he struggled to operate the levers of power and ultimately made little meaningful impact. In contrast, the first year of Trump 2.0 has been a whirlwind, ‘flooding the zone’ with initiatives in a manner intended to overwhelm opposition and media.
On the international stage, Trump has withdrawn the USA from the Paris climate accord, started the process of leaving the World Health Organization and scuppered a landmark international agreement to reduce emissions from commercial shipping.
At home, partly by issuing presidential orders (210 as of November 2025, the highest number by any president) and the efforts of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, thousands of staff at key agencies related to climate change, industrial pollution and public health have been fired, with targets including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Environmental Protection Agency and NASA.
TURBULENT TIMES… click below to read all the stories
• Trump 2.0
• USAID Cuts
• Courtroom Drama
• Scientists Reeling
Trump has also moved forward with plans to revoke the ‘endangerment finding’ – a 2009 legal determination that greenhouse gas emissions cause climate change and threaten public health – and rolled back legislation on gender identity. DOGE claims US$214billion savings as of late November 2025 (though many media outlets have calculated it to be far less); even this figure is barely ten per cent of its US$2trillion target.
Elon Musk, initially put in charge of DOGE, said the mission was to end the ‘tyranny of the bureaucracy’, save taxpayers’ money and reduce US national debt, which stands at US$36trillion. Others beg to differ and see a concerted effort to dismember key parts of these agencies limb by limb.
‘Much of the damage is irreversible,’ says Jeff Masters, a meteorologist at Yale Climate Connections and a former hurricane scientist with NOAA. ‘These are not simple cuts that can be rectified by fully restoring funding next year. The very infrastructure needed to do science has been seriously weakened, and will take years or decades to repair. It’s like blowing up a dam and deciding it was a bad idea. You can’t go and glue the pieces back together.’
The dismantling of environmental and climate agencies
The presidential crosshairs have been fixed on key government agencies from the start of Trump’s second term in office. The National Science Foundation – which supports basic scientific research at thousands of US institutions – has lost more than 10 per cent of its staff.
The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) faces the elimination of its climate research centres and loss of hundreds of federal and academic climate scientists who track and study human-driven global warming. NASA Science’s office faces a nearly 50 per cent cut; the National Weather Service (NWS) has lost 600 staff and the Environmental Protection Agency (EP) faces a 23 per cent budget cut.
Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has lost a third of its staff and appears set for a radical re-direction in its approach to vaccination.
‘All of this is without precedent,’ says Dr. Stan Meiburg, executive director for Environment and Sustainability, Wake Forest University and a former EPA Deputy Regional Administrator. ‘It will result in more exposure to health-damaging pollution if polluters believe they can emit with impunity. This weakness will propagate through the entire US environmental and public health management system.’
PUNITIVE TARIFFS RESHAPED ECONOMIES OVERNIGHT, EXPOSING THE FRAGILITY OF GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS
‘No-one wins in a trade war’, goes the mantra. But some people, it turns out, lose more than others. Ever since Donald Trump presented his list of ‘Liberation Day reciprocal tariffs’ in the White House Rose Garden last April – targeting
180 countries and territories – the impacts of tariffs on developing nations have been profound and sparked protests around the world.
Tariffs hit South and Southeast Asia hard, according to Ben Bland, Asia-Pacific programme director at Chatham House, ‘throwing countries’ short-term economic plans into disarray, undermining the basis of their long-term development models, and pushing them further into an uncomfortable embrace with China’.
Initially, Cambodia (49 per cent), Vietnam (46 per cent) and Indonesia (32 per cent) were hit with higher tariffs than China. Cambodia exported more than US$3billion of apparel to the USA in 2024 and the apparel sector employs more than 900,000 people, more than ten per cent of the country’s overall workforce.
The garment sector is Sri Lanka’s third-largest foreign exchange earner – worth US$1.9billion in 2024 – and exports to the USA sustain much of the industry’s 350,000 workers. Bangladesh, which was slapped with a 37 per cent tariff, relies on its garment industry, which employs four million workers and accounts for 13 per cent of the country’s economy and 80 per cent of its exports.
Last autumn, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which granted duty-free access to the US market for thousands of products from sub-Saharan Africa, was allowed to expire.
According to the German Institute of Development and Sustainability, replacing this with tariffs affected a range of countries, including Lesotho, Kenya, Madagascar, Chad, Botswana, Nigeria, South Africa, Mauritius and Malawi. Trump has argued that moving away from aid dependency and towards self-reliance was mutually beneficial, but since August, 22 African nations have been faced with duties ranging from 15 to 30 per cent.
The Lesotho government was forced to declare a state of disaster and warned that 40,000 jobs in the textile sector were likely to be lost. South Africa warned that the tariffs jeopardise 100,000 jobs within the car industry – exports dropped by 60 per cent in 2025.
The scale of the tariff shock has also strained long- established supply chains that link developing economies to US consumers. Shipping firms report rerouting cargo away from the US after sudden increases in duties left consignments stuck at ports or returned to origin. Manufacturers in Vietnam, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka say the volatility has made forward planning impossible, with many factories operating below capacity for the first time in a decade.
The ripple effects have reached commodity exporters too. Several African nations reliant on the US for key agricultural markets have warned that higher duties on tea, coffee and horticultural goods threaten farm incomes and rural employment. Kenya’s producers say rising costs have undercut the viability of smallholder exports, while Malawi and Ethiopia report cancelled contracts.
From hurricane warnings to a heating planet, NOAA has for decades been at the forefront of climate analysis. According to an internal budget document seen by Science. the agency’s 2026 budget is to be cut by $1.7 billion, about 27 per cent, and the White House is seeking to eliminate NOAA’s research arm and cut funding for the agency’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) to just over US$171million, a drop of US$485million. The budget closed the agency’s National Severe Storms Laboratory and ended support for collecting regional climate data and information, often used by farmers and other industries (the government belatedly restored the data service for farmers).
These measures have already had meaningful impacts, according to the Center for American Progress, which says cuts to NOAA and NWS – including the loss of key NWS early-warning staff – are hindering the nation’s ability to prepare for and respond effectively to extreme weather events, a risk highlighted by flooding in Texas last July, seen as the country’s deadliest inland flooding event in 50 years.
Regular twice-per-day upper-air balloon soundings – the most important tool for reliable model weather forecasts – have been lost from 18 per cent of the nation’s upper-air stations, says former NOAA hurricane scientist Jeff Masters. ‘There are questions on whether the lack of balloon data contributed to the unusually poor forecasts for the impact of ex-Typhoon Halong, which devastated western Alaska in October.’
Top heat experts at the National Integrated Heat Health Information System were no longer at their government posts at the start of what was a brutally hot summer, involving a massive heat dome over the United States, subjecting more than 255 million Americans to what meteorologists called ‘dangerous, life-threatening’ conditions.
NASA, regarded as a global gold standard for climate monitoring, faces budget cuts of up to 24 per cent (it could have been worse: in April, Trump’s budget request implied slashing the centre’s funding for its science missions by 47 per cent, a measure described by the American Astronomical Society as ‘an existential threat’). A question mark still hangs over the future of its Space Flight Center in Maryland, one of the world’s premier centres for earth science research.
Targeting of key staff at the CDC has also been unabashedly political. Last September, US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, known for his anti-vaccine advocacy, called for ‘new blood’ at the agency and the removal of officials with ‘conflicts of interest and catastrophically bad judgement, and political agendas’. Staff at the CDC’s climate office were laid off, with outbreak forecasters, policy and data offices affected.
The CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service – which trains the agency’s celebrated ‘disease detectives’, typically the first responders in an outbreak – lost at least 30 programme coordinators, though some were belatedly reinstated. Ahead of the winter respiratory virus season, more than 130 employees were laid off from the office of the director of the National Center for Immunisation and Respiratory Diseases.
Among these were leaders of the CDC’s response to the growing number of measles cases in the country. A federal spokesperson has since said some firings had been reversed, but Colorado has reported its worst measles year in three decades and Florida has announced it will be the first state to eliminate all childhood vaccine mandates. All staff at the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report – which has published surveillance data on the nation’s health for more than a century – were fired.
DRILLING EXPANDS WHILE PROTECTIONS SHRINK
Hostility towards climate policy has been evident throughout the year. In September, the US Department of Energy instructed staff to avoid terms such as ‘climate change’, ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’, while criticism continued of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for what is said to be an exaggeration of climate risks.
Regulatory shifts have favoured fossil fuels: the Environmental Protection Agency has delayed limits on toxic pollution from coal-fired power plants, and analysis by the Rhodium Group warns that dismantled climate rules could cut the pace of US decarbonisation by more than half over the next 15 years.
Offshore drilling is set to expand sharply. A draft five-year leasing plan proposes up to 34 oil and gas auctions, including the first new leases off California in 40 years, major sales in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and 21 auctions off Alaska, extending into High Arctic waters previously untouched by drilling.
Onshore, the administration has opened 5.3 million hectares of land to coal mining and allocated US$625million to recommission coal plants.
A tax bill has also reduced royalty rates on coal production. Internationally, an agreement to cap global shipping emissions collapsed after Trump dismissed it as a ‘green scam’.
The cuts have excised the next generation of leaders at the CDC, the NIH, and the Food and Drug Administration, according to a former senior CDC employee. ‘The magnitude of these reductions is historic and risks jeopardising the nation’s ability to innovate in biomedicine and avert disease,’ they said.
According to Josh Sharfstein, public health professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and former deputy commissioner of the FDA, ’many of these experts are no longer with the agency. I’ve heard from many state and local officials that the backup they’ve counted on is now spotty, depending on the topic and the office needed. There will be direct impacts in discrete areas, such as those resulting from the loss of the tobacco control programme and from the departure of experts in vaccination at CDC. Over the long term, I’m most concerned about the loss of integrity in policymaking, as strong processes are critical to success in regulation and grantmaking for health ’
Across at the EPA, 31 critical clean-air and water regulations have been revoked amid 3,700 workforce reductions – a cut of 23 per cent in staff, according
to an EPA statement. According to Meiburg, the administration has ‘aggressively encouraged eligible staff across the agency to take early retirements… terminated staff who were recent hires… and outright eliminated staff positions in areas related to environmental justice, renewable energy, scientific research and climate change.’
Furloughed staff have been unable to inspect water treatment plants, chemical factories, oil refineries or monitor air quality. In addition, the reoriented EPA
says it plans to reinterpret the Clean Air Act (seen as the nation’s most effective safeguard against toxic air pollution from coal-burning plants), repeal all federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants and rescind recent updates to the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS).
Further proposals by the White House include a 30 per cent cut to the EPA’s science and technology budget, crippling essential research on air pollution, toxic chemicals and climate resilience, says the EPN, along with a US$680million cut in grants to states and tribes, setting back clean drinking water projects and other projects across the nation, and targeting the Office of Research and Development – the backbone of EPA science – which develops publicly vetted research action plans on the harmful impact of everything from forever chemicals to wildfire smoke.
‘These cuts will produce a much weaker, less capable EPA,’ says Meiburg. ‘The level of damage to the infrastructure of EPA is profound. It will result in more exposure to health-damaging pollution if polluters believe they can emit with impunity. It is likely to take EPA years to recover from the departure of so much institutional memory in such a short time,’ he adds.
One of the administration’s first targets was the USAID budget, which was cut by 82 per cent in early 2025, ‘officially ending’ about 5,200 of USAID’s 6,200
The head of the WHO says programmes to tackle HIV, polio, mpox and bird flu have been affected by the freeze on tens of billions of dollars of overseas
aid from the USA. The UN women’s health agency warned that the absence of US support in Afghanistan will likely result in an additional 1,200 maternal deaths and 109,000 unintended pregnancies between 2025 and 2028. Across Africa and the developing world the impacts have been profound (see separate article).
In September, the USDA announced that it would terminate not only the annual report on food insecurity in the USA but also eliminate funding for the underlying data. Last May, NOAA announced that it would no longer update its Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters product, which tracks major weather and climate disasters. Last spring also saw the laying off of analysts at the Department of Health and Human Services who were responsible for updating poverty guidelines used to calculate eligibility for more than 40 programmes; data collection was suspended for the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a gold-standard database of maternal mortality data.
WIND AND SOLAR, ONCE BOOMING, FACE MORATORIUMS, STALLED PERMITS AND SLASHED INCENTIVES THAT THREATEN YEARS OF CLEAN-ENERGY MOMENTUM
The USA’s medium-term record on renewable energy has been reasonably impressive. Solar deployment and electric vehicle (EV) sales broke records in 2023 and 2024.
After a decade-long trend of rapid growth in solar power, installed solar capacity now totals about 220GW, enough to provide more than seven per cent of the nation’s electricity.
According to the US Energy Information Administration, the total annual US electricity generation from wind energy increased from about six billion kilowatt hours (kWh) in 2000 to about 434 billion kWh in 2022, when wind turbines accounted for 10.3 per cent of total US utility-scale electricity generation.
Trump, however, has lambasted what he calls ‘farmer- destroying solar’ and called wind and solar ‘the scam of the century’. On his first day in office, he signed an executive order declaring a moratorium on permits, new leases and lease renewals for all wind projects on federal land.
In July, he signed an executive order instructing the Treasury Department to terminate the clean electricity production and investment tax credits for wind and solar facilities. Agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins has announced that her department would rescind ‘all programmes building solar panels on our farmland’.
Trump’s administration has filed legal motions to halt or investigate the development of nine offshore wind farms that had already been approved, which were expected to create 9,000 jobs and power five million households (legal challenges have reversed at least one of Trump’s injunctions).
Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ imposed steep cuts to solar energy and placed new restrictions on energy tax credits that will slow the deployment of residential and utility-scale solar.
The Department of Energy says it intends to claw back US$13billion in funding for ‘the wasteful Green New Scam agenda’ of clean energy projects, while a US$7billion grant programme to expand solar energy in low-income communities has been rescinded. Kris Mayes, Arizona’s attorney general, said the cuts would increase energy bills by 20 per cent for the poorest.
According to Victoria Hunter Gibney, senior research analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, these actions ‘are part of a larger pattern that will reduce the availability of data or discredit data that are available’ and signify increasingly overt politicisation. ‘Decisions to collect or publish less federal data appear to be driven by the current administration’s views on issues such as LGBTQ+ identities and climate change,’ she says. A brain drain of high-level departures and new employees is inevitable, warns Masters.
‘There will be fewer talented people wanting to work for the government and NOAA, since talented people will seek jobs elsewhere rather than be subjected to abrupt termination for no reason.’
CUTS TO WILDLIFE SERVICES AND FOREST PROTECTIONS HAVE THREATENED SPECIES, LANDSCAPES AND THE FRAGILE SYSTEMS THAT SAFEGUARD THEM
Wildlife habitats are being primed for resource exploitation and long-standing safeguards overturned as the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) faces hundreds of job cuts. The administration intends to fire dozens of officials from the service’s Fish and Aquatic Conservation and Migratory Bird Programmes and the National Wildlife Refuge System.
The grizzly bear is among the iconic species that may suffer, according to Ed Bangs, a former USFWS expert who led the recovery programme for grey wolves in the Rocky Mountains at the beginning of the 21st century.
In the summer, agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins said she was rescinding the Roadless Rule, which for 25 years has protected 23 million hectares of national forest from new road construction, reconstruction and most timber harvesting. There are roadless areas in 39 states, including nearly a quarter of New Mexico’s Gila National Forest and 3.6 million hectares of coastal rainforest in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.
Rollins said the rule was ‘overly restrictive’ and ‘outdated’. Conservationists counter that the protections have been central to preserving biodiversity hotspots, safeguarding carbon-rich old-growth forests and limiting erosion across fragile mountain watersheds.
They warn that reversing the rule could accelerate habitat fragmentation across some of the country’s most intact ecosystems.
Trump has imposed tariffs on timber imports, while a tax and spending bill passed last summer legally requires a 78 per cent increase in the amount of timber sold from national forests in the next nine years. At the time, Trump said: ‘We are freeing up our forests so we are allowed to take down trees and make a lot of money… we have massive forests. We just aren’t allowed to use them because of the environmental lunatics who stopped us.’
An executive order has also made it US policy to expedite the extensive development of Alaska’s natural resources, including energy, minerals, timber and seafood. The order outlines policies to maximise resource use, repeals earlier measures that restricted development and prioritises the state’s liquefied natural gas potential. It also aims to initiate new leasing and permitting in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — a region that has long been protected for its ecological and cultural importance.
