NASA researcher Kelly Gleason works on skis during field testing for snow reflectivity near Delta Junction, Alaska, in 2023.Mario Tama/Getty
This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The US Senate passed a limited spending package on Thursday that will largely fund several science- and land-related agencies, including the Department of Interior, the US Forest Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the US Environmental Protection Agency, at current levels. Having passed the House on January 8, the bill now heads to President Donald Trump, who is expected to sign it.
The bill was, in many ways, a congressional rebuke of Trump’s request to drastically cut critical federal services related to the environment.
“It really shows that our public lands are meant to be managed for everyone in this country and not just private industry looking to turn a profit,” said Miranda Badgett, senior government relations representative for The Wilderness Society. “This bill really rejected some of the reckless budget cuts we saw proposed by the administration that would impact our national public-land agencies.”
Still, to conservation and science advocates, the bill is a compromise between Republican and Democratic priorities: It trims slightly 2025 budget numbers, including millions of dollars cut from NASA, the EPA and the US Geological Survey. It also doesn’t account for inflation, said Jacob Malcom, executive director of Next Interior, which advocates for the Interior Department.
“This is part of that long-running plan: ‘We’ll make services worse and then they won’t have popular support.’”
The Senate also rejected nearly 150 budget riders placed by the House that would have dramatically hamstrung agencies, Badgett said. Rejected riders included prohibiting the Bureau of Land Management from spending money to enforce the Public Lands Rule that was finalized in 2024 (which the Trump administration is currently trying to repeal), requiring quarterly oil and gas lease sales in at least nine states, and prohibiting any implementation of the BLM’s Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Rule that, among other things, boosted the royalty rates oil and gas companies must pay the federal government.
The biggest blow to the West, climate science and the nation’s health and safety, however, are potential cuts to the National Center for Atmospheric Research, based in Boulder, Colorado. The center creates the modeling and analysis that underpins the weather forecasting people around the world depend on for their lives and work. But instead of including a line item to fund NCAR in this budget, the bill simply tells the National Science Foundation, which oversees the center, to continue its functions.
This leaves the center with a shaky future in light of the administration’s stated desire to dissolve it, said Hannah Safford, associate director of climate and environment for the Federation of American Scientists. Colorado Senators Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper fought unsuccessfully to include NCAR-specific funding in the bill.
Unless politicians find a workaround, climate science at the center will be destabilized, Safford added, but what that will look like on the ground is still uncertain. “It’s unlikely to manifest as a sudden loss of a particular service, but it might cause weather forecasting to be more unreliable,” she said.
It’s unclear if the current administration will follow the will of Congress and implement the budget as it’s written, Badgett said, though it includes directives that require federal agencies to receive approval from the House and Senate Appropriations Committees if they significantly change staffing or how the money is spent.
“I personally have concerns,” she said. “But I’m glad to see there are various guardrails to safeguard the agencies and our public lands and the folks who work hard to do the work at the agencies.”
In addition, Malcom said, most environmental agencies were already chronically underfunded. An agency like the US Fish and Wildlife Service, for example, only receives a fraction of the money that’s needed to recover threatened and endangered species. And that’s been the case for years. When agencies are underfunded and under resourced, he said, the public lands and water they oversee will continue to suffer along with the critical research done to prepare people for climate change.
In other words, the budget is, he said, “not as bad as it could be, but it’s also not as good as it needs to be.”
Jonathan Gilmour, cofounder of The Impact Project, a data and research platform focused on the value of public service, worries that agencies won’t have the staffing after last year’s layoffs and deferred resignations to continue necessary projects. He hopes the new budget will allow them to rehire or hire new employees to fill critical roles, though whether that happens remains to be seen.
While this bill doesn’t include draconian cuts, those who live, work and recreate in the West will likely continue to notice services decline, Malcom said. “Watch for things to get worse. This is part of that long-running plan at least since the Reagan years of, ‘We’ll make services worse and then they won’t have popular support, and then it will make it easier to cut further because there’s not popular support,’” he said. “This will just be heading in that direction.”
