'Devastated' scientists fear worldwide fallout as Trump guts 20-year Arctic research

The Trump administration has reportedly decided to yank federal funding from an annual National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report that examined the state of the Arctic, which is warming significantly faster than other regions of the world as continued fossil fuel extraction and use drive up global temperatures.

Politico, which first reported the decision, noted that the move “jeopardizes public dissemination of the report that NOAA has published since 2006. It has previously been available on the agency’s website, requires NOAA staff for its production, and pools data from NOAA scientists for many of its findings.”

Zack Labe, a climate scientist who has been an author on NOAA’s peer-reviewed Arctic Report Card since 2020, wrote on social media that the Trump administration’s decision “is truly devastating.”

“The Arctic Report Card has been one of my favorite scientific endeavors,” Labe wrote. “For two decades, it has documented conditions across the Arctic system, bringing together physical and social sciences with real-world observations/data and consistent updates.”

Speaking to the science news outlet EOS, Labe warned that “the loss of the Arctic Report Card would be significant not only for the scientific community, but also for decision-makers and the public.”

“Written for a broad audience and developed by more than 100 scientists from around the world, the report is an important resource for consistently documenting changes in one of the fastest warming regions on our planet,” Labe added. “Discontinuing it would create a significant gap in our ability to track and connect these changes from year to year, with implications for people and communities around the world.”

Last year’s edition of the report card found that “surface air temperatures across the Arctic from October 2024 through September 2025 were the warmest recorded since 1900.”

“The last 10 years are the 10 warmest on record in the Arctic,” the report observed.

The Trump administration, packed with fossil fuel industry allies and headed by a climate denier, has worked aggressively to gut federal initiatives designed to track the worsening impact of the global climate emergency. Since taking power last year, the administration has dismissed government scientists, scrubbed climate information from federal websites, stopped updating a database that tracked the country’s costliest weather disasters, and picked a climate denier to oversee the federal government’s flagship climate report.

Rick Thoman, an Arctic climate specialist, called the Trump administration’s latest move “devastating news for Arctic environmental monitoring.”