Science under siege: behind the scenes at Trump’s troubled environment agency (original) (raw)

Uncertainty, hostility and irrelevance are now part of daily life for scientists at the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Dan Costas, now retired, gazes out towards the Rhode Island coastline at sunset.

Dan Costa was a scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency for more than 32 years. Credit: Kayana Szymczak for Nature

The day Donald Trump took office as US president, the mood was sombre at the main research campus of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Durham, North Carolina. As scientists arrived for work, they saw pictures of former president Barack Obama and the previous EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy, coming down off the walls. Researchers had reason to be anxious: Trump had threatened many times during his campaign to shutter the EPA, and he had already taken steps along that path. Weeks before he moved into the White House, Trump had nominated Scott Pruitt to head the agency — a man who had spent his career filing lawsuits to block a variety of EPA regulations.

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Nature 559, 316-319 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05706-9

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