Climate Changed
Washington Bureaucrats Are Quietly Working to Undermine Trump’s Agenda
Across the government, career staffers are finding ways to continue old policies, sometimes just by renaming a project.
Photographer: Brendan Smialowski/AFP
In report after report following Donald Trump’s election, career staffers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration kept saying the same thing: climate change is real, serious and man-made.
That’s surprising because Trump has called global warming a hoax. His political appointees at the Commerce Department, which oversees NOAA, have complained to its staff, but stopped short of demanding changes or altering the findings. So the reports, blog posts and public updates kept flowing. The bureaucrats won.