EPA budget cut by nearly 55%, National Parks by 25% in Trump’s proposed spending plan.
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Coming up with a final federal budget always involves arm twisting and other negotiating tactics as everyone lobbies for their priorities, so the initial budget proposal released by the White House in early May remains far from final.
However, pick any topic related to conservation, environmental protection, climate change or weather and it’s not hard to find someone concerned by the cuts the Trump administration is proposing in its quest to shrink the federal budget.
In total, President Donald Trump’s proposed budget recommends chopping more than $32 billion across agencies charged with monitoring weather, oceans and the atmosphere and protecting natural and historic resources, parks and conservation lands, according to a USA TODAY analysis. The cuts echo an array of actions already taken by federal agencies and the president’s Department of Government Efficiency.
The Environmental Protection Agency for example, faces a 54.5% proposed cut, taking its budget to a level last seen when Ronald Reagan was president. The proposed cuts in other environmental-related spending range from 15% to 55% across federal agencies.
Democrats, former federal scientists and advocacy groups say the cuts will set back the nation’s efforts to combat climate change, leave the country’s environmental satellite programs lagging other nations and allow increases in pollution and harmful emissions.
The White House said its overall budget would “save taxpayers $163 billion in wasteful spending” among non-military agencies and “provide historic increases for defense and border security.” The president’s supporters say such cuts have to happen if the nation is ever going to pay down its debt.
Shrinking the federal deficit through budget cuts is crucial, said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think-tank that drafted Project 2025. She was one of its many authors.
The president’s budget does include “a lot of cuts to offices that look at renewables and social and environmental justice,” she said. “We have a $36 trillion national debt and we have a $2 trillion deficit. We shouldn’t be spending money on these things.”
“We want to have a fiscally sound budget, just the way households have a fiscally sound budget.”
Trump could balance the budget by cutting Social Security and Medicare, she said. “But during the campaign, the president said he was not going to cut those programs … He’s fulfilling his promises.”
Activists see a ‘striking blow’
But a wide range of conservation and environmental advocates argue the president’s budget could have devastating impacts for years to come and that there are better ways to cut federal spending. The cuts come on top of months of staff reductions that have seen the workforce in some agencies reduced by as much as 20% or more, according to USA TODAY reports.
The budget proposal is “another clear signal of how far this administration is willing to go to demolish the critical infrastructure that supports our cherished public lands and wildlife,” said Robert Dewey, vice president of government relations at Defenders of Wildlife, a nonprofit animal advocacy group. “The Trump administration is making a grievous error by slashing programs and staff in the name of efficiency and would be striking a disastrous blow to the agencies charged with conserving imperiled species and habitats.”
Ranking Democrats in the House and Senate vowed to work against some of the budget reductions.
“Trump’s budget ‒ bought and paid for by his fossil fuel megadonors ‒ would be an unmitigated disaster for everyone except the looters and polluters,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, in a news release.
With the cuts to the EPA budget, the “most hazardous industries would get to spew cancer-causing pollution and greenhouse gases into our air, exacerbating climate-flation on everything from insurance to groceries.”
Here are some examples of key cuts:
Department of Interior
At the Interior department, which includes the National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and Geological Survey, the budget would be cut by almost a third, even though it’s slated to take on services now provided by other agencies. The budget would drop from $17 billion to $12 billion next year.
National parks advocacy groups were quick to raise concerns about the more than $1 billion cut to the parks budget, a 25% reduction. The budget also included a proposal to shed “many” of the smaller, less visited 433 parks by handing them over to states to manage, though it did not specify how many or which ones.
At the U.S. Geological Survey, $564 million would be eliminated for university grants and programs that focus on “social agendas” such as climate change rather than “achieving dominance in energy and critical minerals,” according to the budget document.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s office that oversees protected marine species such as whales and sea turtles would be merged with an office performing similar functions for land and freshwater species at the fish and wildlife service that is slated for a $37 million cut. That concept had been discussed among the agencies for years.
The merger is “consistent with the President’s efforts to improve performance and reduce the federal bureaucracy, as well as his deregulatory agenda,” the White House said.
The administration’s budget also announced plans to create a new “Federal Wildland Fire Service” in the Interior Department. It would take wildfire mitigation and firefighting responsibilities at the U.S. Forest Service, which has been under the Department of Agriculture for 120 years, and merge with staff with similar responsibilities at four agencies in the Interior Department.
Environmental Protection Agency
The Environmental Protection Agency’s budget would shrink from $9.1 billion to $4.2 billion.
The cuts would end $1 billion in grant funding to states. Almost $500 million would be eliminating or reducing three grant programs the administration describes as “radical environmental justice work, woke climate research, and skewed, overly-precautionary modeling that influences regulations.”
Two additions are noted across these environmental areas, $9 million would be added to a budget of more than $100 million for the drinking water program and $27 million to a grant program for Indigenous Tribes to maintain water and wastewater infrastructure, increasing the program’s budget several times over.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
A variety of “climate-dominated” research, data and grant programs would be terminated at NOAA, reducing the budget by $1.3 billion. The cuts also include NOAA’s climate adaptation partnerships.
The proposal would scale back the planned replacement for NOAA’s existing geostationary operational environmental satellites. The system provides a host of public data for weather observation and modeling, as well as other kinds of earth, atmospheric and solar data. Plans for its replacement would have added improved imagery and composition, as well as additional instruments for monitoring the atmosphere and ocean. The Trump proposal would also cancel unspecified contracts for what the administration termed “unnecessary climate measurements.”
Craig McLean, a former chief scientist at NOAA and former assistant administrator for research, is among those dismayed by the efforts to strip back the instrumentation of the planned new satellite system. It “seems to reinforce the naive presumption that satellites should only support the weather mission and ignores the ability of satellite-based sensors to assist our understanding of ocean sciences and changes in the earth and similarly in the atmosphere,” he said.
Department of Energy
Although the so-called “green new deal” was never passed by Congress, the president’s budget makes several references to the “Green New Scam” in its proposal to shave money from the Energy department’s budget.
It proposes cancelling more than $15 billion in funds allocated from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for renewable energy sources.
More than $2.5 billion would be cut from the office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which oversees the department’s “Energy Star” program, and the budget blames for unpopular regulations on gas stoves and lightbulbs. It also cuts $389 million from the environmental management program that oversees waste cleanup at 14 active clean-up sites.
Other proposed spending cuts:
∎ Department of Agriculture: The budget cuts more than $2 billion in environmental-related expenses, such as $754 million for a program that provides technical assistance for property owners who want to conserve and maintain natural resources on their land. The document notes the budget supports the administration’s efforts to “improve forest management” and increase domestic timber production.
∎ NASA: The space agency would see a 24.3% cut in its programs related to Earth science and climate change, a reduction from $24.8 billion to $18.8 billion. It would eliminate $1.1 billion for “low-priority climate monitoring satellites” and would restructure the Landsat Next mission. The mission, proposed for launch in 2030-2031, would have continued the “longest space-based record of Earth’s land surface” and expanded the data available for water quality, crop production, critical mineral mapping and ice and snow dynamics, according to federal websites. The budget document states NASA will study “more affordable ways” to maintain Landsat imagery.
Dinah Voyles Pulver covers climate change, wildlife and the environment for USA TODAY. Reach her at [email protected] or @dinahvp on Bluesky or X or dinahvp.77 on Signal.