Virginia Burkett has filed a whistleblower complaint, asking for an investigation and better policies to protect scientists against political interference

Exclusive: the Trump administration demoted this climate scientist — now she wants reform

Virginia Burkett has filed a whistleblower complaint, asking for an investigation and better policies to protect scientists against political interference

A climate scientist who was demoted for speaking out by the administration of former US president Donald Trump is seeking an investigation into her case and demanding changes to personnel policies to prevent similar retaliation against others in future. Her supporters say the proposed reforms could help her agency, the US Geological Survey (USGS), as well as others safeguard science in the event of a second Trump administration, which many fear will be even more efficient than the first at sidelining science and scientists.

“This is not about what happened to me, it’s about what could happen to others,” Virginia Burkett, the scientist, told Nature, emphasizing that stronger protections are needed regardless of who wins the US presidential election in November.

Burkett, whose position and salary as chief scientist for climate and land use at the USGS have been upgraded under President Joe Biden, laid out her allegations in a 200-plus-page complaint filed today with a federal watchdog agency that represents whistleblowers. She is represented by the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, a non-profit organization based in New York.

After Trump took office in 2017, Burkett repeatedly opposed what she saw as harmful actions taken by his administration, including dismantling climate research programmes, cutting science budgets and attempting to water down an influential government report on global warming. Burkett says that she was demoted from her leadership post at the USGS and then removed from a prominent White House panel that manages the government’s main, multiagency climate programme. Now she is seeking an investigation into what she calls “abuse of authority and gross mismanagement” under Trump.

Current officials at relevant agencies declined to comment or did not respond to requests from Nature, and Trump's science adviser at the time says he does not remember being involved with her case.

The Biden administration is currently rushing to put scientific-integrity rules in place ahead of the upcoming US presidential election, to protect against political interference. But if Trump wins and takes office for a second time, many question whether those rules will be enough to safeguard government science and scientists.

As a senior scientist, Burkett says that she is in a solid position to push for stronger protections. “I don’t want to be here, but if not me, who?”

Running interference

From the earliest days of Trump’s presidency, Burkett says that senior USGS officials appointed by the administration misrepresented to the US Congress the scale and impact of budget cuts that they were trying to make to climate programmes within the agency. For example, agency leaders implied in their proposed budget that they would transfer a research programme focused on carbon uptake by ecosystems to a new department, when in fact the programme was being eliminated. At the same time, senior officials were attempting to misrepresent climate research in government-issued reports, she says.

After speaking out in opposition to both, Burkett was told in June 2017 that she would be transferred out of her science post and into a policy position under a political appointee who had yet to be chosen. The way the transfer was initiated, she alleges, violated rules designed to protect career civil servants, who are hired competitively rather than being appointed by the president. She was not alone: 34 other senior climate scientists were also given unexplained reassignments. Burkett successfully fought the transfer, but says she was coerced into accepting a demotion.

Neither USGS nor its parent agency, the Interior Department responded to Nature’s request for comments by the time this story was published.

Burkett’s stand-off with the Trump administration reached its peak in 2018 as a team of scientists was finalizing the fourth National Climate Assessment, a mandatory analysis that the US government must deliver to Congress every four years about the state of climate science and how the country should respond to climate change. Compiled by more than a dozen federal agencies, the assessment is managed through the US Global Change Research Program (GCRP), which reports to a White House multiagency panel that was chaired by Burkett at the time.

While he was president, Trump, a climate sceptic, promoted the US fossil-fuels industry and pulled the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate pact. Despite worries from scientists involved, the climate assessment seemed to fly under the Trump administration’s radar. That, at least, was the case until the report was submitted for a final review, scheduled for completion in July 2018, by each of the participating agencies. Rather than signing off, political appointees with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began seeking changes that would “downplay and misrepresent” the scale and impact of climate change, as documented in the report, Burkett says. In particular, the NOAA officials wanted to downplay a fundamental message from the report: that the risk of catastrophic warming could be reduced by halting greenhouse-gas emissions, she adds.

Burkett raised the alarm on behalf of the panel in multiple e-mails to NOAA officials and others after learning of these attempts in September of that year. The White House eventually conceded and issued the report, Burkett says, but sought to limit media coverage of it by releasing it on Black Friday, a day in November after the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, when many people are offline, spending time with family and shopping. It was originally slated for release at a science meeting in December.

A number of scientists who worked on the climate assessment confirmed to Nature the story laid out by Burkett, saying that she had spoken out against a series of requests for revisions that would have undermined the science in the report. “I have no idea who she was irritating at the time, but we all backed up what she was saying,” says Don Wuebbles, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign who co-led the assessment.

Another scientist with direct knowledge of the internal discussions says that staff members within the GCRP spent weeks trying to negotiate compromise language that would satisfy the Trump-appointed NOAA officials without distorting or diluting the science. That process was still under way when Burkett stepped in to block the proposed changes, says Dave Reidmiller, who oversaw the assessment within the GCRP. It didn’t seem like the most politically savvy move, but Burkett was clearly standing up for science, says Reidmiller, who is now at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland.

Burkett was eventually replaced as co-chair of the White House panel by a NOAA official.

Officials with NOAA declined to comment. Trump's science advisor, Kelvin Droegemeier, entered the White House in January 2019, after the climate assessment was published but before Burkett was removed from her post overseeing the GCRP. Droegemeier told Nature he doesn't recall "being involved in anything associated with Virginia Burkett."

Safeguarding science

Burkett’s complaint comes as the Biden administration seeks to finalize its own update of scientific-integrity rules across the federal government, which the president initiated during his first week in office. In 2023, the White House released guidance, as well as a model policy, that US agencies could use to craft rules that would protect against political interference.

The USGS is one of the first to finalize its policy, but Burkett fears that this policy, and others in progress, will not necessarily protect scientists who speak out. Moreover, she says, they can be wiped out at the stroke of a pen by a new president, because they are not protected by federal law — something that the US Congress would have to agree on.

The new USGS policy looks strong at first blush, but it could take time to determine how well it works, particularly if faced with pressure from hostile political appointees, says Anita Desikan, a senior analyst at the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Most of the other agencies tasked by Biden with creating policies have yet to finalize them, despite a January 2024 deadline.

What sets Burkett’s case apart from others that seek monetary rewards or damages is her demand, instead, for institutional reforms to further protect the employment rights of government scientists across the interior department, says David Seide, an attorney who is familiar with Burkett’s case. In particular, Burkett is asking for new rules for interior department political appointees involved in scientific communications; new procedures for scientists who want to file anti-harassment complaints; and reforms to the structure and operation of a panel that is supposed to ensure that the rights of career government employees are respected.

“She’s asking that the agency learn from its mistakes,” says Seide, who works at the Government Accountability Project, a non-profit organization in Washington DC. He adds that the case speaks directly to a lot of his organization’s clients, who are “genuinely worried about what is going to happen if Trump wins in November”.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02213-y

This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:Jeff Tollefson