Key Insights
- The White House has appointed an ex-professor who says fears about climate change are overblown as new director of the US Global Change Research Program.
- The program, which produces reports on how climate change is affecting the country, was defunded last April.
- Climate scientists are concerned that the White House announced no more details about the future of the program or the climate reports.
The US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), which puts out reports on how climate change is affecting the US but had much of its funding cut last year, has a new director who thinks the scientific consensus on climate change is alarmist and overblown.
Geochemist Matthew Wielicki, formerly of the University of Alabama, was announced as the program’s new leader by US Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright in a post on X on July 9.
“Matt Weilicki [sic] is an honest scientist who follows the data wherever it leads. That is what science is all about. He will lead our efforts to honestly present the empirical climate data to guide policy makers,” Wright’s post says.
But many members of the climate science community are dismayed at the choice for USGCRP head.
“It’s certainly an unexpected individual, but not an unexpected perspective,” says Andy Miller, former senior science adviser for the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development. “The only thing that seems to qualify [Wielicki] for this position is that he is a vocal denialist.”
The future of the USGCRP has seemed dim since last year. The Donald J. Trump administration cut funding to the program in early April 2025. Later that month, the nearly 400 scientists working on the sixth National Climate Assessment (NCA), an extensive scientific review of how global warming impacts the US, were dismissed. And on June 30 last year, the website for the USGCRP went offline.
When asked about the reasons behind Wielicki’s appointment and future plans for the NCA, a White House spokesperson responded, “The Trump administration is committed to using the best scientific information to inform public policy. For too long, the USGCRP has been used as a vehicle for political agendas instead of sound science. We look forward to restoring the USGCRP and ensuring it fulfills its legal mandate.”
The US Office of Science and Technology Policy, which oversees the USGCRP, did not respond to C&EN questions.
‘It’s certainly an unexpected individual’
Wielicki’s appointment was first reported by Politico on July 9. He had been an assistant professor at the University of Alabama’s Department of Geological Sciences until 2023, when he left due to “the push for equity in science above all else,” and “the earth science communities [sic] silence on the false ‘climate emergency’ narrative,” according to his post on X.
Wielicki now refers to himself as a “professor-in-exile” and writes articles about climate and energy policy in his Substack Irrational Fear. His publications focus mainly on the mineral content of the earth’s crust.
Research experience in climate change isn’t necessarily important for the role, Miller says. “The USGCRP director doesn’t need to be the person with the deepest expertise. Their role will be to herd the cats rather than develop the assessment.”
But Wielicki also seemingly has no experience coordinating significant research teams or even a history of academic leadership. The lack of experience in both research and leadership says two things about the NCA going forward, Miller says. “One, what they expect the magnitude of the effort to be, which is, I think, minimal, and two, it says to me that [Wielicki’s] going to be a figurehead,” he says. “I think he’s going to be told what to do and be expected to carry it out.”
Does the appointment mean the NCA is coming back?
Before the Trump administration defunded the program last year, getting the NCA out was a huge undertaking, says Carlos Martinez, senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. It was organized by a national coordination office that had 40 support staff. Fifteen federal agencies worked on the report, and each agency had two representatives. Chapter authors and hundreds of scientists wrote drafts.
“It’s a massive logistical effort to bring multiple agencies together under a 3-to-4-year time span to craft, develop, strategize, and coordinate an assessment that then gets approved by all of the agencies,” Martinez says. “And to see that there has just been this announcement [of a new director], but no news in terms of the logistics, the structure, the timeline—it’s already concerning.”
Historically, the USGCRP director’s job is to make sure that the right processes are followed, that the right meetings happen with the right people, and that reviews happen in a timely manner, Miller says. The USGCRP director had influence over the NCA but didn’t determine what went into its reports, he adds. The content was the result of consensus from the federal agencies that worked on the report, its scientist authors, and public input.
“But there’s the way the job has been, and then there’s the way it is now,” he says. “Which are probably two different things.”
Martinez calls the lack of transparency the next step in censoring climate science. “We saw at the beginning of this administration the censoring of climate science data, like climate.gov. We saw layoffs and firings of staff last year, many of whom worked on climate or other related earth science spaces, who have institutional knowledge and understanding of what’s going on,” he says. Now, Martinez says, the administration is “not just removing climate science but supplanting it with climate disinformation as US climate policy.”
