When I was a student working on a PhD in environmental engineering, I knew I wanted to choose a career that would allow me to use my technical expertise to improve the world. This led me to hands-on policy work at the Union of Concerned Scientists, where I helped launch our Center for Science and Democracy. After some years in public service at the White House and the US Department of Transportation, helping to reinforce the crucial role of science in government decisionmaking and decarbonizing the US transportation system, I’m excited to return to the place I spent the first decade of my career as the organization’s new President and Chief Executive Officer.
We’re in a pivotal moment for the nation and the world, and UCS has a critical role to play. In our more than 50-year history, UCS has led through challenging times, navigating thorny science policy issues, sounding the alarm on threats to people and the planet, and winning victories that ensure science supports everyone.
UCS was founded in similarly turbulent times, when it was clear that the scientific community could no longer sit on the sidelines as science was being misused, and people harmed. While the world has changed significantly since then, the need for the scientific community and its supporters to be engaged remains. We must now apply our values, our expertise, and our skills to the challenges at hand today. What I’ve always found appealing about UCS is that we hold true to the science, we don’t pull our punches when science is under attack, and we speak truth to power. If ever there was a time for us to recommit to those principles, it is now.
We must be clear-eyed about the uphill road ahead. These are challenging times. The first two weeks of the Trump Administration have already demonstrated a devastating disregard for science and scientists. The administrations’ early executive actions have sought to disrupt the critical work done by thousands of experts in the federal government to advance public health, safety, security, and equity across the nation and the world. Pushing federal scientists to quit, asking them to remove diversity, equity, inclusion, race, and gender references from their work, and persecuting immigrants are just a few of the horrifying new attacks we’re seeing come out of the Trump White House. There is undoubtedly more to come.
We are also facing an alarming erosion of independent checks and balances on presidential power that threaten our nation’s ability to use science for good. Among these actions: removing inspectors general charged with ferreting out waste, fraud and abuse in federal agencies, appropriating Congressional authority to control federal spending, and disregarding longstanding federal processes and norms. These actions are creating an environment where science and scientists are vulnerable to political interference. We are already seeing independent scientific institutions and other external voices bow to the administration’s whims, or quietly and preemptively acquiesce to the administration’s preferences against values they’ve long held. These trends make it all the more important that UCS remain a powerful, independent, and unapologetic force in a world where others are unwilling or unable to hold their ground.
UCS is ready. While this is certainly an administration on steroids compared to the first Trump term, many of these attacks are coming from the same playbook we’ve seen before, and we know how to fight back. We have the tools, we have the expertise, and we have mobilized and coordinated networks to push back, to stand up, and to navigate this new environment. Our Save Science, Save Lives campaign is underway and working full speed. We’re in an environment where a lot will change quickly, but we must hold true to our values and remain focused on where we can be most impactful in protecting people and securing wins. Specifically, we must keep in mind the following:
- Hold the line. We’ve made significant progress in the past years on many of our issues—an emerging clean energy economy, major wins in decarbonizing the transportation sector, reduced climate and air pollution, a strengthened federal scientific integrity landscape, new efforts to provide oversight on new nuclear weapons development, advances in holding fossil fuel companies accountable for climate impacts, new protections from harmful pollutants for environmental justice communities, and new scrutiny on pollution from big agriculture. These gains are now facing threats by an administration dead-set on destroying all of it no matter the cost to people and the planet. We must preserve everything we can. We must make it as difficult and as painful as possible for them to dismantle these hard-fought victories. And we have the tools to do it. In the first Trump administration, a lot of damage to science and science-based policy was avoided because UCS and others fought back, stood our ground, and insisted on the critical importance of science and scientists to the nation. In the coming months and years, we’ll have ample opportunity to deploy these tactics and fight back at every turn, preserving as much as possible for the future. We mustn’t give up. This work is hugely important and can be hugely impactful in protecting what we’ve built.
- Keep the vision. We must hold true to our values. As the administration seeks to erase race, gender, trans rights, and other important elements of identity from federal activities and otherwise works to tamper with the full scope of federal scientific work, including cross-agency environmental justice and climate activities, we must not cede any ground. We cannot dampen, self-censor, or otherwise walk away from the critical work they seek to erase. As the scientific community, we know that working to address inequities, focusing on environmental justice, and including diverse perspectives are all critical components of the pursuit of science and science-based policy that we cannot simply delete out of existence. We must hold true to our values and keep top of mind the vision and the world that we’re working towards: where science works to improve health, safety, security, and equity for everyone.
- Innovate and strategize. At the same time, we must be clear about what we’re up against. This is an uphill battle. We must leverage our expertise, our communities, and our resources to evolve our strategies and be smart about where we focus. This will mean rebuilding infrastructure, communities, and networks from outside government to preserve what’s being bulldozed within government. It will mean carrying water on important issues to preserve critical progress made in recent years. This will require trying new tactics, getting creative, avoiding distraction, and standing tall in the face of new threats that might not have been conceived yet.
It’s a challenge we’re prepared to take on. We’ve faced big obstacles before. In our organization’s history, UCS has stood tall and won against seemingly insurmountable forces time and time again. From our roots fighting the military industrial complex to facing oil giants today, UCS has always insisted on and worked towards a world that better served people.
We owe it to everyone who came before us in this fight to keep going.
We owe it to everyone in and outside of government, who are now watching their work be unraveled before their eyes.
We owe it to the thousands of federal employees being furloughed or fired because they dared to try to make our government work better everyone.
We owe it to the thousands of communities across the nation and world who deserve a safer, healthier, more secure, and more equitable world driven by facts and evidence.
This is our mandate. This is our moral imperative. And I’m ready to go.